Utopian Dream Research Articles

“It´s a utopian dream”: Mexico´s intercultural universities and the challenges of decolonising higher education

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the decolonising potential of Mexico´s Indigenous-serving universities, through a qualitative study of the pioneer of these institutions: the Mexico State Intercultural University (UIEM). Created jointly by the federal and state governments in 2003, the UIEM is one of 16 such universities serving more than 21,000 students, mostly members of Mexico´s Indigenous minority. In this article, I present findings from more than 75 interviews with UIEM graduates, students, teachers, and administrators, focusing on their perceptions of the intercultural curriculum, as well as its relationship to the labour market, an area that has received little attention in the literature. The research seeks to answer the following broad question: To what degree does the intercultural model challenge existing knowledge hierarchies and empower Indigenous students and to what degree does it reproduce the coloniality of power, being and knowledge? While the institutions serve an important function in expanding educational opportunities and revitalising Indigenous languages and cultures, they also face profound difficulties, including political meddling, a lack of institutional autonomy, ‘epistemic frictions’ over the curriculum, institutional racism, scarce resources, and contradictions between the ‘intercultural utopia’ and the realities of the job market.

Listening Beyond: Collaborative Reflections on Learning about Activism Through an Undergraduate Oral History and Podcasting Project

ABSTRACT This article, written collaboratively by a professor and four undergraduate students, explores the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of learning oral history and creating an oral history podcast in one thirteen-week undergraduate course about activism. The article highlights four main themes that emerged: the use of oral history as a pedagogical tool and way of learning about activism, the challenges and opportunities of collaborative work, the particularities of conducting a digital project for public dissemination, and the significance of positionality and the ethical imperative of avoiding transactional and extractive approaches. This article emphasizes the inherent messiness and complexity of striving for equality in oral history pedagogy, acknowledging the tension between theory and practice, institutional constraints, and the transient nature of the classroom. The transformative potential of oral history pedagogy lies in its ability to bring diverse voices into the classroom while striking a balance between utopian aspirations and pragmatic considerations. Despite various challenges, the authors express collective effort and pride in the outcomes, reinforcing the value of teaching through oral history for meaningful engagement and personal growth.

Državni planovi i republički programi: Prilog razmatranju političke ekonomije jugoslavenskog socijalizma u periodu decentralizacije (1965-1983)

This paper aims to illustrate the constant quest of the leadership of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) for an effective economic policy after 1965 and to provide an answer, among other things, to the question of how much the projected economic decentralization due to reform measures contributed to overall socio-political dispersion. Faced with serious financial and economic challenges, the state leadership sought to find a model that would keep them on ideologically defined tracks while also allowing for breadth and integration into global economic currents. In these efforts, the general geopolitical position of Yugoslavia as a country that remained “somewhere in between” by the agreement of major powers after Second World War was reflected, thus best illustrating the historical destiny of the entire Balkan Peninsula, especially the area predominantly inhabited by South Slavs. To explain the topic as a materialized concept and to question it in this way, works of authors who dealt with the political economy of Yugoslavia as both creators and critics were used. Using the example of the implementation of autonomous economic policy by the Bosnian-Herzegovinian political elite during this period, the aim is to open up space for critical thinking about the actual possibilities and roles of the republics, and to try to discern whether they could truly be fully independent in their economic programs. Although Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced economic momentum alongside overall social transformation during this period, the actions of its political leadership did not always encompass all economic flows of the republic through their actions and planning. This is most vividly evidenced by well-known examples of economic manipulation behind which central authorities (so-called “guardians and executors of the revolution”) stood, and which were subsequently abused before and during the disappearance of the common state. In this regard, an overview of the development of the idea of self-management by Yugoslav ideologues is provided, the phases of ideological development are presented, as well as the difficulties faced by the concept itself, and the independent political course of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian political leadership, or the overall socio-political context in which “independence” began to be practiced. Specifically concerning the position of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian political elite towards reforms, a quite interesting detail was noticed. Namely, although a high level of decentralization was achieved through constitutional amendments (1968-1971) and clearly defined separate republican markets, decisions were made differently at the level of the Federation, i.e., in its remaining functions. By outvoting. Taking this into account, a conclusion naturally emerged and set the development of the self-management economic system between the utopian aspirations of ideologues and the realpolitik actions of party and military hawks, which then created significant cracks within the system and favored the emergence of gray areas whose existence partly generated the great economic crisis during the 1980s.

