Preliminary conference program (update)
Updated: 3 days ago
Dear all,
Below is the preliminary program we've constructed so far. This version will have running updates. We'll post another update once we have finalized the program.
We believe we were able to accommodate all the scheduling requests; however, please email us (chanedwardk@gmail.com, pventura@spelman.com) if any issues arise. It was great to see all of the volunteers for chairing panel sessions--unfortunately, there were more volunteers than panels, but we tried to match chairs to panels related to their work as much as possible. All the submissions look very thought-provoking and there were many that fit together quite nicely. We hope that many long-lasting connections can be made among everyone.
See you in Portland!
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Interconnections between Utopia and Dystopia in Times of Crisis
(Arthur Dove, “Red Sun,” 1930, Wikimedia Commons)
49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies
November 12-14, 2026, Portland, Oregon, USA
Embassy Suites Portland Downtown
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Society for
Utopian Studies
Appreciation and Dedication
We first want to take a moment to offer our respect and appreciation to the Indigenous peoples whose traditional land is the site for this conference: “The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating both permanent communities and seasonal encampments. Due to the strategic and systemic efforts to annihilate Indigenous peoples from these lands and history, there are many other tribes and Nations who traditionally lived, hunted and fished in what is now Multnomah County and Oregon that are not collectively remembered.” The Embassy Suites Portland Downtown was originally named the Multnomah Hotel. Please also refer to the following: https://www.portlandpf.org/land-acknowledgement.
This year’s conference organizers pledge to coordinate panels devoted to Indigenous connections to utopian studies from around the world for next year’s conference with the hope of increasing attention to these issues. We also recommend the following volumes: Grace L. Dillon’s landmark book, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012) and The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2024), edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.
This year’s conference is dedicated to Merritt “Mickey” Abrash (1930-2026), co-founder of the Society. A special tribute panel (Session 8.1) has been organized in his honor.
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Greetings!
Welcome to Portland and to the 2026 annual meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, with special thanks to the local host: the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society. We look forward to many thought-provoking presentations and great conversation. We also want to highlight some particular features of the conference:
Two exciting keynote talks: Alex Zamalin on Friday at 6:30 PM and Tavia Nyong’o on Saturday at 6:30 PM (information on the speakers available on the conference website)
Mentoring sessions for graduate students and early-career faculty on Friday and Saturday, 8:15 AM-9:00 AM, in the Eric Hauser Room (feel free to bring materials or just questions to discuss) and a workshop on publishing in the journal Utopian Studies (Session 6.3)
Exhibit of creative works on intentional communities and interactive workshops including a presentation of a zine based on the work of Cynthia Kaufman (Session 11.3), and a participatory performance (Session 11.4)
Thursday evening welcome reception at 6:00 PM with drinks and food and Saturday SUS business lunch meeting (both are free and open to all attendees)
Lunch and dinner “club” for conference attendees wanting to go out for lunch or dinner with others (sign-up sheets at registration table)
Abstracts for individual papers and panels will be available on the conference website.
Conference Organizers:
Sangita Gopal (Local Chair, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon)
Edward K. Chan (Program Co-Chair, Waseda University, Tokyo)
Patricia Ventura (Program Co-Chair, Spelman College)
Donald Zarate (Graduate Assistant, University of California, Riverside)
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Conference Program (preliminary Sept. 6, 2026)
Thursday, November 12
Breakfast (free for Embassy Suites guests) 7:30 AM-9:00 AM
Room: Sam Hill
Registration 10:00 AM-5:00 PM
Queen Mezzanine
Utopian Studies Editorial Board Meeting 10:30 AM-11:30 AM
Room: Eric Hauser
Steering Committee Meeting 11:30 AM-12:30 PM
Room: Sam Hill
SESSION 1 (Thursday) 1:00 PM-2:30 PM
1.1 Workshop
Playing with Patterns in Cooperative Culture - What Works Well?
Room: Marshall Joffre
Raines Cohen (Planning for Sustainable Communities)
Kavana Bressen (Effective Collective)
1.2 Technocultures of the Posthuman
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Olena Tiaglova (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena)
Maria Abizanda-Cordoba (Universidad de Zaragoza / UC Riverside)
“Dystopian Crimes, Utopian Horizons: Critical Utopias in 21st-Century U.S. Crime Fiction”
David Thomas (Tennessee Tech University)
“Dropping in with Pulsa: How a Phreaky Publication Predicted the Future”
Agnibha Banerjee (Rice University)
“‘It was a Composite Face’: Bodies Without Borders and the Posthuman Messiah in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad”
1.3 Learning with Indigenous Communities: Activism and Thought
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Toby Widdicombe (University of Alaska Anchorage)
Ashley Moser (University of Konstanz)
“Tending the Ruins: Infrastructure, Threshold, and the Utopianism of Staying”
Jeremy Swartz (University of Oregon)
“Towards Topos: Beyond Binaries of Utopia and Dystopia”
Isaiah Zamora-McGuire (University of Oregon)
“Embedding Relational Practices within the Indian Health Service”
SESSION 2 (Thursday) 2:45 PM-4:15 PM
2.1 The Arts and the Utopian Imagination
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Michelle Waters (Independent Scholar)
Michael Beltz (University of North Dakota)
“Dadaism and the Rejection of the ‘Future’”
John Barberet (Polk State College)
“From Caves to Caves: Imagining the Past and the Future”
Alex MacDonald (Independent Scholar)
“Music in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere”
Jennifer Wells (California Institute of Integral Studies)
“Vision for the 21st Century: Pluriversal and Complex Utopianism”
2.2 Understanding Utopias and Dystopias with Metamodern Theory
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Emily Bauman (New York University)
Linda Ceriello (Kennesaw State University)
“Metamodern Ironesty in Spirituality Media: Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom”
Ishita Lahiri (University of Washington)
“South Asian Feminist Dystopias”
Zebediah Kraft (University of Alaska Anchorage)
“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Metamodern Spirituality in Undead Landscapes”
2.3 The Queer Art of Survival
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: sean grattan (Independent Scholar)
sean grattan (Independent Scholar)
“I Can See a Brave Tomorrow: Team Dresch and The Queer Commons”
Kate Haffey (University of Mary Washington)
“Queer Artists, Queer Arts: The Coming Out Story as Utopian Kunstlerroman”
Kirin Wachter-Grene (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
“In Pornotopia: Delany’s ‘Dump,’ or Building Otherwise”
SESSION 3 (Thursday) 4:30 PM-6:00 PM
3.1 Envisioning Germany and Its Elsewheres
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Maxim Denis Newiak (Brandenburg University of Technology)
Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers (Library of Congress)
“From the Dream Realm to the Berghof: The Apocalyptic Prophecy and Totalitarian Reception of Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side”
Adrian Wetter (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris)
“When Liberation Turns: Gender, Transgression, and the Critique of 1968 in Johannes Schaaf's Traumstadt (1973)”
Denis Grélé (University of Memphis)
“The Tale of Two Modernities: Capitalism, Industrialization, and Modern Life in Jules Verne, Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1879)”
3.2 Anxious Americana
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Matthew Hodgetts (Case Western Reserve University)
Renee Hollopeter (Pacific Northwest College of Art)
“The Tradwife Gothic: Pastoral Fantasy and the Dialectic of Utopia”
Tina Warrick (University of Rochester)
“Liminal Rurality: Pumpkinhead, The Witch, and the Rural Gothic American Dream”
Susanne Banks (University of Glasgow)
“Reading Timothy McVeigh’s Secret Manifesto: Luddite and Trekkie Visions of Utopia & the American Extreme’s Hatred of the Present”
Kenneth M. Roemer (University of Texas at Arlington)
“A Dream of America in 1899 (Almost) Predicts the Current Administration”
3.3 Seeking Queer Freedom
