Ruth Houghton has published an arts review reflecting on the potential of utopian constitutionalism using the creative work ‘The Words that Bind Us’.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17521483.2026.2682727
NUCUSP members – Lisa Garforth and Ruth Houghton – have been part of the AHRC network on Utopia and Failure that ran from 2023-2026 and included a workshop in Newcastle in 2024. The Special Issue from this network has just been published in the European Journal Social Theory.
Special Issue in the European Journal of Social Theory
Garforth, Lisa. “Climate and Failure: For a Weak Utopianism.” European Journal of Social Theory, ahead of print, November 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310251392829.
Thaler, Mathias, Davina Cooper, and Ruth Houghton. “Introduction: Utopia and Failure: A Complex Relationship.” European Journal of Social Theory, ahead of print, June 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310261452967.
NUCUSP members will be taking part in a roundtable at next week’s conference on Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
The Roundtable on Gender and Genre Beyond Literary Studies, will be chaired by Stacy Gillis, and will feature Aislinn Fanning (Newcastle), Lisa Garforth (Newcastle) & Nikki Godden-Rasul (Newcastle)
Dates: June 11-12th 2026
Location: Percy Building, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU
Contact: sciencefictionfantasyncl@gmail.com
Organisers: Abi Hockaday & Aparna Sivsankar
Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) continue to offer new ways of considering the relationships between gender and genre. This conference is interested in how women – writers, characters, fans – use, negotiate, and operate SFF.
The programme is available here.
The Gender Research Group’s Spring Conference is taking place on Friday, April 24th, 12-3pm in HDB1.09.
NUCUSP members Abi Hockaday and Miranda Iossifidis are presenting their work.
Abi Hockaday (English Literature, Language & Linguistics), “Reading the Technodomestic in Science Fiction” – I consider the relation between gender, the domestic, and technology, through a reading of Femizine, the first British science fiction fanzine written for women, by women, in the 1950s. It is the humour and playfulness that mark what I term the ‘technodomestic’ in the fanzine’s stories which helped create a community of women fans exploring cultural anxieties about women’s place in the home – and in fandom.
Miranda Iossifidis (Geography, Politics & Sociology), “Resisting Population Control at Home and Internationally: Reproductive Justice and Campaigns against LARCs in the 1970s and 1980s” – I explore the solidarities, networks and tensions in feminist conversations and encounters constellated around resistance to population control, in activism against long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) in the 1970s and 1980s, considering how activists centred racism, classism, and ableism experienced by women, and how they connected coercive practices, and populationist ideas and interventions in the United Kingdom to global population control policies. I undertake a situated analysis of the activisms, drawing on archival material to show how they are shaped by distinct histories of colonialism, racism, and geographies.
In her latest article in Global Constitutionalism, Ruth Houghton explores the relationship between theories of utopia and approaches to constitutional change in theories of constitutional law.
The abstract of the paper reads: There is something utopian about constituent power, whether this is the unrealisable idea of “the people” or the world-building nature of constitutional change. However, in contemporary constitutional scholarship “utopia” is more often used as a pejorative critique of reform projects that are seen as idealistic ambitious calls for constitutional change, which might fail for being “too utopian”, “too idealistic”, “too unrealistic”. In an attempt to move beyond this critique, this article draws on alternative approaches to utopianism to uncover the temporal assumptions underpinning contemporary approaches to constituent power and highlights the different approaches that can be exposed if theories of utopian-thinking are foregrounded. Both utopia and constituent power are closely aligned with visions of alternative futures, and constitutional scholars agree that there is an intersection between utopian thinking and the subjectivities, temporalities and operationalisation of constituent power. Moving away from utilising utopia as a pejorative label and engaging instead with what it can expose about temporalities, offers alternative approaches to the study of constituent power.
NUCUSP Member, Ruth Houghton took part in a discussion on ‘Utopia as a Method’ for the Talking about Methods (Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies) podcast.
In the episode, Professor Linda Mulcahy talks to Aislinn Fanning, Cristy Clark, Zoe Tongue and Ruth Houghton about utopia as a method. The discussion includes reflections on what utopia as a method is and how it can be used in research projects. The episode also covers the method’s limits and some of its downsides.
NUCUSP member, Dr Lisa Garforth will be speaking at an event in King’s College London in February on ‘New Directions in Utopian Studies’. Lisa’s paper is entitled, ‘Utopia as a social thing: on dreaming, doing, defining and describing’
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-directions-in-utopian-studies-tickets-1979739755903
This event is part of the AHRC network on Utopia and Failure.
Ruth Houghton appears alongside Aoife O’Donoghue and Matt Leggatt in an episode of Utopian and Dystopian Fictions.
Oscar Horton Chandler acted as a Rapporteur for the AHRC Utopia and Failure Network workshop in Newcastle in September 2024.
In a blog post on the AHRC Utopia and Failure network blog, Oscar provided some reflections. You can read the blog post: Reflections on our second workshop in Newcastle by Oscar Horton Chandler (I) | School of Social and Political Science
On 11th June 2025, Rebecca Coleman led a creative methods workshop. Rebecca is Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at Bristol University. She led academics and researchers in a creative exercise of building utopias as part of a teach-out at Newcastle University. Against the backdrop of a Higher Education sector that is in crisis, with UCU strikes at Newcastle, people gathered in the local pub to create a space where it might be possible to engage in alternative utopian worldbuilding.
You can read about the workshop on the AHRC Utopia and Failure network blog: Practical utopias: A creative methods workshop | School of Social and Political Science
