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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.


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Book
01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: Nowotny argues that the ambivalence about science is an inevitable legacy of modernity as discussed by the authors, and argues that science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them, harnessing the passion of science to produce "deliverables".
Abstract: An influential scholar in science studies argues that innovation tames the insatiable and limitless curiosity driving science, and that society's acute ambivalence about this is an inevitable legacy of modernity. Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce "deliverables." Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgement that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence-as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

70 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1998-Futures
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest that there are other arenas to explore that, were they taken seriously, could exert sufficient symbolic pull to qualify as desirable images of future worlds, and they could then begin to act as ''magnets'' for the realisation of possibilities that are presently obscured.

67 citations

Book
04 Dec 2015
TL;DR: The authors argue that climate change is a form of "slow violence" that humans are inflicting on the environment, and that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms "Pretraumatic Stress Disorder."
Abstract: Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented,perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of deja vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of "slow violence" that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms "Pretraumatic Stress Disorder." Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blindspots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.

66 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Aug 2010
TL;DR: Dystopia is often used interchangeably with 'anti-utopia' or 'negative utopia', by contrast to utopia or 'eutopia', to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Where did it all go wrong? When did the vision of heaven on earth become an anticipation of hell? In many accounts we emerge from the hopeful, dream-like state of Victorian optimism to pass through what H. G. Wells called the age of confusion into a nightmarish twentieth century, soon powerfully symbolized by the grotesque slaughter of the First World War. Enlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was now displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers. From that time ideal societies have accordingly been more commonly portrayed negatively in dystopian rather than utopian form. Like most other parts of terra utopus , however, the concept of dystopia has been much contested, many eutopias or ideal societies having dystopic elements and vice versa. Dystopias are often described as 'conservative', though they may in fact be sharply critical of the societies they reflect, as we will see. 'Dystopia' is often used interchangeably with 'anti-utopia' or 'negative utopia', by contrast to utopia or 'eutopia' (good place), to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies, or which demonstrate, in B. F. Skinner's words, 'ways of life we must be sure to avoid' - in the unlikely event that we can agree on particulars. Yet as we will see, the most famous exemplar of the genre, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , was not intended to be anti-utopian as such.

65 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption.
Abstract: Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations – exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. ...

65 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141