Culture and Ideas
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Does Time Legitimate Territorial Claims? Reflections on the Plights of the Palestinian and Indigenous American Peoples
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The passage of time may serve to bury the crime, but it does not permit an international ‘statute of limitations’ in the case of either the Palestinians or Indigenous Americans.
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Language in the Realm of Techno-Utopianism
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In The Future of Language: How Technology, Politics and Utopianism are Transforming the Way we Communicate, linguist Phillip Seargeant attempts to unravel the intricacies of what lies ahead in human communication.
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A Reflection on the Confucian Utopian Vision of Society
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According to Confucius, humans had already achieved a utopia in the ancient Chinese world, and he called for a revival of the angelic human nature to go back to the ‘Golden Age’ of humankind.
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“What’s missing?”
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Conflating both strands in the term “utopia”, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions of a Climate-Changed World argues that this yearning for an alternative world operates as a valuable foil to console, critique or even change the status quo.
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The Utopia of Democratic Socialism: An Alternative to Capitalism
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Without a positive vision of utopia, capitalism seems insurmountable, and the Left will remain unable to present a coherent counterpoint to the current market system. In fact, it might be said that the lived reality of oppression is what necessitates utopian theory: to offer respite from the otherwise seemingly inescapable present.
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Against ‘Postliberalism’
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In contrast with the postliberal mind and its Romantic obsession with self-deceptive ideas about the ‘recovery’ of past ages, liberalism must ask itself such complicated questions. It requires empathy, solidarity, thought, and action, independent from the great power structures of the modern world.
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Resistance in the Black Box Society
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The role that algorithms have increasingly taken on as intermediaries between humankind and the world not only highlights their transformative potential, but also brings to the forefront the social, political and ethical implications of these systems.
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Lessons for Utopians from Anthropologists
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With its emphasis on the importance of the residents’ collective action in the creation of their community, The Good Enough Life provides a necessary corrective for utopian theorising that consistently ignores the foundational role of agency within a given utopia.
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Towards Humane Utopias
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Protopian thinking represents a careful and reasoned approach to changing the world: it focuses on tomorrow and looks into the far future without prescribing what the future is.
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Climate COPs and the Art of ‘Muddling Through’ the Ecological Crisis
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While an incremental approach to global climate governance is surely frustrating and limited, it is not an absurd and blind ‘everything-is-fine’ way of dealing with the current ecological crisis.