International Conference

(Im)possible Worlds:
Future and Utopia in Literature, Cinema, and Art

Organized by: HISTOPIA Project (Historia del futuro); and Red Trasatla?ntica
de Estudio de las Utopi?as (Transatlantic Utopian Studies Network)

Collaborators: Madrid Capital: la utopia liberal (IULCE-UAM) Project; Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Departamento de Historia Contemporanea.

Nowadays, contemporary utopias are not usually set in imaginary places, but use the future as a territory where possible worlds are imagined. By showing alternative lifestyles, these future worlds have allowed human creativity to still challenge the established order even after our whole planet is now well-known to Geography. Artists, writers and filmmakers have shown over the last centuries that it remains possible to explore possible and impossible worlds in order to expand our freedom of thought and of questioning the existing order.

Under the title (Im)Possible Worlds: Future and Utopia in Literature, Film and the Arts, this conference will provide an occasion to debate the shape of things to come in these different fields of creation. We believe that utopian and dystopian thinking is very much alive in the arts, film and literary fiction. It has evolved over time, but it has always been an incentive for us not to uncritically accept what is already known. For example, TV series and video games are new media through which the younger generations from the second half of the twentieth century and today have become familiar with the future. There are certainly positive elements in this capacity to look forward in an age rather focusing on memory and the past, despite its lack of historical awareness. Historical revisionism, prevalent nowadays, operates with stereotyped fragments from the past, whereas their commercial use aims to place us at the end of history. Against this ideologically retrospective background, we propose a prospective turn reclaiming the future as a symbolic venue for collective emancipation and as a territory where the new and the unexpected prevail.

This conference's goal is to provide a forum for further analysis of all cultural products dealing with the idea of the future and utopia over the past two centuries, up to now, as well as to reflect on the reception and the impact of those products on the creation of future worlds. We do so in a multidisciplinary way, by inviting interested scholars in art, history, philosophy, philology, cultural and literary studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, film studies and other fields to discuss the future as a rich, as well as elusive, topic. The different views on the works and their context will allow us to ask ourselves how we give meaning to the future and how we can help to turn it into a time of freedom, hope and creative imagination.

ORGANISATION
The conference will take place on October the 25th, 26th and 27th (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) 2017 at Centro Cultural La Corrala (C/ Carlos Arniches, 3 and 5, 28005 — Madrid).

HOW TO SUBMIT PROPOSALS
If you are interested in attending this conference as a speaker, you should send your name and the title and abstract (250-500 words) of your paper by June the 1st 2017 to redutopiasgmail.com. You should also mention your academic affiliation or your organisation, movement or community. The languages in this conference will be Spanish and English.
A scientific committee will select the papers according to their interest and quality, taking into account the time and space available for the conference sessions.