This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned ‘within, against, and beyond’ current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded through the UK’s Connected Communities programme, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and by attending to arguments from the field of Utopian Studies. It explores particular issues of power and control within the field of co-production, acknowledging that neoliberalism both constrains and co-opts such practice; and explores methodological and infrastructural issues such that its utopian potential might be realised.

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13645579.2017.1348581

Co-production: towards a utopian approach

This article argues that constructivists committed to reflexivity should be students of the future. It notes that both conventional and critical approaches do not sufficiently engage with the problem of future uncertainty in the process of identity formation and neglect its behavioural implications. Against this backdrop, the article regrounds constructivism in a temporal ontology and the argument that humans, in the face of contingency, seek to establish visions of a meaningful future. It discusses how visions, as utopias and/or dystopias, define possibilities of being and thereby provide actors with a sense of direction, and it differentiates between “robust” and “creative” visions to highlight two ways in which such possibilities are manifested. In doing so, the article encourages constructivists to become more attentive in identifying the visions which enable and bind creative agents in the process of realization.

Reclaiming the Vision Thing: Constructivists as Students of the Future

It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.

http://extscifi.weebly.com/uploads/8/9/4/7/8947540/article26.pdf

The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction

Cities grow like some sort of plant. Some of them, including some very beautiful ones like the medina of the Maghreb, seem to have been stuck together randomly like great corals. But is it truly random? Isn’t it actually the result of strong local, historical and technological constraints? On the other hand, Greek and Roman cities were designed with rigid plans. Though the overall shape and the road and waterway networks were tightly constrained, each unit had considerable freedom, allowing the city to accommodate the unexpected and adapt itself to new things. Naples, for instance, formerly known as Neapolis - the “new city” - has kept its antique grid pattern. How can structure be given without causing rigidity? The city is a spatial translation of the rights that govern the collective and the individual. Berlin is a contemporary example of this dialectic.

The Ideal City

• The article focuses on the co-creational labour made by professionals (and non-professionals) who, in a non-Anglo-Saxon country such as Italy, adapt and modify (heavily or slightly) the ‘original’ media products (i.e. TV series) in order to make them accessible to the domestic audience. After a concise introduction on the ‘Italianization’ process, the article proceeds to describe two ways of adapting nationally: the professional translation and dubbing system and the grassroots fansubbing phenomenon. The attention is both on the production routines and on their influence on the meaning of the text. •

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367877909337859

The Mediation is the Message. Italian Regionalization of US TV Series as Co-creational Work

Dark horizons : science fiction and the dystopian imagination

Informed by feminist, Marxist, ethnographic, and post-structuralist frameworks, Utopia Method Vision makes a unique contribution to international debates in cultural, literary, sociological, and political studies of utopian theory, texts, and practices. The collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work in general and their research perspectives in particular. In so doing, the contributors develop a larger, self-critical look at the limits and potential of the entire paradigm by which utopianism is known, studied, critiqued, created, and received.

Utopia method vision : the use value of social dreaming

In the twentieth century, the dark side of Utopia-dystopian accounts of
places worse than the ones we live in-took its place in the narrative catalogue of the West and developed in several forms throughout the rest of
the century.1 No doubt prompted by H. G. Wells’s science fictional visions
of modernity, a number of other works-E. M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” and, more famously, works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We,
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour-came to represent the classical, or canonical, form of dystopia. In a
more diffused manner, works that shared the cultural ambience of the
dystopian imagination (though often with ambiguity or irony) appeared
on the margins of mainstream literature. These include titles as diverse
and contradictory as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Ayn Rand’s
Anthem (1938), C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), Vladimir
Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), Evelyn Waugh’s Love among the Ruins
(1953), and Don De Lillo’s Underworld (1997). In the direction of popular
culture, a more overt dystopian tendency developed within science fiction
(sf), and this resulted in the “new maps of hell,” as Kingsley Amis put it,
that appeared after World War II and continues in the dystopian sf of recent years (by authors such as Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl and C. M.
Kornbluth, Judith Merrill, A. E. Van Vogt, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard,
Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon). In
all these instances, to a greater or lesser extent, the dystopian imaginationhas served as a prophetic vehicle, the canary in a cage, for writers with an
ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the
iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside.

Introduction. Dystopia and Histories

The Telling, the long-awaited new novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, is the first
full-length Hainish series novel in more than twenty years. Prior to this, Le
Guin had in fact written mostly short stories and novellas set in the Hainish
universe, of which the most recent is Four Ways to Forgiveness. Her new
novel is a continuation of this collection in terms of both themes and genre.
Like Four Ways, The Telling is concerned with history and with the portrayal
of a dystopian world. The novel also represents her first full-length exploration of dystopia since The Word for World Is Forest. Like that novella, it is,once again, a story of cultural contact, the kind of anthropological science
fiction that is characteristic of Le Guin’s work. Like Word, the new novel
deals with the survival of culture and is related to historical facts-the
Vietnam War (Word) and the Cultural Revolution in China as well as the
rise of religious and secular fundamentalism (Telling). Furthermore, they
are both, more or less overtly, critical dystopias.2 But besides being a story
of cultural contact, The Telling presents a quest for identity for its protagonist, one rooted in knowledge of history, memory, and acceptance of responsibilities. Given these themes, it is useful to read the novel in the
context of the following debates: the relationship between the utopian
genre, history, and memory; and the thorny issue of historical forgiveness.
Any discussion of the past and memory, in fact, seems to be connected to
the issue of reconciliation (reparation and/or compensation). Le Guin’s
novel centers on such issues, and in the course of her narrative she provides insights into these themes, ultimately suggesting that if happiness
and despair are the conditions of the citizens of utopia and dystopia, respectively, knowledge and awareness are those of the protagonists of the
critical dystopia. And it is memory and the recovery of history that lead to
this more open and critical condition.

Raffaella Baccolini

Papers

Dark horizons : science fiction and the dystopian imagination

The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction

Utopia method vision : the use value of social dreaming

Introduction. Dystopia and Histories

“A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past”: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling