This month, I ran my new Masters course for the first time – Utopia and the Future. It’s a course on the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s programme Education Futures and focuses on helping students use the scholarship of utopia to open up new ways of thinking about their own areas of interest, concern and action.
We had 20 fantastic students on the programme, from many different disciplinary areas – 8 online and 12 on-campus. I was also joined by two colleagues – Richard Williams, who ran a wonderful session on the architecture of new towns as utopia, and JL Williams who led us all in a creative writing session which surfaced some beautiful written expressions of imagined utopia from students. Overall this was a collegial and collaborative mix of amazing people!
The course makes a lot of use of Ruth Levitas’s ‘utopia as method’, with a final assignment which asked students to apply this method in an area of their choice. I was so impressed with work created, which ranged from a utopian re-imagining of the Cyprus buffer-zone to the issue of object repatriation through the lens of Chinese utopianism, all via AI futures, digital rights, autonomous vehicles and sustainability.
The course runs again this November – if you are a student at Edinburgh and interested, please drop me a line.