Fantastic symposium at the Newcastle Law School on 8th November 2019 on utopian thinking – thanks to Ruth Houghton for organising! We heard a really rich set of papers with lots to think about for those interested in pasts and futures – and really relevant to a broadly understood sociology even though the overt frame was around international law and human rights.

Kathryn McNeilly (QUB) asked us to think counter-factually about what kinds of worlds might have emerged if utopian moments in the development of human rights law had allowed for the development of radical political daydreaming.

Nathaniel Coleman (Newcastle) reflected on how utopia might be a valuable method for the theory, pedagogy and practise of architecture – reflecting on the central function of architecture in devising and making spaces that might enable new and better ways of being.

Matthew Nicholson (Durham) explored ways of ‘re-situating utopia’ in international law discourse – which usually mobilises fixed, blueprint notions of utopia (whether it locates them in existing frameworks or the promise of a depoliticised human rights). He asked how international law might work in and with a more processual, open-ended and radical utopianism.

I had a few things to say about changing context for imagining better environmental futures and the need for a more speculative, utopian and science fictional sociology.

Sarah Lohmann (Durham) is working on feminist critical utopian fictions from the 1970s and explored how they can be thought of as literary-philosophical thought experiments. They work with a complex, dynamic notion of time and offer imagined alternative societies not as blueprints but as self-organising systems that remain relevant in changing times.

Ruth Houghton (Newcastle) and Aoife O’Donoghue (Durham) are reading feminist utopias and dystopias against global constitutionalist manifestoes in relation to visions of more inclusive and solidaristic visions of international law. How might these texts help us learn how to approach governance that is not predicated on patriarchy?