Greetings and salutations, Utopists!
I started to write this with jokes and asides about Blursday and the loss of time and connection from the pandemic, but I tire even of those. In the past three years, if your academic life has been like mine, you’ve been to virtual conferences, maybe one or two in-person meetings as well, and have moved from in-person to virtual to hybrid to whatever-this-week-brings in both scholarly communities and local work. I’ve been teaching online or in networked classrooms since 1990, and, prepared and experienced as I am, this has been an unsettling and revealing ride.
But now, finally, we meet again. Mostly in-person. Mostly whole and ready to listen to each other.
I hope that this will be both a reboot—adding a new OS to our society’s practices and experiences that builds on what has worked and what has not during the pandemic—and a return—to the congenial and generous space that the Society for Utopian Studies offered me when as a graduate student I finally gained the courage to present my work to an audience of knowledgeable peers, and that has nurtured me with personal and professional (mostly combined) relationships over more than three decades.
When I tell my students or relatives or that dude at the block party what I do, I focus entirely on the alternative. On the conditions and horizons of possibility. On the tantalizing glimpse of the what-might-be, the could-be-made, the might-could. You and I know that those interlocutors want to talk about the impossible. The perfect. The ideal.
But as we reconvene, raise a glass and break bread together, listen respectfully and curiously, celebrate each other’s inquiries, I ask that you stand with me, face in the direction of possibility, and resolve to strike out together for what we might build.
The Society for Utopian Studies is now well into the second and third generations of scholars, communitarians, fellow-travelers, and all-round curious folk. Let’s make something out of this meeting that flies, ambles, or otherwise moves in the direction of the alternative.
Pete Sands