SATURDAY
Abstracts by Panel, Saturday morning
Abstracts by panel, Saturday afternoon
Embassy Suites Guest Breakfast 7:30-8:15
Session IX 8:15-9:45
- A. Utopian Themes in Michael Cummings, Children’s Voices in Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) (Colonial East)
Robust democracy remains a utopian vision in formally democratic societies, partly because the voices of the youngest third of their people are officially excluded. As adult officials fail to address the most pressing issues of our times—including climate change, gun control, Black Lives Matter, the rights of LBGTQIA+ persons, and the defense of democracy itself—activist children, tweens, teens, and young adults are taking matters into their own hands while gaining adult allies. Adultist disenfranchisement is arbitrary, capricious, and unjust, its rationale mirroring historical reasons for preventing poor people, people of color, and women from voting: alleged political immaturity, irresponsibility, and incapacity. In the meantime, young activists have found creative ways to make their voices heard, as in the cases of Nobel nominee Craig Kielburger (Founder of Free the Children), Nobel winner Malala Yousafzai (on girls’ rights), Nobel nominee Greta Thunberg (on climate change), and Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez (on gun control). The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed on to by all the functioning governments in the world, has spawned a generation of child and youth activism, significant policy changes, and an explosion of scholarship on children’s rights, voice, engagement, and empowerment. This roundtable will address the intersectionality of marginalization by age, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability; youth-elder mentoring and alliances; multiple paths to youth empowerment including media and the arts; and adult “apathy” as a lifelong toxic effect of the official silencing of our voices during the most formative years of our lives.
Chair: Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Participants:
Michael Cummings, University of Colorado Denver
Philip Wegner, University of Florida
Hoda Zaki, Hood College
- B. Despair, Hope, and Facing the Darkness (Colonial West)
Chair: Diana Palardy, Youngstown State University
David Schappert, King’s College (PA), “East of Utopia—Philip K Dick’s Utopian-Adjacent Spaces”
Diana Palardy, Youngstown State University, “Isolating the Prophet: The Cassandra Curse in Spanish Environmental Apocalyptic Literature”
Session X 10:00-11:30
- A African American Literature, Utopian Studies, and Cultural Remaking (Colonial East)
Chair: Eric D. Smith, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Edward K. Chan, Waseda University, and Patricia Ventura, Spelman College, “Black Lives Matter Utopian Literature”
John Mark Robison, University of Florida, “Money, Utopia, and the Politics of Disgust in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby”
- B. Global Neoliberalism and the British Dystopia I (Colonial West)
Chair: Richard Bodek, College of Charleston
Richard Bodek, College of Charleston, “James Bond & the Post-War Tory Anti-Utopia”
Amanda Rose, University of Florida, “Relational Space as a Means to Collectivity: The Critical Dystopia of J.G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation”
- C. Teaching Utopia (Citadel North)
Chair: Claire Curtis, College of Charleston
Peter Sands, UW-Milwaukee, “Slowtopia”
Briana McGinnis, College of Charleston, “Teaching Radical Possibility in Hopeless Times”
Boxed lunch available for pick up at 11:30
12:30-1:30 Business Meeting (Colonial East/ West)
Session XI 1:45-3:15
- A. Queer and Intersectional Imaginings (Colonial East)
Chair: Aaron Hammes, John Jay College
Aaron Hammes, John Jay College, “A Pyramid of Queer and Trans Counter Utopias”
Josephine Holland, University of Richmond, “Emerging Online Community Building, World-Making, and the Utopian Impulse in Queer Speculative Podcasts”
- B. Solarpunk Futures: A Workshop for Utopian Remembrance (Colonial West)
Solarpunk Futures: A Workshop for Utopian Remembrance utilizes the artist’s table-top game, Solarpunk Futures, to engage attendees of the 2022 Society for Utopian Conference in a process of visionary social storytelling around the collective struggle required to win our utopia. The game employs backcasting in a “Festival of Remembrance,” whereby Assemblies for the Future (groups of 1-8 players) play for 45 minutes from the perspective of a future utopia in which they collectively “remember” how their Ancestors utilized Tools and Values to overcome a real-world Challenge. Assemblies will report back on the form of their utopian scenarios, insights gained along the way, and how their experiences might inform their present-day actions.
