Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium

Abstract: It has become a sign of living in the present to note the increasing globalization of the world the transnationalism of the currents along which capital, goods, labor, persons, and information flow; the interconnectedness of diverse cultures; the networks and internets that, despite their inequitable distribution, have nonetheless become the icons of rapidly changing, intricately interlinked societies. Global consciousness, speaking everywhere with the inexorable voice of the new, also appears to tow traditional academic bodies of knowledge within its orbit: "adapt," it seems to say, "or die." This Darwinian choice between adaptation and death has of course already been made, its iteration in the present tense serving to obscure the creeping changes long wrought on our disciplinary institutions, critical theories, and pedagogical practices by an ever more heterogeneous global sensibility. Globalization, understood as a process of cross-cultural interaction, exchange, and transformation, is certainly as old as any currently recognized academic field and in most cases far older, whether we take as its starting point the post-modern, post-colonial acceleration of spatiotemporal connection, the nineteenth-century capitalist expansion of imperial nations, the fifteenth-century formation of a world system dominated by mercantilist states and divided into core and peripheral zones, or even the trade routes of the ancient and medieval world.1 But contemporary globalization is of course far more than the mirror image of its various historical antecedents, bearing at its disposal unprecedented economic and cultural forces of connection (if one is Utopian) or homogenization (if one is dystopian).2

Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema

Abstract: This book offers an intriguing and ambitious prospect: an attempt to unearth the emergence of an ecologically-based worldview pervading at least western consciousness. The author adopts a Raymond Williams-style approach to this project, engaging in deep textual analysis of the Hollywood blockbuster with a view to identifying whether those projects are implicitly informed by some kind of subliminal eco-consciousness. (Dr. Roddy Flynn, DCU) Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research and is used extensively to examine the most influential global medium of all time. The book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from 1950s to the present, which has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, westerns, nature and road movies, as listed in the filmography are extensively analysed while particularly privileging ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. The five chapters all use detailed film readings to exemplify various aspects of this 'feel good' utopian phenomenon which begins with an exploration of the various meanings of ecology with detailed examples like Titanic helping to frame its implications for film study. Chapter two concentrates on nature film and its impact on ecology and utopianism using films like Emerald Forest and Jurassic Park, while the third chapter looks at road movies and also foreground nature and landscape as read through cult films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Grand Canyon. The final two science fiction chapters begin with 1950s B movie classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man and compare these with more recent conspiracy films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run alongside the Star Trek phenomenon. The last chapter provides a postmodernist appreciation of ecology and its central importance within contemporary cultural studies as well as applying post-human, feminist and cyborg theory to more recent debates around ecology and 'hope for the future', using readings of among others the Terminator series, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and Alien Resurrection.

Critical Policy Studies

Abstract: Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1. Critical Policy Studies / Michael Orsini and Miriam Smith Part 1: Political Economy 2. Political Economy and Canadian Public Policy / Peter Graefe 3. Policy Analysis in an Era of "Globalization": Capturing Spatial Dimensions and Scalar Strategies / Rianne Mahon, Caroline Andrew, and Robert Johnson Part 2: Citizens and Diversity 4. Citizen Engagement: Rewiring the Policy Process / Rachel Laforest and Susan Phillips 5. Queering Public Policy: A Canadian Perspective / Miriam Smith 6. Gender Mainstreaming in the Canadian Context: "One Step Forward and Two Steps Back" / Olena Hankivsky 7. Political Science, Race, Ethnicity, and Public Policy / Yasmeen Abu-Laban Part 3: Discourse and Knowledge 8. Governmentality and the Shifting Winds of Policy Studies / Karen Bridget Murray 9. Agenda-Setting and Issue Definition / Stuart N. Soroka 10. Scientists, Government, and "Boundary Work": The Case of Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering in Canada / Francesca Scala 11. Between Respect and Control: Traditional Indigenous Knowledge in Canadian Public Policy / Frances Abele 12. Framing Environmental Policy: Aboriginal Rights and the Conservation of Migratory Birds / Luc Juillet Part 4: Risky Subjects 13. From the Welfare State to the Social Investment State: A New Paradigm for Canadian Social Policy? / Denis Saint-Martin 14. Canadian Post-9/11 Border Policy and Spillover Securitization: Smart, Safe, Sovereign? / Mark B. Salter 15. The Permanent-Emergency Compensation State: A "Postsocialist" Tale of Political Dystopia / Matt James 16. Discourses in Distress: From "Health Promotion" to "Population Health" to "You Are Responsible for Your Own Health" / Michael Orsini Contributors Index

Precarious Dystopias: The Hunger Games, in Time, and Never Let Me Go

Abstract: Survey of three recent movie dystopias— The Hunger Games, In Time, Never Let Me Go —that explore the politics of precariousness, dramatizing the predicament of exploitation in both fatalistic and tentatively hopeful ways.

The morbid age : Britain and the crisis of civilization

Abstract: Richard Overy's "The Morbid Age" opens a window onto the creative but anxious period between the First and Second World Wars. British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity; it was the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to the Freudian unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was faced a dystopian future of war, economic collapse and racial degeneration. Brilliantly evoking a Britain of BBC radio lectures, public debates, peace demonstrations, pamphleteers, psychoanalysts, anti-fascist volunteers, sex education manuals and science fiction, "The Morbid Age" reveals a time at once different from, and yet surprisingly similar to, our own. "History at its best". ("Economist"). "The carefree image of life in Britain between the wars is overturned in this magnificent account". (Peter Preston, "Observer"). "It is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has". (Simon Heffer, "Daily Telegraph"). "With learning, lucidity and wit, "The Morbid Age" ...brilliantly describes the sense of an inevitably approaching catastrophe". (Eric Hobsbawm, "London Review of Books"). Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His books include "Why the Allies Won", "Russia's War", "The Battle of Britain" and "The Dictators", which won the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for history in 2005.