Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2023"

Otto Neurath’s Scientific Utopianism Revisited-A Refined Model for Utopias in Thought Experiments

Abstract: Otto Neurath's empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to political economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath's utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist's model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist's model more adequately complies with many uses of thought experiments, especially with the open-ended discussions of utopias and dystopias in thought experiments. (2) As a strict logical empiricist, Neurath is committed to a strictly empiricist account of thought experiments. John Norton's empiricist argument view can indeed account for the justifications of empirical beliefs and genuine discoveries targeted by scientific utopianism in three distinct (yet connected) ways, all of which Neurath already contemplated: (2.I) Dealing with utopias and thought experiments on a regular basis increases creativity and inventiveness. (2.II) Particular ways of presenting knowledge facilitate scientific discovery and social progress. (2.III) The use of utopias in thought experiments can prompt conceptual change and allow access to new phenomena. We conclude by highlighting that, even though thought experiments support a positive attitude for exploring new social possibilities, Neurath points out that active decisions are unavoidable. The exploration of alternatives and the awareness of a need for decisions in policy discussion avert a technocratic outlook in social science.

Integrating competence and Bildung through dystopian literature: Teaching Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses and democracy and citizenship in the English subject

Abstract: Artikeln behandlar användningen av dystopisk litteratur för ungdomar i engelskämnet i Norge och kopplar detta till det tvärvetenskapliga temat demokrati och medborgarskap. Detta tema är centralt i den nyligen reviderade läroplanen i Norge och är en viktig del av skolans mandat – utbildning måste säkerställa att eleverna är redo att delta i ett demokratiskt samhälle med kunskap, färdigheter och kritiskt tänkande när de har avslutat gymnasiet. När man arbetar med litteratur på detta sätt är det möjligt att integrera kompetens och bildning i klassrummet: specifik kunskap och kompetensutveckling kopplas till en värdebaserad utbildning som syftar till att hjälpa studenter i deras individuella utveckling.

Antonioni’s Anthropocene and Guerra’s enchanting gardens

Abstract: This article explores the seemingly discordant ecologies that animate the ecopoetics of Tonino Guerra’s thinking, arguing that in Guerra’s work we find both a critique of human uses and abuses of the environment – in the era of environmental loss we are currently calling the Anthropocene – and an invitation to creatively reimagine our planetary place. More specifically, it addresses the contrasts between the bereft landscapes in the tetralogy of films Guerra wrote with Michelangelo Antonioni and the intricate, rich gardens of his poetry and of his hometown, Pennabilli. In contrast with (or perhaps in response to) the out-of-control gardens and unpalatable fruits of the films, Guerra’s personal philosophy led him to cultivate poetic and earthly gardens that nourish biodiversity and community and express optimism for a habitable Anthropocene future.

Zwischen Utopie und Dystopie

Abstract: The analysis is based on three research questions: To what extent are these two pioneer communities the subject of public discourse? Which patterns structure the discourse on these pioneer communities? And what can be concluded in regard to the significance of this coverage for the processes of deep mediatization? In essence

Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

Abstract: Focusing on the contemporary period, this book brings together critical age studies and contemporary science fiction to establish the centrality of age and ageing in dystopian, speculative and science-fiction imaginaries. Analysing texts from Europe, North America and South Asia, as well as television programmes and films, the contributions range from essays which establish genre-based trends in the representation of age and ageing, to very focused studies of particular texts and concerns. As a whole, the volume probes the relationship between speculative/science fiction and our understanding of what it is to be a human in time: the time of our own lives and the times of both the past and the future.

#NotDying4Wallstreet: A Discourse Analysis on Health vs. Economy during COVID-19

Abstract: This paper combines political/poststructuralist discourse theory with actor–network theory to explore dystopian visions in the context of a discourse around the hashtag #NotDying4Wallstreet. The call for protest against former US president Donald Trump’s demand to reopen the economy during lockdown dominates the discourse. The tweets were analyzed with quantitative discourse analysis and network analysis to identify key terms and meaning clusters leading to two main conclusions. The first (A) is an imaginary dystopic future with an accelerated neoliberal order. Human lives, especially elderly people, are sacrificed for a well-functioning economy in this threat scenario. The second (B) includes the motive of protest and the potential of the people’s demands to unite and rally against this threat. Due to the revelation of populist features, this (online) social movement seems to be populist without a leader figure. The empirical study is used to propose a research approach toward a mixed-methods design based on a methodological discussion and the enhancement of PDT with ANT. Thus, the article has a double aim: an update of contemporary approaches to social media analysis in discourse studies and its empirical demonstration with a study.

