Utopian Research Articles

Utopia, Religion and Dissent in Robert Williams Buchanan’s The Rev. Annabel Lee: A Tale of to-Morrow

The article analyzes the novel The Rev. Annabel Lee: a Tale of to-Morrow (1898) by Robert Williams Buchanan, focusing on the conflict between a secular utopian society of the future, built on the principles of Comtean Positivism, Owenite Socialism and Social Darwinism, and a Christian revivalist movement led by a female preacher. While exploring the connections between gender, social engineering and faith, the article also interrogates ambiguities implicit in two conflicting worldviews which are dependent, respectively, on science and a revealed religion.

Yarning to reduce take own leave events in First Nations patients presenting to the Emergency Department-presenting the qualitative themes and co-design of the Deadly RED project.

The Deadly RED redesign and implementation research aimed to improve take own leave (TOL) rates within a Queensland emergency department by providing a culturally competent care pathway. A mixed methods pre/post evaluation of the feasibility, acceptability and usability of the Deadly RED pathway for First Nations patients presenting to ED was performed. This pathway combined early welcome and information sharing, introduction of screening and follow up for patients who TOL and enhanced access to alternative community healthcare. Yarning circles facilitated co-design of research protocols and tools while a purposefully designed research Yarn enhanced understanding of the 'story' of the people. Qualitative analysis of Yarns allowed deductive themes to be extracted. A Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach and Indigenous research methodology involving First Nations people in design, knowledge sharing and joint ownership of results was used. Common themes from the 85 yarns included the negative impact of long waiting times and positive impact from wholistic care. Unique themes identified included interpretation of waiting room placement and paracetamol prescription as a dismissal. Knowledge dissemination from yarning drove improvements in communications and processes to promote treatment completion resulting in elimination of these themes in post implementation yarns. Eighteen patients who had TOL were included in the post implementation yarns, however only eight of these believed that their treatment was incomplete. The use of yarning for consumer engagement has allowed deeper understanding of the reasons for TOL in First Nations emergency patients. The reciprocal knowledge sharing has guided targeted improvements in wholistic emergency care and communication resulting in First Nations patients feeling their care is complete even when the 'number' reports otherwise. SO WHAT?: Indigenous Research methodology including yarning with First Nations patients suggests alternative engagement methods to guide enhanced quality of care monitoring for ED presentations.

Understanding on Social Utopia: West to East

Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy of life is the philosophy of creation. Personal and individual freedom can be achieved and only be maintained through creation. Constructive behavior takes man further and further away from the very essence of life. This essay discusses and compares Tagore’s evolution with Rousseau’s hypothetical evolution, mostly from the _Second Discourses_, and builds upon Marx’s _Estranged Labour_, to illustrate that _near_ utopia can be achieved through a socialist and creative mindset. Arguments follow such that, such a state and society can be attained by developing man’s aspirations through proper nurturing at the initial stages and harnessing the creative spirit within him.

Understanding on Social Utopia: West to East

Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy of life is the philosophy of creation. Personal and individual freedom can be achieved and only be maintained through creation. Constructive behavior takes man further and further away from the very essence of life. This essay discusses and compares Tagore’s evolution with Rousseau’s hypothetical evolution, mostly from the Second Discourses, and builds upon Marx’s Estranged Labour, to illustrate that near utopia can be achieved through a socialist and creative mindset. Arguments follow such that, such a state and society can be attained by developing man’s aspirations through proper nurturing at the initial stages and harnessing the creative spirit within him.

Robert Owen's legacy to co-operative ideas and practices in Japan

Robert Owen’s ideas arrived in the Far East in the late nineteenth century when Japan abandoned its “closed-door” policy. Owen’s views became widely known through numerous translations and publications after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. His ideas have proven influential particularly in the areas of childcare, social welfare, management practice and social movements although his influence on communal life has been limited. Owen has often been viewed negatively as a utopian socialist by Marxists but he has inspired co-operative leaders including Dr Toyohiko Kagawa. Owen has been studied by researchers of social philosophy including Professors Shigeru Goto and Chushichi Tsuzuku. Today, Hitotsubashi University and Meiji University in Tokyo hold the Owen Collection and the Owen Library, respectively. The Robert Owen Association of Japan was set up by concerned researchers and co-operative practitioners in 1958, commemorating the centenary of Owen’s death. It is active in promoting scholarship on Robert Owen and worldwide co-operative history through regular symposia and publications in both English and Japanese. The story of the Rochdale Pioneers remains popular even today and is often revisited by academic essays, books, comics and films while a replica of Rochdale’s Toad Lane Museum was built by Co-op Kobe.