From Utopian Socialism to Modern Welfare States: The Evolutionary Trajectory of Social Welfare Thought

This study charts the progression of social welfare ideology from 19th-century utopian socialism to contemporary welfare state configurations. It initiates with a critical appraisal of utopian socialist tenets-advocated by Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon-underscoring communalism, social cohesion, and equitable resource allocation. The analysis then traverses the path towards practical reforms, such as Bismarck's insurance schemes and British liberal interventions, which set the stage for state involvement in welfare. A central inflection point, the Beveridge Report, is scrutinized for its blueprint of a comprehensive post-war welfare system in Britain, marking the advent of the modern welfare state era. Following this, adaptations in Europe, notably Scandinavian models, encounters with neoliberalism and globalization, and the rise of sustainability concerns and universal basic income discussions are elaborated. Employing historical, theoretical, and comparative methodologies, the research emphasizes the endurance of utopian principles amidst welfare model evolution, engaging with debates on dependency, state efficacy, and governance. The conclusion contemplates the future trajectory of social welfare amidst societal shifts, advocating for adaptable, inclusive, and environmentally conscious systems that harmonize utopian aspirations with practical realities.

Anthony Vidler in Reverse

Abstract This essay in memory of Anthony Vidler explores the ways in which his obsessive mode of thinking and writing was primarily historiographic and ultimately autobiographical as it reversed itself towards the future. Vidler was not a historian who wrote but a writer who over time produced the effect of being a historian. He was a scholar in reverse, a trained architect and insightful architectural critic fixated on the ongoing legacy, from Plato to the latest digital zealots, of utopian dreams of an idealized architecture that would incubate an equitable society and the dystopian effects of the always unsuccessful attempts to realize those dreams. Vidler portrayed architecture and the social life it supposedly serves as permanently suspended between utopia and dystopia. Colin Rowe, his first tutor at Cambridge University in 1960, triggered this life-long obsession by pointing to Emil Kaufmann's writing about the precocious modernity of enlightenment architects, especially the ideal city imagined in the late 18th century by Claude-Nicolaus Ledoux, symptomatically the only architect referred to by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Vidler never let go of Ledoux, continuously reshaping him and an endless chain of architects from the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Tony Garnier and Le Corbusier. Kaufmann and Rowe haunt all the work, as does Walter Benjamin, whose inversion of history likewise turned on the relationship between Fourier's philosophy and a specific architectural typology.

Hope Springs Eternal: Political Engagement in a Post-Anarchist Utopia

ABSTRACT Post-anarchism poses a profound challenge to the fundamental tenets of traditional anarchism, particularly its veneration of science and reason, its overarching narrative of human emancipation, and its reliance on a sanguine conception of innate human goodness. However, this challenge inadvertently erodes the utopian aspirations inherent in traditional anarchism, leaving a conspicuous absence of a tangible alternative. Yet, a sense of utopia remains integral to the impetus for political engagement. This article seeks to address the implicit quandary of political engagement within post-anarchism by examining the works of Max Stirner through the lens of existentialism. By juxtaposing Stirner’s notions of involuntary egoism, ownness, the un-man, and insurrection with the philosophical perspectives of Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir, we discover that, despite its anti-political inclination, post-anarchism finds solace in the tragic and ceaseless nomadic pursuit of societal amelioration.

Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Realities: Contrasting Visions in 21st Century Literature

Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Realities: Contrasting Visions in 21st Century Literature

About the published content on each section

About the published content on each section

Déjà brew: Has a new generation of craft workers taken over William Morris’s utopian dream?

Déjà brew: Has a new generation of craft workers taken over William Morris’s utopian dream?

Human reason versus arrogance technoscience and the replacement shadow. -Ethical evaluation and social control to regain power on the means and ends from the work of José Sanmartín

This essay analyzes from a personalistic bioethics the model of technological progress supported by an autonomy without controls and an imperative that is governed by the maxim: if it can be done, let's do it!, as a necessary and sufficient condition of progress. This puts us on the slippery slope between the technically feasible and the morally lawful. The pioneering work of the philosopher, José Sanmartin Esplugues 2 , urges reflection in the face of a technological profusion that sees the human being as a useful embodied object and offers powers of intervention on human life that were previously unimaginable. The reduction of the person to mere biological-material data opens the door to increasing deshumanization by subordination to the calculations of an instrumental rationalism. Underlying the desire to see ourselves at the top of the world and genetic techniques are the ultimate expression of a longing for human emancipation that aspires to take the reins of evolution through an abstract postbiological imaginary. Sanmartin proposes a model of ethical evaluation and social insertion of technoscientific activity that goes beyond the conventional categories of impact, use and effectiveness to distinguish social, cultural, economic, political and values correlates, in order to embroider a pattern that decides on the means and ends of human life through technologies that are neither innocuous nor neutral. A society without antidotes to manipulation that also teaches us to cultivate utopian dreams about human nature is easily malleable by elites who promise happy worlds and redeem us from our vulnerability.