Crises Come in Waves

Abstract: A wave of crises for the international system, international law, and the world economy began in 2016. The rise of national populism in many parts of the world, a political force openly opposed to international law and regulation, directly challenged the projects of the 1990s. The rise of revisionist states invoking nationalist identity, especially China and Russia, produced new international tensions and challenges. Online life evolved in an increasingly dystopian direction. These three developments reinforced each other. The global pandemic made everything even worse.

Remaining or Leaving?

Abstract: Economic pragmatism in relation to EU matters has characterised the approach of British governments ever since the beginnings of the integration project and it also pervades the Eurosceptic novels. Here, membership in the EU, frequently equated with the single market, appears to be a good thing as long as Britain benefits from it economically, while a full monetary and economic union is strongly rejected. The final analysis chapter closely examines the different scenarios that the novels suggest for the future of Britain—within or outside the EU. It illustrates that the Eurosceptic novels do not remain within the classic dystopian resistance plot structure, but rather include open endings which are characteristic of the so-called critical dystopias. With regard to the British EU relationship, most of the novels envision future forms of cooperation outside a supranational framework. In three novels, the UK eventually leaves the EU (Brexit) and seeks different trading alliances with Europe, the US and the Commonwealth nations. The economic dimension of European integration appears to play a decisive role with regard to the novels’ outcomes: the UK’s economic orientation (e.g. preference of neo-liberal ideas) is said to set the British apart from EUrope.

J M Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy: A Search for Answers

Abstract: The 2019 novel by the South African-Australian Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus, is a third book in a sequence that includes Jesus in its title; like its predecessors it follows the lives of a recently constructed family in the dystopian Spanish-speaking towns of Novilla and Estrella. The surreal trilogy, which began with The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and then The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), presents us with unreal worlds, leaving us searching for meaning. This fable-like fantasy, which expands the author’s ‘late style’, challenges the genre of fiction itself. Typical of late style, the trilogy resists closure and resolution. The debated ideas are generated by characters who were forced to forsake their memories and histories. Even though the protagonists begin to embody the very ideas they debate, answers are not forthcoming.

Dystopian Games: Diagnosing Modernity as the Scene of Tests, Trials and Transformations

Abstract: Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on ‘dystopian games’, particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the ‘scene of a trial’ in Boltanski’s phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault’s work on ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformations’, what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.

Territory and sustainability: graphic expressions against a dystopia

Abstract: The disruptive events that have occurred in recent years encourage us to determine that science does not make free assessments of the climate situation. The territory, its resources, are in a phase of depredation, the environment, attacked. The result is a process of environmental degradation without a solution of continuity. We take great care in environmental words and discourses, we ignore the value of the image, that of "an image is worth a thousand words", which refers us to the value of graphic expression. Through its analysis in this article, we claim it as a proactive weapon in the defense of the environment, in the fight for a new paradigm alien to growing systems, to an educational environment to reverse the situation and determine environmental stability. Actions are difficult, but they are possible, and in chromatic semiotics we find a fundamental ally. The emotion, the feeling, is the first asset to remove to start the path of reversal.

Visualising emptiness: the landscape of the Western Front and Australian and English children’s picture books

Abstract: ABSTRACT Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is the illustrators, however, who have the more complex task, for they have inherited an aesthetic issue that has challenged artists since 1914. Like the British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand official war artists of the time, they are confronted, at every turn, by the challenge of depicting a surreally empty landscape. It was not so much a landscape as the artists understood it before the war, but rather an anti-landscape, as though the war had annihilated Nature. What was left was a dystopian wilderness that bore witness to the destructive power of industrialised warfare. This article will explore how a selection of Australian and English children’s picture book illustrators respond to the emptiness of the battlefield landscape, or as Becca Weir so evocatively characterises it, the paradox of measurable nothingness.