Freedom to dream: Black Owenites and co-operation in America

Robert Owen’s vision of a co-operative society inspired two centuries of utopian experimentation among African Americans. In the nineteenth century white planter Joseph Davis and Scottish reformer Fanny Wright attempted to apply Owenite principles to their management of slave plantations. After emancipation freed people founded Black towns, such as Mound Bayou, Mississippi, pooling their resources to protect themselves against white supremacist violence. During the Great Migration in the 1910s and 1920s, W. E. B. DuBois and other Black activists and intellectuals promoted co‑operatives in urban centres. And the Great Depression of the 1930s inspired significant experiments in co‑operation, most notably the prosperous utopian community of Father Divine’s Peace Mission. While the post-war period saw a decline in co-operation, in more recent decades there has been a resurgence in interest in the movement. From co-operative grocery stores to large-scale utopian communities, African Americans drew on Owenite ideas of co-operation to assert their independence and self-sufficiency.

Belovodsky Plot of Russian Prose of the 1920s: the Philosophical Context of the Utopian Ideal

Belovodsky Plot of Russian Prose of the 1920s: the Philosophical Context of the Utopian Ideal

Philosophical Posthumanism: A Renewed Worldview and a Methodological Framework for Critical Analysis

Abstract Exponential technological advances capture the zeitgeist of contemporary society. Machines are increasingly gaining agency, which helps in the deconstruction of the humanist notion of humans. Society takes a posthuman turn with large-scale human–machine imbrication and nonhuman agency. The posthuman turn is also reflected in the academic world, which is seriously contemplating the integration of posthumanities. The philosophical posthumanism of Francisca Ferrando is a posthuman theory with three constituent elements: post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, and post-dualism. Post-humanism revisits the definition of human that has given rise to marginalization within the human species. Post-anthropocentrism critiques the human superiority and exceptionalism that have led to the marginalization of other species. Post-dualism revisits the dualistic mindset that allows hierarchical sociopolitical constructions. Ferrando presents a vision of a posthuman utopian society that recognizes pluralistic voices within the human species on egalitarian terms, accepts and values the agency of nonhuman actors, and sheds the dualistic view of life that keeps humans and nonhumans on either side of the binary system. Philosophical posthumanism can be suitable as a methodological framework to analyze the posthuman discourses in literary works, specifically in science fiction.

Spirit Possession among the Shakers of Pleasant Hill

Abstract As a conceptual tool, effervescence offers a nuanced and complex explanation of forces for social change. Yet, it can be challenging to identify subject matter that spans the full implications of effervescence from embodied feeling to changes in social action over time. This study joins theories of effervescence with a unique set of primary historical records from a nineteenth-century religious utopian community in the United States to investigate whether effervescence might have a role in the creation, maintenance or decay of social ideals. As an explanation for social action, findings suggest that effervescence points to a link between embodied feeling, social ideals and institutional control – aspects of effervescence that offer avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.

Puerto Rico’s Rescued Schools: A Grassroots Adaptive Reuse Movement for Abandoned School Buildings

From 2007 to 2019, over 650 public schools closed in Puerto Rico. School closures not only affect students and teachers; these spaces serve as anchor institutions providing social infrastructure for the sustained health of communities. While closed schools remove a critical community asset, these vacant buildings provide adaptive reuse opportunities for alternative social infrastructure and community resources. This article explores how abandoned schools are repurposed in Puerto Rico, focusing on “rescued schools”—that is, grassroots, voluntary initiatives that repurpose schools to support community development. Through a multi-method approach, we categorized and mapped 161 repurposed schools throughout Puerto Rico—38 were rescued schools—and conducted twelve interviews and two focus groups on rescued school initiatives. Our results describe how abandoned schools offer a galvanizing opportunity for motivated community members to meet emerging, localized needs, and the challenges in gaining school ownership and attracting sustained financial and volunteer support, the lack of which impedes their potential impact. We demonstrate how rescued schools embody alternative regional political visions within Puerto Rico and argue that government authorities can minimize the harm from school closures by forging new partnerships between community-based organizations, municipal governments, and other supportive actors to repurpose schools and reproduce their role as community anchor institutions.

“Une pièce d’étoffe que nous aurons à faire”: Louis Riel's Utopia: Between Prophecy and Politics

AbstractThis article offers a re-evaluation of Louis Riel's political, philosophical and religious writings by reconstructing these writings along utopian lines. In so doing, it supplements the existing literature on Riel's writings that tends to see Riel as either a prophetic figure or a practical man of action, but rarely, if ever, both. In its reconstruction of Riel's utopian vision, this article focuses on three aspects of his writings. First, it addresses his critical conception of Métis self-government before Confederation. Second, it examines his proposals for the overthrow of what he perceived as Anglo-Canadian tyranny in the North-West. Third, it considers his visions of an ideal—that is, utopian—society in the North-West. The article concludes by examining the implications of this reading of Riel's utopian vision for his legacy in Canadian political science.

Democratising cities: introduction

The world’s cities are plagued by serious ills of injustice, inequality and uneven development. Through hard-fought struggles against these urban inequalities and injustices, cities remain important breeding grounds for forms of democratic action that have the potential to reinvigorate the practice and potential of democracy itself. Contemporary struggles over rights to the city generate new answers to questions at the heart of the democratic ideal. In the everyday battles that take place over the institutions and infrastructures that will shape their everyday lives, urban inhabitants frequently resist the ossification of democracy in its inherited forms. Their struggles not only demand new solutions to the pressing urban challenges they face, they also challenge democracy as it is and make claims about democracy as it should be. As such, the historical geography of democracy maintains a close association with the city. This Special Feature on Democratising Cities brings together a survey of city-scaled possibility, canvassing diverse democratisation strategies across a variety of places. We treat democratisation as a process of extending and enacting a logic of equality as the foundation for legitimate authority in the face of specific problems and injustices. Our focus is on the doing of democratisation, exploring a set of innovative democratic practices that people in cities are employing in their efforts to make a better urban life—from alliances, networks, issue-based movements and citizen platforms to digital strategies, political contracts, participatory budgeting, occupations and alternative lifestyles and communities. We show how these practices of democratisation generate new understandings of the who, what, where, when and how of democracy itself.

From Transparency to Opacity

Since 2015, Cheikh Ndiaye has been painting the most famous theaters between Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dakar, Senegal, including their emblematic names: the Mansour, Liberté, VOG, Vox, ABC, Rio, the Medina, and Le Paris, et cetera. The artist’s obsessive paintings are without decorative or exotic intention. All of these movie houses stand, as if they were clichés of one another, as “realistic” representations of the chaos left behind by a foreclosed socialist utopia or a neo-liberal trash dump site; they interpellate the viewer/spectator. Cheikh Ndiaye’s paintings of old movie theaters are intriguing for more than one reason. They are as fascinating for the visual information they reveal as they are for what each painting seems to be hiding, or for the opacity it claims for itself. This essay provides a Glissantian reading of Ndiaye’s movie-theater paintings, not as transparent and nostalgic representations of iconic film houses, but as refigurations of landscape paintings. As Glissant puts it, landscape (le paysage) is not only a character on equal footing with the human and nonhuman species that occupy it in literature, paintings, and film; it has also become clear, for environmental and cultural reasons, that ignoring it risks undermining these art forms. Like Glissant, Ndiaye is revisiting the landscapes of closed movie-theaters for the purpose of reinvesting them with a new aesthetics, and a new way of visualizing the environment.

Kochanek Sybilli Thompson Marii Pawlikowskiej-Jasnorzewskiej – Utopia czy dystopia?

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s futurological fantasy from 1926 entitled Kochanek Sybilli Thompson (The Lover of Sybilla Thompson) seems to be a realistic social utopia. On the one hand, it reflects the spirit of the moral revolution of the interwar period and refers to the beginnings of aesthetic medicine and cosmetic treatments aimed at rejuvenation. On the other hand, it heralds – how aptly – the era of hippie free love, polyamorous relationships of the 1970s, the time of the next sexual revolution, but also the time of much more advanced plastic surgeries and cosmetic technologies. However, a careful reading of the drama allows us to see the critical (and also satirical) dimension of the story about a seventy eight-year-old woman who decided to rejuvenate herself in order to experience physical love once again. Joyful utopia becomes sad dystopia. In my article I look at this dualism: utopian – dystopian, realistic – fantastic, joyful – sad, young – old, modern – conservative, and the game of tension between oppositional concepts.

