Work

Climate and failure: For a weak utopianism

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Attempts to imagine a better future from within the climate emergency must work in and through failure: failing eco-social systems, failed narratives, failures of political will, failures to change consumerist lifestyles. Utopia is intimately related to failure. It is a response to something wrong or missing. As a mode of critique and creation it is definitionally impossible to realise. But the climate crisis brings distinctive dimensions, disrupting linear temporalities, resisting solutions and posing existential dilemmas. This paper works through theoretical ideas linking utopia with failure in contemporary utopian and queer theorising, adapting them to the climate context and articulating a weak utopianism in response to theorists calling for a hard or strong utopia in times of crisis. It argues that climate crisis is better understood as a world than as a problem, and explores what kinds of implicated, everyday and entangled utopian desires might enable us to navigate the Anthropocene.

Source: European Journal of Social Theory

DOI: 10.1177/13684310251392829

Author: Lisa Garforth

Institution: Newcastle University

Language: English

Topic: Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Subfield: Philosophy

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Climate action, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650