The Value of the Relational: On Demands for Gifts in Dystopian Situations

Abstract: A conjuntura turbulenta da sociedade global contribui para aprofundar a revisão dos fundamentos normativos das ciências sociais e da sociologia, favorecendo mudanças de perspectivas analíticas. Isto é bem evidente nos estudos sobre a dádiva sistematizados por intérpretes de Marcel Mauss reunidos na Revue du MAUSS [Movimento Anti-Utilitarista nas Ciências Sociais]. Estes autores atualizam a contribuição teórico-metodológica do dom – inicialmente formulada com três movimentos, dar-receber-retribuir –, com a introdução de um quarto movimento. Assim, temos um outro sistema de trocas que é mais extensivo, demandar-dar-receber-retribuir, cujo principal formulador é Alain Caillé. Esta inovação facilita entender as trocas voluntárias entre indivíduos situados em hierarquias morais e econômicas distintas e que não podiam ser explicadas nos limites do sistema triádico anterior. Este novo sistema acompanha o desenvolvimento dos estudos sobre sociologia relacional.

Threatening dystopias: the global politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh

Abstract: "Threatening dystopias: the global politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh." Social & Cultural Geography, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Old Models, New Realities

Abstract: In October 1949, Aldous Huxley sent a letter to George Orwell, providing a few brief comments on Orwell’s just published novel Nineteen Eighty Four. Huxley had written his own vision of a dystopian future in his 1932 novel, Brave New World, and after complimenting Orwell on his work, made a few brief observations about the differences between the two works. These two works of fiction aimed to give warnings about modern developments and where they might lead in the future if humanity did not wake up to their dark as well as their bright potentialities. As literal predictions, which neither book was meant to be, their visions have fortunately not been fulfilled. But the underlying themes and tends they identified have run much further than one might have hoped.

Prepped for harvest: Monstrous metaphors of capital in the young adult dystopian film, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

Abstract: Through the use of horror movie motifs like zombies and mad doctors, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) stands in drastic contrast to other young adult dystopian properties like The Hunger Games (2012), for example, in that Scorch Trials uses allegory as a means to comment on neoliberalism, alienated labor, and commodity fetishism essentially functioning as a Marxist critique of capital. However, this reading only occurs subtextually. By using a contextual cultural studies approach, which reads film as embedded in cultural politics, and a “monsterology,” which captures capital as a specter within the film, this essay will serve as an intervention surrounding discourse on The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. In doing so, this analysis will make the case that films targeted at students and young adults are important sites of pedagogy that contribute to an understanding of how capital alienates us from ourselves, each other, and social democratic structures.

The Representation of Dystopia and related Social Phenomena within the works of George Orwell: An Analytical Study

Abstract: One of the most well-known dystopian authors, George Orwell has left a lasting impression onmodern politics and culture. Orwell paints a dark picture of the future when totalitarian regimesand authoritarian governments rule over societies that have lost their freedom and autonomy inthe two most well-known books, 1984 and Animal Farm. In these depictions of such societies,Orwell highlights several societal problems, such as the abuse of authority, the repression ofopposition, and the manipulation of language and knowledge. Also, depicts a world in whichpeople have been robbed of their humanity and reduced to nothing more than cogs in a massiveand oppressive system using colorful and frequently scary images. Although Orwell's worldviewwas grim, the writings have still encouraged numerous people to think critically about the worldand try to create more just and equitable societies. All the works are an essential contribution tocurrent discourses of social justice and political activity because of the focus on the value ofindividual agency and resistance in the face of injustice, which continues to connect withaudiences today. All things considered, George Orwell's depictions of dystopia and relatedsocietal phenomena in writings serve as a potent cautionary tale about the perils of unbridledauthoritarianism and the necessity of upholding democracy and human rights.

Defending the Nation

Abstract: Cultural tensions between Britain and the European Union take centre stage in the Eurosceptic novels which represent how the EU culturally invades Britain and dystopia-like encroaches on the terrains of British history and identity, fabricating and propagandising a shared European past, a common heritage and culture. The chapter examines the novels’ discursive construction of the British nation and national identity in relation to the EU and pays particular attention to the prominent role that the novels attribute to the construction of the nation’s past and culture, to historical encounters, traditions and narratives. The chapter outlines first how the EU threatens the British nation and its narration, and second, how in turn, the fictitious resistance movements draw from the same set of national(ist) narratives to articulate their points of view: icons of nationhood, sites of memory and historical junctures become indispensable for the formation of national resistance against the EU. The chapter thereby illustrates, how the novels draw from and extrapolate Eurosceptic tropes.

