Five hundred years ago, Thomas More conjured up a fictitious island he called Utopia.
We now use this name to describe a whole range of idealistic political and social experiments.
However, what is often overlooked is that Utopia was not meant to be a fixed thing or place (it literally translates as "no-place") but an active practice of political and social imagination; a creative prompt ingeniously built into the book itself.
So how might we use utopias in these turbulent times when we need to radically re-imagine and re-create so many facets of the world?
In this talk we will uncover the mechanics of Thomas More's Utopia – not as an idle academic exercise but as the jumping-off point for an applied methodology of utopian imagination.
The talk is hosted by professor Stephen Duncombe who is the creator of the Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.
Curated by Roskilde University