Technical Connection: Invariants, Adaptations, Breakthroughs

The article deals with issues related to the features of technical existence and its influence on civilizational processes, in general. The main element of technical reality is a copy. Copying is an ideal tool for maintaining the existence of the technical world, a model for reproducing technical reality. The peculiarity of a technical ontology is determined by the logic that is built into it. The logic built into the ontology defines the specifics of technical connections. Technical copying can be represented by the logic of a standard closed ring, or the logic of the Möbius strip. The article highlights copies of the first order, embodied in utopian dreams of an ideal technological world. Copies of the second order are associated with the mass replication of goods and services, the emergence of a standardized worldview, the use of algorithms in management decisions. Simulacrum copies are artificially created viruses, the peculiarity of shadow copies is that they destroy their donor. The experiment is also considered as a technical situation, since it meets the requirements of artificiality, control, power influence, reproduction. But the peculiarity of its seriality, its type of copies is the function of turning logic. The experiments mix natural and artificial, living and non-living, as well as all modes of time. In experiments, the links of natural laws and the rings of traditions are broken, the world is moving from the ‘eternal return’ to new objects and new types of relationships. Here self-expansion of being is accomplished through the interaction of researchers, devices, information carriers, resources. The technical truth that appeared in the experiment embodies courage and creativity, thereby revealing its aspiration to the future. In copies of experiments, it is not subsidence that works, but the growth of being.

Architectural Model Design Research Based on Social Morphology Mapping

This study aims to explore the issue of declining social mobility in China, against the backdrop of China's economic development since the initiation of reform and opening-up in 1978. This study introduces an innovative urban spatial concept that vertically distributes three major social strata within a building, aligning them with different functional spaces. By closely integrating production resources and factors of production, this study regulates workers' labor time on the one hand and encourages them to maintain substantial purchasing power on the other hand. This novel perspective constructs a distinctive urban landscape. Since the initiation of economic reforms and opening up in China, the economy has experienced vigorous growth. However, social mobility has gradually decreased. Against this backdrop, this study takes the three major social strata as its foundation and reimagines the spatial arrangement within cities. By integrating social strata with functional spaces, the spatial manifestation of various strata's status and roles is the goal. Meanwhile, the introduction of production factors guides the behavior of workers. On one hand, labor time is regulated to seek more production resources. On the other hand, workers are encouraged to maintain higher purchasing power. However, it's worth noting that the current notion of "humans should be doing the same things" is gradually evolving into a utopian aspiration. Through this study, the aim is to encourage individuals to reconsider the connection between social mobility and class, along with exploring ways to establish a more inclusive and fair future within urban environments.

Trauma and the Growth of Love in Children

This paper aims at all those seeking to understand, respond to, and help children suffering trauma because of the full-scale War of Russia against Ukraine that began in 2022. It draws from three main sources: personal experience of living alongside children and young people who have suffered the trauma of separation and loss; studies, reflections, and practice of those have sought to understand children in a holistic way: biological; emotional/psychological; social and spiritual; Christian faith and tradition, including the Bible, human resources and activity, and theology. The paper is based on the conviction that “it takes a village to raise a child,” not least in a time of war, and that all villagers who have the well-being of that child at heart have a potential role to play in the process. The author points that “parenting” in its widest sense is not restricted to biological relatives or designated carers. The paper seeks to imagine the context from outside the war zone, acknowledging the complicated, secretive, messy, and unpredictable nature of conflict. In its conclusion it brings a message of hope, based not on wishful thinking or utopian dreams, but on experience and evidence collected from around the world, and close to hand, that demonstrates how the trauma of children can and has been overcome.

Answering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, Canada

Answering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, <i>The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times</i>, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, Canada

Numbers as Utopia: Sustainable Development Goals and the making of quantified futures

In this article, we argue that number-making is a mode of imagining political futures – not only futures that are probable but, crucially, futures that are desired. In this way, rather than simply a mode of ‘technicising’ policy challenges, quantification fleshes out the utopian dream of a better world. Global governance is faced with the paradox of, on one hand, the utopian aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to create a perfect world (free of poverty, inequality, diseases and climate disaster) and, on the other hand, the dystopian effects of inaction – both tracked carefully through a complex network of indicators. This article focuses on the materiality of the Sustainable Development Goals as a productive device through which a monitoring agenda such as the Sustainable Development Goals has become ever more influential and has led to the emergence of a global public policy space.

