The Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative at Bard College Berlin, the Gagarin Center at Bard College, and Center for Comparative Research on Democracy of Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin are delighted to announce a call for papers for the international conference “Utopian Imagination and Dystopian Practices: Future in the Past / Past in the Future” that will be held at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany), on the June 6-7, 2025.

The era of polycrisis – regardless of what underlies it (environmental threats, the failure in the global security system, world growth of inequality, the undermining of civil society, coming both from authoritarian regimes and from the democratic politics of populism) – requires not only a reaction, taking into account the current challenges of the present time. It needs an anticipatory, projective thinking capable of responding to current problems based on inspiring examples of the past and visionary breakthroughs into the future. Civic activism and educational practices need these symbolic resources as much as contemporary art, political theory, and economic modelling. Perhaps it is the u(dys)topian perspective that will be able to bridge the gap between theory and practice, activism and academia, scientific rationality and poetic imagination, anthropocentrism and planetary habitability.

The search for the ideal society of Plato’s Republic and the Medieval messianic descriptions of paradise on Earth took on new forms during the Renaissance, when in the early 16th century Thomas More coined the neologism utopia – a place that does not exist, or a better place. For a long period, the phrase of Oscar Wilde that “Progress is the realisation of utopias” inspired modernity. However, enthusiasm gave way to disappointment as Svetlana Boym put it “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia”. The attempt to realize utopias is inherently hopeless. The literary genre is clearly losing to dystopias. As early as the 1980s, Herbert Marcuse spoke of the end of utopia, and Jürgen Habermas referred to the exhaustion of utopian energies, seeing the decline of the welfare state and the ideal of a laboring society of free and equal producers. 

Nevertheless, the interest in searching for ideal forms of collective life, both for local communities and humanity as a whole, has not diminished. Nor has the desire to explode the present, harmonize it, and make it more just, happy, free, prosper and in harmony with nature and future generations. 

 The conference organizers propose the following topics for discussion, which, however, do not limit the range of possible subjects:

•       Literary and philosophical utopias of the past for transforming the future. Is their potential exhausted, and do they need revision?
•       Socio-economic models as utopias and dystopias: socialism, the welfare state, and liberal capitalism. What’s next?
•       Avant-garde projects for transforming the present: the practice of small actions, the mission of art, and imagination.
•       Utopia, dystopia, heterotopia, retrotopia. What is the temporality and topology of the future?
•       What is the ideal of education for the future? Can elitist principles be applied to mass education? Who is more important for shaping the future – liberal arts or management and IT?

 The working language of the conference is English.

 All submissions should include the following:

•       Title of the presentation.
•       Name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s).
•       A brief bio (up to 150 words)
•       Extended abstract (up to 500 words in English)

Key dates:

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 20, 2025

Notification of Acceptance: March 1, 2025.

 Please send your proposals and queries to: gagarincenter@smolny.org.