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Taylor Williams (University of Oregon)
Abbie Boudreaux (University of Rochester)
“Unborn into Dystopia, Imagining Utopia: Examining the Intersection of Identity, Disability, and Power and the Utopian Potentiality of Coven in Black, Sapphic Vampire Literature & Media”
Max Fassnacht (Portland State University)
“‘A Pit Stop to Freedom’: Queer Ambiguous Utopias at Portland’s Clothing Optional Beaches
Sneha George (Pace University)
“Nostalgic Futurity, Transformative Reversions, and the Temporal Paradox of Queer Utopia”
Reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres (free and open to all attendees)
Complimentary drink ticket
6:00 PM-9:00 PM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
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Friday, November 13
Breakfast (free for Embassy Suites guests) 7:30 AM-9:00 AM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
Exhibit of Creative Works: Inclusive Green Spaces, Portland and Beyond 8:00 AM -1:15 PM
Raines Cohen (Planning for Sustainable Communities)
“A Wider View: Panoramic Views of EcoVillages & Cohousing Communities”
Michelle Waters (Independent Scholar)
“Our Dream Oasis”
Registration 8:30 AM-1:15 PM
Queen Mezzanine
(Sign up at registration table if you want to join a group for lunch or dinner)
Graduate Student and Early Career Mentoring Session 8:15 AM-9:00 AM
Room: Eric Hauser
SESSION 4 (Friday) 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
4.1 Slavery and Utopia/Dystopia in U.S. Literature
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Cherise Pollard (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)
Elizabeth Hewitt (Ohio State University, Columbus)
“The Ground of Utopia: Slavery and Political Economy in the Early United States”
Nancy Kang (University of Manitoba)
“‘Women of Affliction’: The Utopianism of Smalling in the Slave Narrative of Louisa Picquet and Kohnjehr Woman by Ana Maurine Lara”
aaron pride (Lafayette College)
“Enslaved Black Prophets of the Millennium: Apocalyptic Thought and Vision of the Kingdom of God in Slave Rebellions in Nineteenth Century America”
4.2 Contemporary Russian Dystopian Literature
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Maria Abizanda-Cordoba (Universidad de Zaragoza / UC Riverside)
Boris Lanin (Adam Mickiewicz University)
“New Trends in Russian Post-Soviet Utopia and Dystopia”
Kit McDunn (University of Oregon)
“Dystopian Bodies: Mutants in Tatyana Tolstaya’s Kys’ and Dmitri Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033”
Olena Tiaglova (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena)
“Multiscalar Space and the Search for Utopia in Eduard Verkin’s Dystopian Novel Sakhalin Island (2018)”
4.3 Too Many Evenings: Utopia Against Immediacy
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Jared Gardner (Ohio State University)
Susan Hegeman (University of Florida)
“After the Chainsaw: Bureaucracy and/as Utopia”
Nathan Stelari (University of Florida)
“‘We Were More of a Benign Tumor’: Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag and the Anxiety of the Organization”
Phillip Wegner (University of Florida)
The Imperative to Imagine Them: The Utopianism of My Dinner with Andre
SESSION 5 (Friday) 10:45 AM-12:15 PM
5.1 Workshop
Real Utopias for Real Educational Problems DAY 1 (attendance not required on both days)
Room: Marshall Joffre
Ron Haas (Texas State University)
Robert Scafe (University of Oklahoma)
5.2 Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia in Popular Culture
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: David Kalman (University of California, Berkeley)
Rebecca Hill (Kennesaw State University)
“Aspirational Utopia in Fandom Conventions”
Elizabeth Mauldin (Georgia Gwinnett College)
“Reading and Rereading Fight Club to Explore the Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia”
Patricia Ventura (Spelman College)
“Elon Musk’s Cyborg Fantasy World and Jordan Peele’s Us”
5.3 Considerations on Personhood in Academia and the Law
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Elizabeth Hewitt (Ohio State University, Columbus)
Jared Gardner (Ohio State University)
“Three Universities: Competing Utopias in American Higher Education Reform”
