Blog

The attached paper focuses on Octavia Butler’s parable series, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). This work was a final assignment for a class we took in our first year of our Research Master in Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University (in the Netherlands). The masterclass was called “Speculative and Utopian […]

As a scholar who has published widely on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopian fictions Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag, not just  through the Penguin Classics part-translation and edition of the two works I published, but also in articles in Paedagogica Historica, Women’s History Review, and Asiatic, I was delighted to find Nottingham University graduate student Ibtisam Ahmed […]

Aster Hoving (University of Amsterdam) and Solange de Manche (ENS Paris), members of the UU Humanities Honours Research Project and collective The New Utopians, are creating an installation that will include a travelling exhibition by the student curator group Strijd ∞ and a video created by the New Utopians, “Students and their university,”which Aster and […]

On Saturday March 31st, De Appel and Netwerk Aalst jointly presented SCI FI SESSIONS, a programme of presentations and brainstorm sessions at De Appel that aims to collectively think through alternative institutional futures in the face of a post-collapse society. The event was programmed in the context of Tamas Kaszas’ current solo exhibition presented both […]

As a member of the Mensenrechtencoalitie Utrecht, the Human Rights Coalition loosely supported by Utrecht municipality, I have been to and been inspired by  two Human Rights Cafes/ Mensenrechtencafes organized by this coalition. I research the utopias and promises of human rights, supervise research on rights and social dreaming as enunciated in art and literature, […]

Call for Papers: Cosmopolitan Endeavours (Abstracts due 20 December 2017) This special issue invites articles on works by women writers of the long eighteenth century that reflect cosmopolitan values, strategies, and futures. In the long eighteenth century, the cosmopolitan ethos is manifold: it informs historiographic and philosophical articulations of an “enlightened moral love of mankind”, […]

Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation Workshop on 21 and 22 February 2018, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University Supported by Comparative Literature Research Group, ICON (Institute for Cultural Inquiry), Utrecht University Utopia articulates dreams of a better life and anticipations of the future; as social dreaming, utopia combines communal and imaginative experimentation. Even if the […]

The Evolution of Subjectivities towards Postmodernism. A Review of the Posthuman Subject in Dick’s Speculative Science Fiction Novels Paula Ramos Mollá Undergraduate research intern with Dr Barnita Bagchi at ICON, UU, June-July 2017 Philip K. Dick’s speculative science fiction works have been studied by multiple scholars (Jameson, 2005; Csicsery-Ronay Jr, 1992; Braudillard, 1991) as a […]