2026 Annual Conference

Conference Theme

A common assertion in utopian studies and beyond recognizes the dialectics of utopia and dystopia. As Ursula K. Le Guin put it (expressing a widely held sentiment), if “[e]very eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia”*: a dream of how things could be, combined with the realities of how things could be worse (or even how they are). Scholarship on the critical utopia and critical dystopia also highlights how the two forms are embedded within each other.

Yet, it is perhaps in times of crisis—when the catastrophes of war, genocide, authoritarianism, continuing and growing economic disparities, blatant discriminations of all varieties, and ecological collapse cannot be ignored—that we need to place emphasis on how to think through the relationship between utopia and dystopia. In this sense, utopia emerges not as an actually existing place to which we can escape but a horizon toward which we can…