William Sheldon, Aldous Huxley, and the Dartington connection: Body typing schemes offer a new path to a utopian future

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and social and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success.

Movement meaning of money: Monetary mobilization in Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement

The resource mobilization (RM) theory has long discovered the significance of money for protests; yet can this insight be applied to nowadays’ decentralized movements, characterized by the absence of organizational leadership and more creative and spontaneous participation from below? While the RM perspective is anchored in a political economy of organizational fundraising, it is time to bring in Viviana Zelizer’s economic sociology to understand how participants utilize the role of donors, consumers, savers, and investors for the movement purpose. Focusing on Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement, this article theorizes the full panoply of ‘monetary mobilization’ to revise RM’s narrow conception. By offering a safer and anonymous channel of expression, monetary mobilization emerges as a substitute for in-person participation for risk-averse citizens with financial means. Money is always loaded with symbolic meanings and ethical considerations so that it also functions as a vehicle of the moral outrage and utopian aspirations. Participants are keen to establish a proper relationship between sponsors and beneficiaries by exercising diligent oversight to prevent its corruption. Contrary to the instrumentalist conception, money is per se not a fully fungible and all-purpose resource.

From Utopian Dream to Dystopian Nightmare: A Protopian Response to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

This article examines the idea of protopia as propounded in Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable (2016), which is anticipated in Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Contrarily, Hank Morgan, the protagonist, feigns to achieve utopia, to secure power and privilege, not to realize utopia itself. However, Kelly’s suggestion of technology as the center of civilization takes us toward the state of protopia. Unfortunately, it is misused for mass extermination in the novel. Drawing critical insights from Fick, Hansen, Lieberman, Dobski, and Kleinerman, this article investigates the scope of protopian response through reader-response theory and attempts to highlight how Hank’s techno-politics (pure) is in resonation with Twain’s protopian vision. It further reveals how it is corrupted by practical politics (impure) for power and comfort, for which Twain criticizes Hank. This research provides a blueprint for thinking through and avoiding the abuses of technoscientific power that the novel so horrifically puts on display for future readers. It endeavors to unearth the protopian reading scope to re-read this dystopian novel as a narrative of progress. This paper argues that to achieve the quintessential goal of humanity, protopia appears to be an appropriate model since utopia is unachievable.

Democracy Is Incomplete: Response to Crawford, Hechter, Zielonka, and Zipperstein

We appreciate four reviews addressing our book, Degenerations of Democracy. Each points to ways democracy may be advanced and also raises questions about our argument. We respond to the latter and briefly build on the former. These are directions for further work, but none stands alone or offers the crucial path forward. This is not surprising, since no democracy in the past or today, even when celebrated as good, just, secure, and stable by a majority of its citizens, has fully realized its normative potential and utopian aspirations. There is always more to be achieved, and there is always potential for degeneration.

Irony with a Point: Alan Turing and His Intelligent Machine Utopia

Turing made strong statements about the future of machines in society. This article asks how they can be interpreted to advance our understanding of Turing’s philosophy. His irony has been largely caricatured or minimized by historians, philosophers, scientists, and others. Turing is often portrayed as an irresponsible scientist, or associated with childlike manners and polite humor. While these representations of Turing have been widely disseminated, another image suggested by one of his contemporaries, that of a nonconformist, utopian, and radically progressive thinker reminiscent of the English Romantic poet Percy B. Shelley, has remained largely underexplored. Following this image, I will reconstruct the argument underlying what Turing called (but denied being guilty of) his “Promethean irreverence” (1947–1951) as a utopian satire directed against chauvinists of all kinds, especially intellectuals who might sacrifice independent thought to maintain their power. These, Turing hoped, would eventually be rivaled and surpassed by intelligent machines and transformed into ordinary people, as work once considered “intellectual” would be transformed into non-intellectual, “mechanical” work. I study Turing’s irony in its historical context and follow the internal logic of his arguments to their limit. I suggest that Turing genuinely believed that the possibilities of the machines he envisioned were not utopian dreams, and yet he conceived them from a utopian frame of mind, aspiring to a different society. His ever-learning child machines, whose intelligence would grow out of their own individual experiences, would help distribute power.