Chaired by Trym Rødvik
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa: Pollution and Climate Breakdown: A personal journey in time, space and struggle
Bio: I am a political ecologist with a background in anthropology and human geography. My overall research objective is to provide a better understanding of how collective action drives socioenvironmental transformations towards sustainability and justice. I hold a PhD in human geography from Lund University and currently I am about to start a postdoctoral position the Centre for Applied Ecological Knoweldge (CApE) of Copenhagen University. I am a member of several collectives of independent research and write often on activist media and independent journalism platforms.
Gregers Andersen: Green Visions: Fictional and Commercial Fantasies of Sustainable Futures
Not a single day seems to go by without a new commercial telling us what the future will look like. From AUDI’s high tech fantasy “The Next Sphere of Future Premium Mobility” to WWF’s vision of future biodiversity “Future Visions of our Planet” we are constantly bombarded by companies and NGOs eager not only to sell us their products, but also their version of the future. And if it is not private companies or NGOs guided by expensive PR firms, who seek to include us in their version of the future, it is the usual guests of televised news programs: politicians, journalists, and experts or it is tv-series, film, and literary fiction. In this paper, I will therefore look closer at some of the many visions of green futures that are present in contemporary popular culture. More concretely, I will compare visions produced by the companies Google, Kalmar, and AUDI with the visions of future sustainability in the film 2067 (directed by Seth Larney) and in Ida Auken’s short text “Welcome to 2030: I Owe Nothing, Have No Privacy, And Life Has Never Been Better”. This will enable me to demonstrate how the imagination of future sustainability tends to fuse with extremely technooptimistic fantasies despite the considerable ecological footprint of computers and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Bio: Dr. Gregers Andersen is assistant professor in environmental humanities at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University. He is the author of the monograph Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis. A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020) and has published articles in several journals (e.g., ISLE, Symplok, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Deleuze Studies) on how literature, film, and philosophy can shed light upon human and non-human conditions in the Anthropocene.
Heather McKnight: From the Micro-Utopian to the Nano-Utopian – Chaos and Hope in Activist Self-Organisation
This paper presents the idea of a nano-utopian moment as a mode of prefigurative analysis for spontaneously arising acts of resistance. First, it introduces Ernst Bloch's concept of utopia as a disruptive process, one that is forward-facing and aims to create a better world . This theory contains within it the normative assumption that a better world is possible given the right conditions, but that this must also be an unclosed system of ongoing critique . It then looks at some of the existing theories on modes of process-based activist utopias, exploring how these arguments are productive in developing the field of activist utopian studies as micro-utopias. These micro-utopias mainly describe events and projects that are small, planned resistances and social experiments with their own pluralistic legal schematia. However, there is scope to examine further descriptions of brief and unexpected utopian moments that may happen within, as a result of, or that are generative of the order and planning that lead to these micro-utopias.
Building on this, the new nano-utopian category aims to describe unplanned or spontaneous activist moments, viewing them as accelerated processes of self-organisation that appear to arise out of chaotic situations or breakdown. It draws on the work of Prigogine and Stengers. They note how under certain circumstances "entropy itself becomes the progenitor of order" . Likewise, the nanoutopian moment while disrupting one system has within it the possibility (not a certainty) of creating a “higher level” of order, i.e. one that reaches towards a new horizon of hope for a fairer ordering of the world for the participants. Finally, this paper looks at an example of nano-utopian activism, the initiation of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, where student protestors were holding up umbrellas to protect themselves from teargas went viral on social media, triggering massive spontaneous self-organisation.
Bio: Dr Heather McKnight completed her PhD in Law Studies at the University of Sussex Law Department, studying resistance to the marketisation of higher education through the lens of a reimagining of academic freedom. She is a critical utopian scholar and activist with research interests in unions, protest, education, feminism, gender, aesthetics, utopian analysis of science fiction television, and speculative fiction. She has been involved preserving the archives of the National Union of Students (UK) and has been involved in relocating them to the Modern Records Centre in Warwick where they will be available as a public interest archive. She has recently completed a research project into the precarious work in Higher Education across Europe with the European Society of Social Anthropologists.