Ellen Rigsby (Saint Mary's College of California)
“The Utopian and Dystopian Elements of Legal Personhood in Contemporary Speculative Fiction and in Constitutional and Environmental Law”
Olivia Matsuoka (University of Oregon)
“Silver Linings: Steampunk as Utopian Technology in R.F. Kuang’s Babel”
5.4 Utopian/Dystopian Feminisms and Genders
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Jessica Conrad (University of Tennessee Southern)
Linda Rosewood (Independent Scholar)
“Psychedelic Lesbian-Feminist Pagans: Women-Centered Community Building in Linda Rosewood's A Circle Outside”
Kelsey Chen (Stanford University)
“A Yin Utopia: Le Guin, Daoist Philosophy, and a Feminist Politics of Negativity”
Maeve Daley (University of Oregon)
“Making More Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf’s Re-Divestment of More’s Utopia and Reclamation of Philosophical Models in her Feminist Social Thought”
Leyla Savloff (Elon University)
“Disobedient Desires: Poetry, Thresholds, and Feminist Abolition in Argentina”
Lunch on your own 12:15 PM-1:30 PM
(Sign up at registration table if you want to join a group)
SESSION 6 (Friday) 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
6.1 The Possibilities of Failures and Fantasies in European Literature and Culture
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Denis Grélé (University of Memphis)
Michael Poling (University of New Mexico)
“Sous les pavés, rien!: Utopia and Nihilism in Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Nada”
Justin Wyble (Chaminade University of Honolulu)
“Flipping the Valences of the Present: Utopology, Collectivity, and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, I-IV”
Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen (Duke University)
“Scandinavian Innocence: Utopia and the Nordic Model”
6.2 South Asian Lives and Futures
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Ishita Lahiri (University of Washington)
Subhayu Chatterjee (University of Oregon)
“Dystopic Present/Utopic Future: Sojan Badiyar Ghat (2024) as a Performance-Event”
Malvya Chintakindi (University of Oregon)
“Feminist Futures from the Margins: Dalit Women, Urban Transformation, and the Politics of Possibility”
Sruti Manjula Devaprakash (Shiv Nadar University Chennai)
“A Study of Doom and Hope in Narratives of Liberalising Indian Cities”
6.3 Workshop
Publisning in Utopian Studies
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Pennsylvania State University), Editor
Etta Madden (Missouri State University), Managing Editor
Stephanie Tavera (Texas A&M University, Kingsville), Associate Editor
6.4 Afrofuturisms and Black Speculative Cultures
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Jessica Maucione (Gonzaga University)
Stephanie Jones (University of Oregon)
“We Femme the Future: Afrofuturist Feminist Praxis”
Alex Zamalin (Rutgers University) and Edward K. Chan (Waseda University)
“Sun Ra: Afrofuturism, Utopia, and Black Liberation”
Cynthia Hodge-Thorne (The Ohio State University)
“Beyond the Earth: Alma Thomas's Space Paintings and Black Futurity in the Space Age”
SESSION 7 (Friday) 3:15 PM-4:45 PM
7.1 Workshop
Error as Method: Moving Between Utopias and Dystopias
Room: Marshall Joffre
Jana Čulek (University of Zagreb)
“(Re)Constructing Imaginary Worlds”
Inês Nascimento (University Institute of Lisbon)
“Teaching by (De)Fault: Error as a Pedagogical Device”
Henrique Andrade (University Institute of Lisbon)
“Reframing Failure through Art-Based Approaches”
7.2 Roundtable sponsored by Center for the Study of Women in Society
“Feminist Futures”
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Jenée Wilde (University of Oregon)
Malvya Chintakindi (University of Oregon)
Abigail Lee (University of Oregon)
Alejandra Pedraza (University of Oregon)
Sophia Sinsheimer (University of Oregon)
Makenna York (University of Oregon)
7.3 Disability Studies and Crip Critique
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Daisuke Kishii (Independent Scholar)
Stephanie Tavera (Texas A&M University, Kingsville)
“What’s the Pointe of Disability?: Following the Ballerina through Trauma/Therapy in Utopian Short Fiction”
Sukriti Joshi (University of Hyderabad)
“Dystopian Visions, Crip Utopias: Exploring Disability, Survival, and Apocalyptic Worldbuilding in Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe and C.S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore”
Stephanie Mojica (California State University, Fullerton)
“When Access Looks Like Misconduct: AI Detection, Multilingual Writing, and the Dystopia of Academic Integrity Policing”
7.4 Televisual (Im)possibilities
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Barbara Selznick (University of Arizona)
Shelley Moore (The University of Alabama in Huntsville)
“Let’s Have a Chat: Love Island, Clam Slams, and the Impossibility of Radical Imagination in Reality Television”
Jessica Maucione (Gonzaga University)
“Racial Utopia within the Class and Gender Dystopia of Nineteenth Century London: Shonda Rimes’s Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story as Commentary on Twenty-first Century Politics and Possibilities”
Barbara Selznick (University of Arizona)
“‘The Courage to Be There’: Re-Creating Family at the End of the World”
SESSION 8 (Friday) 5:00 PM-6:30 PM
8.1 Special Tribute Panel (audience invited to share remembrances)
In Memoriam Merritt "Mickey" Abrash, SUS Co-founder
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Toby Widdicombe (University of Alaska Anchorage)
Kenneth M. Roemer (University of Texas-Arlington)
“Remembering Mickey Abrash's Many Lives and His Contributions to SUS and Utopian Studies”
Lyman Tower Sargent (University of Missouri-St. Louis)
“Merrit (Mickey) Abrash’s Utopia: Mindful of Utopia”
Toby Widdicombe (University of Alaska Anchorage), “Mindful of Utopia: What Happens when an Expert Tells the Tale?”
8.2 Challenges in Pedagogy
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Jacqueline Nusz-Russell (Florida International University)
Jacqueline Nusz-Russell (Florida International University)
Lightning talk: “The Art of Possibility: Teaching the Utopian Impulse in Times of Crisis”
Rebecca Romsdahl (University of North Dakota)
“Reflecting on Transition”
Julianne Liebenguth (University of Arkansas)
“Politics, Poetry, and Place: Teaching toward Livable Futures”
Farhat Bahar (IIT Roorkee) and Sanjit Mishra (IIT Roorkee)
“Teaching Utopia in the Age of AI: Reconfiguring Reading, Authority, and Imagination in Digital Classrooms”
8.3 (Trans)feminist Spaces
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Tp Coughlin (University of Rochester)
Taylor Williams (University of Oregon)
“The Future is Soup: Climate Disaster, Queer Ecology, and Evolving Community in Trang Thanh Tran’s They Bloom at Night”
Julie Conger (Morgan State University) and Jeana DelRosso (Notre Dame of Maryland)
“Unholy Utopias: Morrison’s Convent and Groff’s Abbey”
Cherise Pollard (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)
“Lord, What We Been Through: Structural Oppression and the Problematic Utopian Impulse in Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
8.4 Creating New Worlds in Podcasts
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Leyla Savloff (Elon University)
Sasha Dalton (Independent Scholar)
“Developing a Utopia: The Art of World Building in Alternative Forms of Storytelling”
Tp Coughlin (University of Rochester)
“Trans Voice, Worldbuilding and Collaborative Dystopian Narrative in Friends at the Table”
KEYNOTE TALK #1
6:30 PM-7:45 PM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
Alex Zamalin (Rutgers University), “Afrofuturism as Political Theory”
Dinner on your own
(Sign up at registration table if you want to join a group)
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Saturday, November 14
Breakfast (free for Embassy Suites guests) 7:30 AM-9:00 AM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
Registration 8:30 AM-10:30 AM
Queen Mezzanine
(Sign up at registration table if you want to join a group for dinner)
Graduate Student and Early Career Mentoring Session 8:15 AM-8:50 AM
Room: Eric Hauser
SESSION 9 (Saturday) 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
9.1 Visual Narratives of Utopia and Dystopia in Times of Crisis
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Mew Imashuku (Tsukuba University)
Maxim Denis Newiak (Brandenburg University of Technology)
“No Escape from the Future: Serial Television between Dystopian Warning and Utopian Rehearsal”
James Hawthorne (University of Rochester)
