30th September – 2nd October 2022 | University of Perugia’s 4th Political Imagination Laboratory
What visions animate contemporary activism? How to uncover those utopian aspirations, strategic and/or ideological horizons that too often pass implicitly, silently or invisibly? Our “Political Imagination Laboratory” aims to interrogate the shifting political imagination of contemporary social movements and experimental forms of activism.
The fourth Political Imagination Laboratory core theme will be “Utopias of Sustainability – The Sustainability of Utopias”. As utopias of a better world appear increasingly as ephemeral, precarious and fragile, concepts related to sustainability, the environment and rurality seem at the forefront of contemporary impulses for social change. Examples include experiments with self-production, new forms of horizontal cooperation, new understandings of rural-urban and nature-culture relations, as well as activism against mega-projects around the world.
While social scientists around the world have appreciated these forms of activism as prefigurative for broader social change, others underline how similar utopian impulses can easily be appropriated by neoliberal logics, e.g., propagated by consulting as management goal and cited by companies as advertising slogan. In particular, some voices interrogate the degree to which sustainability fits into an ethos of post-material renunciation. We ask: Which more or less visible utopian impulses haunt contemporary forms of activism? How are, for example, concepts like sustainability, rurality and nature employed by different actors? To which ideologies and/or utopias are these connected? In which context is and is not sustainability, rurality or ecology invoked? How can discourses and practices of sustainability, rurality, ecology and similar concepts be made visible by ethnographers?
Political Imagination Laboratories
Inspired by both visual and ethnographic fieldwork about activism, our “Political Imagination Laboratories” aim to explore and interrogate the shifting political imagination of contemporary social movements. All Political Imagination Laboratories have been taken place at University of Perugia, Italy. Each “Lab” brought together anthropologists, filmmakers and activists paper in a small, collegial gathering to a mix of film screenings, roundtable discussions and work-in-progress expositions. These have been organised by the team of the “Peasant Activism Project” , in cooperation with the network “Anthropology and Social Movements” of the European Association of Social Movements (EASA).
