THURSDAY
Registration: Stairwell
Utopian Studies Advisory and Editorial Boards 11:00-12:00: Citadel North
Society for Utopian Studies Steering Committee 12:00-1:30: Citadel North
The Steering Committee meeting is open to all SUS members. If you would like to join by Zoom, please email susprogramchair@gmail.com for the link.
Session I 1:45-3:15
- A. Looking Backward at Daedalus, Spring 1965 (Colonial East)
Chair: Scott Krawczyk, Georgetown University
Luisa Aleman Hernandez, Georgetown University, “Learning to Live: Minor Campus Utopias in the Anthropocene”
Kate Hilts: “Unmaking the Precincts: Police Abolition from Fiction to Action”
Joey Hiles: “Making Suburbia: From Utopia to Dystopia”
- B. Nineteenth-Century Visions (Colonial West)
Chair: Elaine Ostry, SUNY Plattsburgh
Justin Chandler, Miami University, “Incorporated Selves: Looking Backward, Perspectival Captivity, and the Process of Utopia”
Jonathan Neufeld, College of Charleston, “‘By Means Impossible to be Anticipated’: Aesthetics and Democracy in Benito Cereno & Billy Budd”
Session II 3:30-5
- A. Finnish Utopian Communities: Paper and Documentary Screening (Colonial East)
Chairs: Carrie Hintz, Queens College/ CUNY and The Graduate Center/ CUNY and Claire Curtis, College of Charleston
Paper: Teuvo Peltoniemi, Independent Scholar, “’Three Centuries, Six Continents and Four Main Ideologies’: The History of the Finnish Utopian Communities”
Screening: HÖÖK documentary film
Finnish-Russian documentary film “Fridolf Höök – from Ocean to Ocean” (2020, 26 min., subtitles in English)
During the worst famine years, in 1868, Finnish sea captain Fridolf Höök founded a Utopian colony of Amurland near Vladivostok in Czarist Russia. Finland was then an autonomic part of Russia. The group consisted of a hundred well-to-do Swedish speaking Finns from Helsinki, and main idea was whale hunting. At the same year, about 50 Finnish speaking peasants from Turku immigrated to the same area. Departures aroused a great media debate in Finland.
Captain Höök stayed in the Far East area after the quick end of the Utopian community, and became a local celebrity for decades. Many members of his group returned eventually to Finland. Some remained on the area, as did all the Turku peasants.
The Höök film has been produced in 2020 as Russian-Finnish collaboration. It has been filmed in Finland and Russia. Scientific material, photos and interviews are from Helsinki, Turku, Nakhodka and Vladivostok museums and archives.
Director Mila Kudryashova (St. Petersburg)
Producer Merja Ritola (Helsinki)
Scientific adviser Teuvo Peltoniemi (Helsinki)
- B. On Modernity, Utopianism, and the University (Colonial West)
Chair: Joe Kelly, College of Charleston
Benjamin Schewel, Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT), “Lewis Mumford’s Path to the Axial Age”
Joe Kelly, College of Charleston, “Utopia and the Liberal Revolution”
Stacy Maddern, University of Connecticut, “Building Utopias on College Campuses”
- C. Slavery, Imperialism, Abolition, and Memory (Citadel North)
Chair: Peter Sands, UW-Milwaukee
Barry Stiefel, College of Charleston, “Playing Whiteface: A Dystopian Comparison Study of the Indigenous Diamond Hill and Black Melrose Plantations Through Rose-Colored Utopian Glasses”
Abdul Isiaq, Temple University Department of Africology, “No Africans Involved: Contextualizing the Western Imperialist Project From An Afrocentric Abolitionist Perspective”
Session III 5:15-6:15
- Keynote conversation (Colonial East)
Hoda Zaki, Pete Sands, Claire Curtis
As scholars of utopia our academic work is on the boundaries of some particular discipline for which utopia is potentially marginal or even a somewhat suspect concern.
As academics we all share to differing degrees the tensions around the boundaries of job status, administrative work, service commitments, pedagogical approaches.
As people in the world we negotiate the boundaries between job, community, family, politics.
We share a set of experiences with boundaries: the intellectual, disciplinary, professional, political and personal and we share the very idea that each of these realms has been bounded (or to use the lingo of the academy: siloed) in ways that often undermine each of these pursuits.
Join us for a conversation about negotiating and traversing these boundaries. Come and share your own travels and let’s continue the conversation into the reception afterwards.
Reception: Courtyard 6:15-8:30
Each attendee will receive two tickets for free drinks. Please note that the bar closes at 7:30, but the reception (with food!) will continue until 8:30.