"A spirited tour through 2,500 years of utopian thinking and experiments to tease out better ways of imagining our domestic lives - from childrearing and housing to gender roles and private property - and a look at the communities putting these seemingly fanciful visions into practice today"--

Everyday utopias enact conventional activities in unusual ways. Instead of dreaming about a better world, participants seek to create it. As such, their activities provide vibrant and stimulating contexts for considering the terms of social life, of how we live together and are governed. Weaving conceptual theorizing together with social analysis, Davina Cooper examines utopian projects as seemingly diverse as a feminist bathhouse, state equality initiatives, community trading networks, and a democratic school where students and staff collaborate in governing. She draws from firsthand observations and interviews with participants to argue that utopian projects have the potential to revitalize progressive politics through the ways their innovative practices incite us to rethink mainstream concepts including property, markets, care, touch, and equality. This is no straightforward story of success, however, but instead a tale of the challenges concepts face as they move between being imagined, actualized, hoped for, and struggled over. As dreaming drives new practices and practices drive new dreams, everyday utopias reveal how hard work, feeling, ethical dilemmas, and sometimes, failure, bring concepts to life.

Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through cooptation, division, redefinition or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian spaces historically constituted through media, and analyses the conditions that made them possible. Individual essays deal with non-Western histories of technopolitics through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility, and by examining a range of media formats and genres from print, sound, and film to new media. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of media studies, culture studies, sociology, modern South Asian history, and politics.

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

In the last twenty years the concept of the quotidien, or the everyday, has been prominent in contemporary French culture and in British and American cultural studies. This book provides the first comprehensive analytical survey of the whole field of approaches to the everyday. It offers, firstly, a historical perspective, demonstrating the importance of mainstream and dissident Surrealism; the indispensable contribution, over a 20-year period (1960-80), of four major figures: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, and Georges Perec; and the recent proliferation of works that investigate everyday experience. Secondly, it establishes the framework of philosophical ideas on which discourses on the everyday depend, but which they characteristically subvert. Thirdly, it comprises searching analyses of works in a variety of genres, including fiction, the essay, poetry, theatre, film, photography, and the visual arts, consistently stressing how explorations of the everyday tend to question and combine genres in richly creative ways. By demonstrating the enduring contribution of Perec and others, and exploring the Surrealist inheritance, the book proposes a genealogy for the remarkable upsurge of interest in the everyday since the 1980s. A second main objective is to raise questions about the dimension of experience addressed by artists and thinkers when they invoke the quotidien or related concepts. Does the 'everyday' refer to an objective content defined by particular activities, or is it best thought of in terms of rhythm, repetition, festivity, ordinariness, the generic, the obvious, the given? Are there events or acts that are uniquely 'everyday', or is the quotidien a way of thinking about events and acts in the 'here and now' as opposed to the longer term? What techniques or genres are best suited to conveying the nature of everyday life? The book explores these questions in a comparative spirit, drawing new parallels between the work of numerous writers and artists, including André Breton, Raymond Queneau, Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Stanley Cavell, Annie Ernaux, Jacques Réda, and Sophie Calle.

This book engages with a traditional yet persistent question of legal theory – what is law? However, instead of attempting to define and limit law, the aim of the book is to unlimit law, to take the idea of law beyond its conventionally accepted boundaries into the material and plural domains of an interconnected human and nonhuman world. Against the backdrop of analytical jurisprudence, the book draws theoretical connections and continuities between different experiences, spheres, and modalities of law. Taking up the many forms of critical and socio-legal thought, it presents a broad challenge to legal essentialism and abstraction, as well as an important contribution to more general normative theory. Reading, crystallising, and extending themes that have emerged in legal thought over the past century, this book is the culmination of the author’s 25 years of engagement with legal theory. Its bold attempt to forge a thoroughly contemporary approach to law will be of enormous value to those with interests in legal and socio-legal theory.

In the contemporary moment, smart cities have become the dominant paradigm for urban planning and administration, which involves weaving the urban fabric with digital technologies. Recently, however, the promises of smart cities have been gradually supplanted by recognition of their inherent inequalities, and scholars are increasingly working to envision alternative smart cities. Informed by these pressing challenges, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City foregrounds discussions of how we should think of and work towards urban digital justice in the smart city. It provides a deep exploration of the sources of injustice that percolate throughout a range of sociotechnical assemblages, and it questions whether working towards more just, sustainable, liveable, and egalitarian cities requires that we look beyond the limitations of "smartness" altogether. The book grapples with how geographies impact smart city visions and roll-outs, on the one hand, and how (unjust) geographies are produced in smart pursuits, on the other. Ultimately, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City envisions alternative cities – smart or merely digital – and outlines the sorts of roles that the commons, utopia, and the law might take on in our conceptions and realizations of better cities.