Creating hope in dystopia: Utopia as Method as social pedagogy in early childhood studies

Abstract: Those who choose to engage with the academic world of early childhood are frequently caught between encouraging students to advocate for children and contribute to the construction of a good life and navigating the regulatory frameworks that shape future practice. In short, we must prepare students for the highly skilled work of supporting people who live their lives in day-to-day actions that are underpaid, under-resourced and overlooked. Those who prepare students for this reality are tasked with developing programmes that both instil hope and pragmatism that will sustain them when faced with these everyday realities. This article outlines how the authors addressed this through an adapted use of Utopia as Method in a module on an early childhood degree. By following its distinct modes, students are guided to position themselves not as passive observants of a childhood that is socially constructed around them, but as social and political actors engaged with making human beings human. Among other issues the article evaluates the intersection between social pedagogy, utopia and the future of early childhood. Based on explorations undertaken for this article, we argue that the imaginative reconstruction of childhood through higher education is at ease with the values and purpose of social pedagogy. We reflect that, while the method employed as part of a module was useful in terms of personal development and future-oriented practice, the need to include children’s voices is yet to be developed.

Transforming dispositions towards automation

Abstract: Speaking to debates on how digital automation is changing people's capacities, my commentary affirms the value of surveying the myriad dispositions to automation that are muffled by the force of dominant boosterist or dystopian narratives. However, rather than assuming strong ‘reactions’ to automated objects or interfaces, I speculate that interactions with automation might be better characterised as ‘non-encounters’ for many. I explain how the non-encounters of being lulled, cajoled, and swayed can be evaluated as politically troubling, but that responses to heighten awareness of automation's politics may not necessarily result in people caring more about it. My commentary proposes a more indeterminate understanding of how people immanently evaluate automation which invites a more transitional and low-intensity understanding of the dispositions involved.

Geographies of the impossible

Abstract: In this commentary, I trace the potential of ‘the impossible’ as a spatio-temporal category for geographical research. I proceed from the assumption that the impossible takes on an ever more prominent role in the contemporary zeitgeist, especially in light of current crisis dynamics, such as pandemics, climate change, or the threat of nuclear warfare. When the impossible ‘takes place’, it receives a geography, or means the end of geography. Geographies of the impossible suspend taken-for-granted facts, pave the way for new actors, function according to their own logic, and create spaces for extraordinary encounters. Studying these geographies encourages scholars to engage with dystopian and apocalyptic but also utopian and revolutionary spatialities as well as follow the desire to make possible tomorrow what is impossible today.

The Notion of the “Subaltern” and the Drone Victim Subjectivities in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction

Abstract: This research proposes a new approach to study fictional representation of drone victims in contemporary Anglophone Pakistani novels by examining the inevitable onto-epistemological relation between the notion of the “subaltern” and its possible implications for fictional drone subjectivities. By drawing insights from the newly emerging drone fiction literary theory and re-examining the already well-established tradition of Subaltern Studies, I demonstrate in this essay that the drone fiction written by Pakistani authors is a distinct literary category which configures drone victims as voiceless. I argue that by incorporating the impunity, inhumanity, and injustice inherent in the perpetration of drone warfare, Pakistani authors reimagine the drone victims as mute spectators of their devastation. The essay considers the narrative implications of drone technology’s orientalist, racist, and imperialist rubric in the selected works. A critical analysis of the selected textual excerpts unpacks the socio-political discursive subaltern formations of the fictional drone victim subjectivities such as dead bodies, widows, orphans, and disabled individuals. By unraveling the multiple layers of subjugation and repression embedded into the fictional representations of the drone victims, this essay proposes a possibility to study the precariousness of their situation under the praxis of Subaltern Studies. Moreover, different contexts and types of drone victims unravel the harsh conditions of the groups living under drone surveillance. The motif of drone target strikes allows Pakistani writers to explore the voicelessness of the dronized communities. Hence, in reading drone sufferers as subalterns (a subjugated mute political non-entity), the essay highlights the predicament of the marginalized dronized groups and foregrounds the possible expansion of Subaltern Studies in connection with the exploration of drone victim subjectivities.