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20 May 25 | Events
Open Invitation to Get Involved: Utopia Now! Season
This is an open invitation to get involved in the Cultural Programme Season on Utopia Now! which will
take place in the Schwarzman Centre in Michaelmas 2026.
A core group of researchers, led by Professor Peter Boxall (English), Professor Wes Williams (MML), and
Professor Paul Basu (Anthropology/Pitt Rivers Museum) are already collaborating with the Cultural
Programme on inspiring opportunities for the season (see the full description of the season below for
more details).
We are keen now to extend an open invitation to any others who might like to be involved to join the conversation.
There are different ways to get involved:
- Faculty- or Institute-led events: let us know about the events you are organising for Michaelmas 2026 that could align with the season description below and benefit from collaborative marketing and promotion.
- Apply to the Cultural Programme Open Call: for small, research-embedded cultural projects.
Link to call: https://oxfordculturalprogramme.org.uk/oxford-is-open-to-new-ideas/
Next deadline: MT25 – Thursday 16 Oct (first stage). - Contribute to the season exhibition – The Principle of Hope: this exhibition will take place in the brand new White Box Exhibition Space in the Schwarzman Centre. See further details below from the curator Professor Paul Basu.
- Send us an idea: we are very happy to discuss individual ideas and ways to get involved. Send us an email or come along to the next meeting. Send ideas/queries/questions to: culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk
Join us for the next meeting: Tuesday 10th June, 3.00-4.15 in the Colin Matthew Room at Radcliffe Humanities. RSVP to: culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk
SEASON OVERVIEW – UTOPIA NOW!
Can we imagine and build a world better than the one we live in now?
In our time, such a question might seem naïve, fanciful, or even offensive. Technological revolution is realising many of the marvels that we only dreamt of in our science fictions – artificial intelligence, generic engineering, the automation of virtually every kind of labour, the colonisation of Mars. But such developments can feel more terrifying than liberating. Artificial intelligence threatens to replace the human rather than enhance it; corporate technology worsens global inequality rather than reducing it; and the carbon cost of computing is part of a climate emergency that poses a real and present danger to our collective futures. Is now really the time to engage deeply with the history and the future possibilities of utopian imagining?
Utopia Now! will show that utopian thought does not diminish at times of rapid and disorienting change, such as our own. Rather, it thrives.
Utopian possibility emerges, and imposes itself, when an old world is lapsing, and a new one has not yet been born. In the inter-regnum, the No-place of the present moment, critical imagination is called upon to undertake the task of world building, of willing a new and better future into being.
This Season, in calling for Utopia Now, brings together thinkers and practitioners from across the arts, humanities and sciences, to project images and recount stories of utopian possibility at a critical moment in our shared history. Embracing all forms of creativity and connection, the season will generate a collective picture of the future, which emerges from the long, sometimes complex, and often conflictual tradition of utopian thought, reaching from Thomas More, through the present and into the future.
Celebrating the opening of the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Utopia Now brings together the university and the city in unexpected ways. Exploring Utopian practices at local, global, and planetary scales, we harness the power of the creative imagination in making new and better worlds possible.
The time for utopian imagining has not passed, and is not to come. It is Now.
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW – THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE
An exhibition is being curated by Paul Basu (School of Anthropology & Pitt Rivers Museum) as part of the Utopia Now season with the working title ‘The Principle of Hope’. The plan is to develop a highly interdisciplinary exhibition, incorporating collections from the University’s various museums and libraries, contemporary art and digital installations. One part of the exhibition will explore different historical and cultural visions of ‘better worlds’ (whether expressed in art, artefacts, text, etc.), but also the ‘unliveable worlds’ which give rise to parficular utopian imaginaries. It is hoped to identify items in Oxford museum/library collections that speak to both present ‘dystopias’ (e.g. ecological crisis, biodiversity loss, colonial destruction of other ways of being/knowing) and past/present utopian visions (e.g. images of paradise, golden ages, social and technological utopias, ecotopias) and Paul Basu would welcome hearing from colleagues whose research interests engage with these issues and/or who have suggestions for Oxford museum/library collections that speak to such themes. Please contact Paul at paul.basu@anthro.ox.ac.uk.
20 May 25