“The Widgeting of the Impossible: Reified Dreams and Memories as Dystopian Nova”
Zebadiah Kraft (University of Alaska Anchorage)
“The Cruel Possibilities of Utopia in 28 Years Later Films”
9.2 Soldiering, Militarism, and War
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Jamie J. Zhao (City University of Hong Kong)
Paul Nauert (Eastern Oregon University)
“War Games at the End(s) of the Earth: Playing Critically at the Nexus of Militarism and Climate Crisis through a Multi-Session Participatory Group Simulation”
Anneka Usman (University of Tennessee Chattanooga)
“Hell Outsourced: From Swiss Mercenaries to More’s Zapoletes and the Modern Legacy of Disposable Soldiers––and Their Cost”
Donald Zarate (University of California, Riverside)
“Imagining the Ideal Soldier: Soldierization as Utopianism”
9.3 Queering Family and Patriarchal Rituals
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Sneha George (Pace University)
Daisuke Kishii (Independent Scholar)
“禺” [This project and practice proposes a radical intervention in the traditional wedding ceremony]
Luke Cohn (Portland State University)
“A Family of Black Sheep: Queer Family Structure in The Devils”
Jessica Conrad (University of Tennessee Southern)
“Mama Mania: Eugenics, Sacred Motherhood, and Genophobia in Herland and Mizora”
9.4 Perspectives on Healing, Care, and Disability Studies
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Stephanie Jones (University of Oregon)
Claire Corbeaux (University of Rochester)
“Utopian Forms of Care and Kinship in Octavia Butler's Critical Dystopian Parable Duology”
Stephanie Mojica (California State University, Fullerton)
“Access Culture Against the Dystopia of Compliance: Disability, Race, and Utopian Design in Higher Education”
Adam Kramer (Florida State University)
“Learning from Trans and Addict Community: Transition and Recovery in the Age of Fascism”
SESSION 10 (Saturday) 10:45 AM-12:15 PM
10.1 Workshop
Real Utopias for Real Educational Problems DAY 2 (attendance not required on both days)
Room: Marshall Joffre
Ron Haas (Texas State University)
Robert Scafe (University of Oklahoma)
10.2 Cli-fi and Ecotopia
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: David Thomas (Tennessee Tech University)
Mineo Takamura (Kwansei Gakuin University)
“Can the Future Be Constructed?: Fredric Jameson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the Crisis of Futurity”
Federico Correa Pose (Ohio University)
“Fragile Utopias: The Double Face of Precarity and the Potential of the Common in Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Área protegida”
Tina Walter (University of Salzburg)
“‘Seep Into the Planet’s Face’: Planting Utopia as Embodied Action”
10.3 Utopia and Dystopia in Video Games
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Paul Nauert (Eastern Oregon University)
Jamie J. Zhao (City University of Hong Kong)
“Interrogative Utopianism: A Queer-Feminist Critical Dystopia through Chinese Mobile Gaming”
Hyerin Shin (Waseda University)
“Pinching the Utopia: Gacha Games as Incel Utopias in Korean Gaming Culture”
10.4 (Un)intentional Communities
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Max Fassnacht (Portland State University)
Emily Bauman (New York University)
“Untethering Utopia: The Island of Strangers as Mobile Community”
Lyman Tower Sargent (University of Missouri-St. Louis)
“Utopian Responses in the United States to the Depression of 1929-1939”
Karline McLain (Bucknell University)
“Utopia and Dystopia at Gandhi’s Intentional Communities”
Filippo Barsi (Scuola Normale Superiore)
“Building the New Society Within the Shell of the Old: Industrial Democracy as Concrete Utopia in Revolutionary Ireland (1913–1923)”
Catered Lunch and SUS Business Meeting (free and open to all attendees)
12:15 PM-1:30 PM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
SESSION 11 (Saturday) 2:00 PM-3:30 PM
11.1 Listening for Utopia: Music and the Construction of a Better World
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Alex MacDonald (Independent Scholar)
Eric Whitmer (University of Michigan)
“Music Making Better: The Utopian Visions (and Dystopian Realities) of the American Orchestra”
Annie Kim (Brown University)