Migration, abjection and visibility: the photographic projects of Sam Ivin, Melanie Friend and Yetunde Adebiyi

ABSTRACT This paper examines the work of three photographers addressing the experiences of migrants awaiting decisions upon, or denied residency applications by the UK government. While Sam Ivin’s Lingering Ghosts portraits convey the emotional and embodied impacts upon migrants awaiting notification of asylum requests, Melanie Friend’s images of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) investigate the spaces of exclusion and detention within the UK border control system. The paper concludes by examining Yetunde Adebiyi’s images of protests outside Yarl’s Wood IRC, Bedford and alternative communities for “non-legal” migrants in Liverpool. These images are put in the context of a process of “social abjection” , whereby migrants have been increasingly marginalised through negative media and government policy, ultimately diminishing or denying citizenship to certain groups within society. This raises issues of mobility justice , in that individuals’ experience of mobility is in sharp contrast to that of UK citizens and impacted by multi-scalar entanglements of other (im)mobilities. Individuals’ bodily and spatial experience of, and agency over (im)mobility is related to their visibility, and agency over being visible. By exposing the relative experiences of mobility and visibility the photographs provide a potential site of advocacy for mobility justice but can also draw attention to the unequal experiences of citizenship of subject, photographer and viewer. By suggesting that photographs constitute and engender a social relationship between these parties, the paper proposes that photographic projects might offer a potential “civil contract” between those with very different experiences of mobility, visibility and citizenship.

The white light vibrations of Norman K. Denzin

With Norman K. Denzin’s death on 6 August 2023, the global community of qualitative researchers lost a visionary scholar and vocal crusader in broad areas of critical and interpretivist theory, pedagogy, and practice. His pioneering work included contributions to symbolic interactionism, symbiotics, performance studies, autoethnography, and narrative performance to name a few. Founder of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and several prominent journals devoted to critical scholarship, he also coauthored the influential Sage handbooks on qualitative research. His impact was titanic. This article examines his influence in one discrete area of journal editorship. However, it also draws broader conclusions about his enormous contributions including: his panache for bold action in the face of paralyzing situations, his efforts to create safe and respected academic spaces for other scholars, his leadership in challenging normative academic culture, his deep-seated belief in the transformational power of qualitative inquiry, and his ever-evident moral compass set on enacting inclusive, compassionate, and socially just communities. A tireless crusader for a more utopian society, his white light vibrations will continue to provide a source of energy for those looking to perform a better version of humanity.

ПАРАЛЕЛІ В ЕКСПЕРИМЕНТАЛЬНІЙ ПРАКТИЦІ АРХІТЕКТУРІ ЖИТЛА ЗАХІДНОГО ТА УКРАЇНСЬКОГО АВАНГАРДУ

The article is devoted to the parallels in the practice of experiments of the Western and Ukrainian avant-garde in the field of residential architecture of the 1920s and early 1930s, case study is Kharkiv early modernist residential architecture. The article examines the social and residential early modernist architectural concepts of the metropolitan Kharkiv as an example of a combination of avant-garde Soviet concepts of forming a new social consciousness and Western concepts of residential architecture. It was in the early 1920s that the issue of housing began to be included in political discourse. Architecture and urban planning were seen as the main tool for solving social problems, which in the following years would become a trend in Europe and the United States, as well as in Soviet Ukraine. The study identifies the main global trends in residential architecture of the 1920s and 1930s and shows the peculiarities of the implementation of avant-garde concepts inspired by both global trends and Soviet narratives of creating a new person and a new society using architecture as an instrument. In the 1920s. the formation of architectural and urban planning concepts in Soviet Ukraine was in line with the main social ideas of the architectural and urban planning practice of the West in the following sequence uncritical borrowing of Western "bourgeois" models - "garden city"; attempts at social innovation inspired by the classics of utopian socialism - " house-commune" as a reincarnation of the phalanster; designing new functional-spatial models as a means of implementing social doctrine - " residential combines"; socio-economic invention in the context of sectoral planning - "social city". Practical testing of the models created at each stage became an incentive for new searches.

