In 2023, Ruth Houghton (NU-CUSP and Newcastle Law)<\/a> and Aoife O’Donoghue (QUB, Law) <\/a>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this series, we explored utopian texts that spoke to themes of the environment and climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking the lead from the sub-heading of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, <\/em>this series we read and watched a collection of different “utopias”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this series, we used Margaret Atwood’s term ‘ustopias’ to explore examples of utopias found in novels written by women. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this series, we explored the colonial roots of utopia and the influence of colonialism in utopian literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 … Continue reading Series One<\/strong> – Green Utopias<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Series Two – Ambiguous Utopias<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Series Three<\/strong> – Feminist Ustopias <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Series Four<\/strong> – “Postcolonial” Utopias<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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