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.

The Locust and the Bee: Predators and Creators in Capitalism’s Future Updated edition

Abstract: The recent economic crisis was a dramatic reminder that capitalism can both produce and destroy. It's a system that by its very nature encourages predators and creators, locusts and bees. But, as Geoff Mulgan argues in this compelling, imaginative, and important book, the economic crisis also presents a historic opportunity to choose a radically different future for capitalism, one that maximizes its creative power and minimizes its destructive force. In an engaging and wide-ranging argument, Mulgan digs into the history of capitalism across the world to show its animating ideas, its utopias and dystopias, as well as its contradictions and possibilities. Drawing on a subtle framework for understanding systemic change, he shows how new political settlements reshaped capitalism in the past and are likely to do so in the future. By reconnecting value to real-life ideas of growth, he argues, efficiency and entrepreneurship can be harnessed to promote better lives and relationships rather than just a growth in the quantity of material consumption. Healthcare, education, and green industries are already becoming dominant sectors in the wealthier economies, and the fields of social innovation, enterprise, and investment are rapidly moving into the mainstream--all indicators of how capital could be made more of a servant and less a master. This is a book for anyone who wonders where capitalism might be heading next--and who wants to help make sure that its future avoids the mistakes of the past. This edition of The Locust and the Bee includes a new afterword in which the author lays out some of the key challenges facing capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Dreaming of ‘nowhere’: A co-autoethnographic exploration of Utopia-dystopia in the academy

Abstract: In this postformal co-autoethnographic research, the authors explore the changing landscape of American research universities from their respective locations as mid-career, post-tenure critical ped...

Who Should We Be Online?

Abstract: Abstract From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting within systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures.

Reading The Law Made Strange: A Theological Jurisprudence of Popular Culture

Abstract: This thesis elaborates and performs a form of cultural legal studies that examines the overlap between legal theory, theology and popular culture. In doing so it makes use of, and mobilises, the concept of estrangement or ‘making’ strange put forward by Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists (amongst others). It does this at two levels: first, by examining the genres of speculative fiction as genres of estrangement that ‘make strange’ their representations of law, legality and justice; and second, by proposing a mode and methodology of cultural legal reading as one that itself ‘makes strange’, rendering the texts under analysis otherwise. As such, it sees in the stories told within the genres of speculative fiction not simply flights of fancy or postulates of pure imagination with no relation or reference to reality. Rather, they produce a meditation on and mediation of the world itself—one that opens us to see the world both in its createdness and contingency, as storied and imbued with meaning. It is for this reason that I turn to speculative fiction in relation to a mode of the cultural legal. Rather than focusing on the direct representations of law, legal institutions and legal actors within popular culture, the engagement of speculative fiction provides a way to understand and re-think the stories of and about law themselves. In the analysis of motifs of law and legality, of justice, authority and legitimacy that are ‘made strange’ by their situation in worlds imagined differently, we find the potential to think and see them otherwise, not in the sense of simply a utopian (or dystopian) looking forward through the potential of the imagination, but an understanding of the imagination’s setting free of these concepts enabling a different reflection and understanding of them.