“To give life is a journey through the unknown”: an ethnographic account of childbirth experiences and practices in Southern Benin

In Benin maternal mortality remains high at 397 deaths per 100,000 live births, despite 80% of births being attended by skilled birth attendants in health facilities. To identify childbirth practices that potentially contribute to this trend, an ethnographic study was conducted on the use of biomedical and alternative health services along the continuum of maternal care in Allada, Benin. Data collection techniques included in-depth interviews (N = 83), informal interviews (N = 86), observations (N = 32) and group discussions (N = 3). Informants included biomedical, spiritual and alternative care providers and community members with a variety of socioeconomic and religious profiles. In Southern Benin alternative and spiritual care, inspired by the Vodoun, Christian or Muslim religions, is commonly used in addition to biomedical care. As childbirth is perceived as a “risky journey to the unknown”, these care modalities aim to protect the mother and child from malevolent spirits, facilitate the birth and limit postpartum complications using herbal decoctions and spiritual rites and rituals. These practices are based on mystical interpretations of childbirth that result in the need for additional care during facility-based childbirth. Because such complementary care is not foreseen in health facilities, facility-based childbirth is initiated only at an advanced stage of labour or at the onset of a perceived immediate life-threatening complication for the mother or baby. Programmes and policies to reduce maternal mortality in Benin must seek synergies with alternative providers and practices and consider the complementary and integrated use of alternative and spiritual care practices that are not harmful.

ANALYSIS OF THE OCEANOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS OF MEOSBEKWAN ISLAND (RAJA AMPAT DISTRICT) FOR THE SUITABILITY OF SEAWEED CULTIVATION

Seaweed cultivation is an alternative community livelihood that potentially helping to reduce pressure on coral reefs in the area of Raja Ampat Archipelago. This study was aimed to conduct an oceanographic analysis of the waters of Meosbekwan Island (Raja Ampat Regency) for the suitability of seaweed cultivation. Oceanographic data collection was carried out at three points (M1, M2, and M3) on the western side of Meosbekwan Island. Analysis of suitability for aquaculture was initiated with an analysis of key parameters, i.e., depth, protection and shipping traffic. The suitability analysis was followed by an analysis of the oceanographic parameters of the waters by weighting them using a ranking system. Furthermore, the final stage of suitability analysis was to evaluate the feasibility level of seaweed cultivation. The results showed that the depth of the waters on the western side of Meosbekwan Island ranged from 1.3 m – 5.8 m with an average depth of 1.5 m in the south (M1), 2.2 m in the middle (M2), and 3.9 m to the north (M3). Wave height during the study ranged from 0.1 – 0.3 m with an average value of 0.25 m at all points. The velocity of the water currents ranged from 0.08 – 0.25 m/s. The salinity of the waters was relatively homogeneous (30 - 31 o/oo). Water temperature also has small and relatively homogeneous variations with a range of 30 - 31˚C. The brightness of the waters ranged from 2.5 – 3.5 m. The bottom of the waters on the west side of Meosbekwan Island generally consists of coarse sand, rubble, and seagrass vegetation Enhalus acoroides and Cymodocea sp. In general, the oceanographic conditions of the waters are suitable for the life and growth of seaweed. The results of the location suitability evaluation indicated that the waters on the western side of Meosbekwan Island were technically feasible to serve as a location for seaweed cultivation.

COMMONSIM: Simulating the utopia of COMMONISM

This research article presents an agent-based simulation hereinafter called COMMONSIM. It builds on COMMONISM, i.e. a large-scale commons-based vision for a utopian society. In this society, production and distribution of means are not coordinated via markets, exchange and money, or a central polity, but via bottom-up signalling and polycentric networks, i.e. ex ante coordination via needs. Heterogeneous agents care for each other in life groups and produce in different groups care, environmental as well as intermediate and final means to satisfy sensual-vital needs. Productive needs decide on the magnitude of activity in groups for a common interest, e.g. the production of means in a multi-sectoral artificial economy. Agents share cultural traits identified by different behaviours: a propensity for egoism, leisure, environmentalism and productivity. The narrative of this utopian society follows principles of critical psychology and sociology, complexity and evolution, the theory of commons and critical political economy. The article presents the utopia and an agent-based study of it, with emphasis on culture-dependent allocation mechanisms and their social and economic implications for agents and groups.