“Capitalist Dystopia, Afro-Asian Utopia: Impossibility in Fred Ho and Ann T. Greene’s Warrior Sisters (2000)”
Maureen Rafter (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
“We Will Never Be ‘Satisfied’: Finding Hamilton Between Dystopia and Utopia”
11.2 Reimagining Communities
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Julie Conger (Morgan State University)
Shaoni White (University of California, Davis)
“Dis-Orienting Utopia: The Search for Transcultural Universalism in Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone”
Jared Cohen (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
“Modernist Pessimism and the Utopian Exception: Doom Suspended in Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”
Keren Omry (University of Haifa)
“‘Patience with uncertainty’: Gender and Genre in Israeli SF”
11.3 Workshop
Zine Presentation: Cynthia Kaufman’s Solidarity Economics and Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Raja Gangopadhya (Independent Scholar)
Liz Liu (Independent Scholar)
Cynthia Kaufman (Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action, De Anza College)
11.4 Individual presentation and workshop
Weight: Vulnerability and Coexistence in the Participatory Performance
Room: Eric Hauser
Mew Imashuku (Tsukuba University)
SESSION 12 (Saturday) 3:45 PM-5:30 PM
12.1 Contesting Utopia: Workers’ Paradise and its Discontents
Room: Marshall Joffre
Chair: Abe Walker (University of North Carolina at Fayetteville)
Abe Walker (University of North Carolina at Fayetteville)
“Holding the Faculty to Ac(count): From Audit Culture to Participatory Taylorism”
Nathan Crompton (Simon Fraser University)
“Utopia and Autogestion: French Architecture and Radical Urbanism in the 1970s”
Abigail Susik (Willamette University)
“Óscar Domínguez: Autonomy and Autoeroticism”
Savvina Chowdhury (Evergreen State College)
“Reproductive Labor in a Participatory Socialist Society”
12.2 Fear, Phronesis, Care: Pathways for Utopian Transformation
Room: Roy Yates
Chair: Jared Rusnak (University of Irvine)
Samantha Barbosa (Independent Scholar)
“Imagining Fear as an Obstacle and Invitation to Utopian Education in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower”
Adam Goldsmith (Northwestern University)
“‘History . . . Now Make Me Good’: Utopia as Transitionary Equipment for Changing the World”
Elise Poll (Arizona State University)
“Hungry for More: Gender, Care, and Embodiment in Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
Hailey Gilles (Independent Scholar)
“Crime and Punishment in a World of Plenty: Material Needs and the Praxis of Concrete Justice”
12.3 Thinking with Le Guin
Room: Chief Poker Jim
Chair: Kelsey Chen (Stanford University)
Sasha Dalton (Independent Scholar)
“Corrupting Utopia: Examining the Violence of Colonization in ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin”
Carter Hanson (Valparaiso University)
“Teaching Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ to Historicize Our Anti-Utopian Worldview”
Andrew Johnson (Gonzaga University)
“Two Abolitionist Parables: Omelas vs. Um-Helat”
Gretchen Murphy (University of Texas at Austin)
“Reading The Left Hand of Darkness in an Era of Anti-Gender Backlash”
12.4 Techno-fascism and Rightwing Utopias
Room: Eric Hauser
Chair: Susanne Banks (University of Glasgow)
Matthew Hodgetts (Case Western Reserve University)
“Conservatopia Lost”
Mark Jendrysik (University of North Dakota)
“Let’s Live Forever! Billionaires, Tyrants and Techbros and the Quest for Immortality”
David Kalman (University of California, Berkeley)
“The Utopia of Catastrophe: Technofascism and Epochal Crisis”
Michael Larson (Keio University)
“Utopia, Temporal Dialectics, the Disappearance of the Future, and Contemporary Utopian Theory: Jack Halberstam’s ‘Unworlding’ and Right-Wing Technotopias”
Continue the conversations at the Embassy Suites’ Evening Reception in the Arcadian Garden Room (free for Embassy Suites guests) leading up to the keynote talk.
KEYNOTE TALK #2
6:30 PM-7:45 PM
Room: Queen Marie Ballroom
Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University), “Radiotopias: The musical context for afrofuturism in 1970s Detroit”
Dinner on your own
(Sign up at registration table if you want to join a group)
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