- C. Utopian Effects/Dystopian Pleasures: A Roundtable Discussion (Citadel North)
This panel discussion will consider the insights and impact of Peter Fitting’s utopian scholarship, to mark last year’s publication of Utopian Effects, Dystopian Pleasures, vol. 21 in the Ralahine Utopian Studies Series. In this collection of essays written over a span of three decades (1979-2009), Fitting touches on an impressive range of utopian topics: from gender politics, urban planning, cinema, and technology to right-wing utopias, ideological closure, and the crucial question of how to transform utopian visions into social practice. Together, these writings provide an unprecedented glimpse into the changing currents of utopian thought and expression, as well as the formation of both Utopian and Science Fiction Studies as scholarly fields in their own right, developments in which Fitting has been instrumental.
Chair: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor
Participants:
Peter Fitting, University of Toronto
Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Penn State University
Peter Marks, University of Sydney
Session XII 3:30-4:45
- A. Nourishing Utopia (Colonial East)
Chair, Victoria Wolcott, University of Buffalo
Darrell Varga, NSCAD University (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), “Making Bread and Telling Stories: Bread in the Bones”
Victoria Wolcott, University of Buffalo, “Abundance in a Time of Scarcity: Father Divine’s Peace Mission and Utopian Solutions to Economic Crises”
- B. Utopia and Protest in Chile (Colonial West)
Chair: Diana Palardy, Youngstown State University
Daniel Sarkela, University of Florida, “La vida volverá- reconstructing Chilean Utopia”
Eunice Rojas, Furman University, “Until Dignity Becomes Tradition: The Dawn of a New Utopia in the Songs of Chile’s 2019 Social Upheaval”
Session XIII 5:00-6:30
- A. Global Neoliberalism and the British Dystopia II (Colonial East)
Chair: Ryan Kerr, University of Florida
Eric Smith, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, “Future Perfect and the Vanishing Present: ‘The Great Circularity’ and Anti-Utopianism in Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others”
Phillip Wegner, University of Florida, “A Future Worthy of Her Spirit: Neoliberal Dystopia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun”
- B. First Book Panel (Colonial West)
The First Book Celebration Roundtable brings together first-time authors of books in the field of utopian studies. It serves as a means of celebration of a milestone, as well as facilitates a conversation among roundtable members and their audience on current subjects in book-length inquiries in the field. In this, the first annual First Book Celebration Roundtable, the discipline overwhelmingly represented is literary studies. All three roundtable members are literary studies scholars who investigate the utopian (or dystopian) impulse in narrative in a variety of ways and during a variety of historical periods. For instance, Daniel Dimassa traces the influence of Dante on Germanic romantic writing, both of which – Dante and the German romantics – drew upon utopian ideals to create a mythology of German cultural identity. Similarly, Stephanie Peebles Tavera excavates how, later in the century and across the pond, the utopian impulse would also inform women writers of medical fiction in their attempt to simultaneously critique medico-legal narratives of the female body and offer an alternative history and practice of women’s reproductive health. Dimassa’s and Peebles Tavera’s findings may not be wholly surprising given the popularity of utopianism throughout the long nineteenth century. Rounding out the discussion is Anne Stewart’s study of the “angry planet” in decolonial and dystopian literature, which explores how a long-term commitment to any political imaginary, whether cultural, medical, or industrial, can be dangerous. Whether the utopian impulse propels German romanticists, nineteenth-century American writers, or contemporary authors of environmental literature, it is clear that the act of writing to create cultural change hinges upon utopianism’s penchant for hope as well as finds utopianism’s narrative structure of critique and reform as a useful tool for projects of identity formation.
Chair: Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Texas A&M University–Central Texas
Daniel Dimassa, Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth (Bucknell 2022), https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/dante-in-deutschland/9781684484188/
Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Author of (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (Edinburgh UP, 2022), https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-p-rescription-narratives.html
Anne Stewart, Angry Plant: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/angry-planet