About the Reading Group

In 2023, Ruth Houghton (NU-CUSP and Newcastle Law) and Aoife O’Donoghue (QUB, Law) established the Utopias Reading Group. The initial aims were to bring together people from across different disciplines who had an interest in reading and talking about different utopias and to disrupt the canon of utopian literature that gets recited within legal scholarship.

Now in its 4th series, the Utopias Reading Group has produced a Reading List of fascinating utopias. This includes utopian-thinking found in Sci-Fi TV, novels, and auto-biography.

The Reading Group takes place online. At the beginning of each session, someone will introduce the text that we have been reading. This could be an introduction to the themes that interested them or a discussion of the context, the author, or publishing history. We then open up to questions and free-following discussion.

For more information about the Utopias Reading Group and/or to join the mailing list, please email Ruth Houghton at ruth.houghton[@]newcastle.ac.uk

Series One – Green Utopias

In this series, we explored utopian texts that spoke to themes of the environment and climate change.

• Octavia E Butler’s The Parable of the Sower was introduced by Lisa Garforth and Miranda Iossifidis
• Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir was introduced by Sandrine Ndahiro
• Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was introduced by Mathias Thaler

Series Two – Ambiguous Utopias

Taking the lead from the sub-heading of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, this series we read and watched a collection of different “utopias”.

• Three Episodes of Star Trek: New Generation were introduced by Oscar Horton Chandler
• Ge Fe’s Peach Blossom Paradise was introduced by Daniel Hutton Ferris
• Lois Lowry’s The Giver was introduced by Louisa Klatt and Alice Diver

Series Three – Feminist Ustopias

In this series, we used Margaret Atwood’s term ‘ustopias’ to explore examples of utopias found in novels written by women.

• Yoko Ogewa’s The Memory Police was introduced by Matthew Leggatt
• Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless was introduced by Arianna Preite
• Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Padmarag was introduced by Barnita Bagchi, who translated the work

Series Four – “Postcolonial” Utopias

In this series, we explored the colonial roots of utopia and the influence of colonialism in utopian literature.

• Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence was introduced to us by Gautam Bhatia, the author
• Flora Nwapa’s Efuru was introduced by Olaoluwa Oni
• Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia was introduced by Charlie Toogood