Utop\Intent · Utopian Intentions: Critical Theory, Intentional Communities, and a Politics of Limits

Utopian Intentions: Critical Theory, Intentional Communities, and a Politics of Limits

This project explores the relationship between grassroots, land-based community projects and social activism across several intentional communities in North America and Europe. The tendency in social movements scholarship has been to ignore intentional communities as sites of social activism, seeing them instead as small, apolitical/insignificant, and largely escapist compared to conventional social movements. Similarly, in critical and social theory scholarship, the tendency has been to ignore intentional communities as idealist and naïve. At the same time, in communal studies where intentional communities are often studied and valued as a phenomenon, their relationship to social activism has not been a topic of research. This project seeks to bridge this gap, explicitly exploring the relationship between intentional communities and larger social activism. It begins with the premise that social change in our contemporary globalized and digital world cannot be reduced to the traditional actors of earlier decades. Instead it looks at how land-based communal projects are involved in and effect societal transformation. The scientific consensus is nearly unanimous that contemporary Western society and its globalized modes of production and exploitation urgently need to be transformed if we are to lessen significant ecological, economic, and social crisis. Averting these crises is no longer possible. Swaths of the planet now burn during the summer months clogging even the metropoles with smoke, the sixth mass extinction visible in the fossil record rages unabated with ecocidal fever, global weather patterns that have held stable for all of civilizational history and beyond now fluctuate rapidly and their collapses are now expected, disinformation campaigns course the globe fracturing collective action, and nationalist rhetoric grips the old liberal democracies of the Global North enticing them to see the problem as always elsewhere. This project is important because it ethnographically explores alternative visions and practices of social transformation that are already active in the Global North. Understanding how social transformation occurs--especially when traditional actors of social change have stalled or do not work as they once did--is important for society if we are to explicitly address some of the most pressing crises of our time. Furthermore, bringing attention to these alternative projects as legitimate "prefigurative political projects" as well as critically thinking about how they fail in certain aspects is important to thaw contemporary society's political malaise and sense that there is no alternative. The overall objectives of the project include: To understand how social transformation happens. To understand how and the extent to which grassroots, land-based communal projects engage and contribute to social activism and transformation. To bridge the scholarly gap between Critical Theory, Communal Studies, and Utopian Studies. To develop ethnographic research skills for the study of prefigurative political projects, intentional communities, land-based communal projects and their engagement with wider societal transformation as well as their own internal cultures and practices. To publicize and raise general awareness of alternative visions of human-ecological relationships, dwelling, and modes of production. To develop a methodology that combines ethnographic data gathering with critical theory argumentation and which is public-facing.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз