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What would radically improve the quality of your life? The quality of your family’s life? The quality of your friends’ lives? And their family and friends’ lives? 

Radical wealth redistribution? Different housing? A stronger community? Open borders? A better justice or health or education or care system? More green and accessible spaces? Cleaner air or water? More time? More rights? Lower temperatures? Less work? Or something altogether different? 

Take a beat, and really think about it. Flesh out your vision. 

What does it feel like to allow yourself to imagine lives otherwise? To let go of an epistemic commitment to realism, and your well-earned cynicism, and dream of a better future? To treat your deep-seated desires, your unmet needs, perhaps even your unspoken suffering, as valuable forms of knowledge? Does it feel scary? Playful? Soothing? Exciting? Warm and lovely?  

Can you lean into that feeling? Viewing it not as incidental to the knowledge you are producing, but deeply implicated in it: as a driving force, a space of possibility, a position from which you can see the limits of current methodological traditions and explore things unexplored? Can you let go of the belief that legitimate knowledge production follows dispassionate and rational reasoning, and embrace your capacity for grace? 

Now. Reflect on your vision. Is your utopic ideal, ideal for everyone? Everywhere? Who gets left behind? Whose interests are ignored? Whose needs are unmet? Whose labour is extracted, exploited? What hegemonic assumptions remain unchallenged? Which institutions and structures and logics of stratification are allowed to persist? How has your positionality in and experience of prevailing social reality shaped your vision of a better future? 

Don’t beat yourself up if things went awry. Failure is expected, here. Embedded embodiment and its consequences are an ontological inevitability. Critique is care (Roy 2022). But, can you try again? Fail better? 

Next, what stands in the way of your vision? States? Powerful global interests? Economic systems? The law? The human condition? Time? Resources? All of the above? What, if any, seismic structural change, or coming together, or shift in cultural norms would provide the necessary foundations for your utopic ideal? 

Finally: what would happen if you took radical action to make your utopic ideal real? Or pretended as if the conditions of possibility you needed were already in place and moved forward in trying to implement it? Or presented your proposal as legitimate in political or intellectual spaces that might say otherwise? And what does that tell us about contemporary realities and your utopic impulses? 

This, all of this, is ‘utopia as method’: a particular reading of, and approach to, hopeful and radical speculation as a form of knowledge production and critique. 

The phrase ‘utopia as method’ is most readily associated with the work of critical social theorist Ruth Levitas (2013). Her book by the same name encourages the radical, systemically holistic and imaginary reconstitution of society. With that said, profoundly hopeful speculation has been, and continues to be a fundamental facet of numerous critical projects, including Black radicalism (Kelley 2003; Zamalin 2019), feminism (Bammer 1991; Cowan, Kennedy, and Munro 2019), queer theory (Muñoz et al. 2019; Sedgwick and Frank 2003) and prefigurative activism (Cooper 2013; Thorpe 2023). The scholarship of Davina Cooper (2013, 2017, 2020), which explores the radical and often playful enactment of desired tomorrows in the context of today, deserves particular attention. 

Whilst these traditions and bodies of literature are diverse, they share a similar set of broad-brush commitments and ideas with respect to utopianism: 

• What we deeply hope for and desire and/or how we act on these feelings is epistemically and politically valuable. It represents knowledge we should engage with thoroughly and critically (Cooper 2013; Levitas 2013). 

• Emotion should be considered central, rather than incidental, to our knowledge production efforts. Our emotions are foundational to what and how we desire, and can themselves be educated by the process of articulating and critical engaging with those desires (Levitas 2013; Nadir 2010; Sedgwick and Frank 2003). 

• Our visions of tomorrow are products of today, and this is normatively ambivalent. Contemporary social realities and imaginaries provide resources to work with: available formulations of equality, justice, liberation and love are potentially valuable to utopic imagining (Bloch 1995; Zamalin 2019). But our inevitable embeddedness can also blind us to our complicity in the hegemonic, or at least limit our understandings of the possible (Bammer 1991; Kelley 2003; Levitas 2013; Zamalin 2019). 

• Imagined utopias should, therefore, always be considered provisional and treated as such. Envisaging a better tomorrow is an iterative, ongoing, preferably collective process which must be engaged with critically. In other words, failure is a feature not a bug (Bammer 1991; Cooper 2016; Levitas 2013). 

• With that said, our provisional utopias provide fruitful and innovative vantages point from which to understand contemporary social reality. Insofar as imagining or enacting desired futures can alienate us from the now, these practices allow us to understand the now differently (Cooper 2013, 2020; Levitas 2013). Similarly working through desired possibilities, interrogating them, and questioning them, particularly in relation to our current conditions, can generate numerous intellectual and political insights (Cooper 2023). 

• When mobilising utopia as a method, we need not confine our analytical efforts to the dispassionate description of an imagined tomorrow. Conceptualising utopia can be a creative, embodied, practice. Fictionalisations and fabulations, performances and play, guerrilla activism and radical acts of refusal, should all be considered instruments in this methodological toolkit (Bammer 1991; Cooper 2013, 2016, 2020; Haraway 2008; Kelley 2003; Thorpe 2023; Zamalin 2019). 

Reference List

Bammer, Angelika. 1991. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s. Routledge.

Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope, Volume 1. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Cooper, Davina. 2013. Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. https://read-dukeupress-edu.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/books/book/307/Everyday… (June 24, 2022).

———. 2016. “Enacting Counter-States through Play.” Contemporary Political Theory 15(4): 453–61.

———. 2017. “Prefiguring the State.” Antipode 49(2): 335–56.

———. 2020. “Towards an Adventurous Institutional Politics: The Prefigurative ‘as If’ and the Reposing of What’s Real.” The Sociological Review 68(5): 893–916.

———. 2023. “Crafting Prefigurative Law in Turbulent Times: Decertification, DIY Law Reform, and the Dilemmas of Feminist Prototyping.” Feminist Legal Studies 31(1): 17–42.

Cowan, Sharon, Chloë Kennedy, and Vanessa E Munro, eds. 2019. Scottish Feminist Judgments: (Re)Creating Law from the Outside In. Hart Publishing. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/scottish-feminist-judgments-… (May 13, 2022).

Haraway, Donna. 2008. “Companion Species, Misrecognition, and Queer Worlding.” In Queering the Non/Human, eds. Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT: Routledge.

Kelley, Robin D. G. 2003. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. New edition. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.

Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. 2013th edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Muñoz, José Esteban, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity: 50. 2nd edition. New York: NYU Press.

Nadir, Christine. 2010. “Utopian Studies, Environmental Literature, and the Legacy of an Idea: Educating Desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. Le Guin.” Utopian Studies 21(1): 24–56.

Roy, Srila. 2022. Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India. Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. 2003. Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Thorpe, Amelia. 2023. “Prefigurative Infrastructure: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47(2): 183–99.

Zamalin, Alex. 2019. Black Utopia Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. Columbia University Press.

By Dr Rebecca Hewer

Chancellor's Fellow

Sociology

School of Social and Political Science