Christine Hämmerling, Alexander Koensler, Marion Näser-Lather: Utopias of Sustainability – The Sustainability of Utopias A Multimodal Intervention. Perugia 2025.
As utopias of a better world appear increasingly as ephemeral, precarious and fragile, concepts related to sustainability, the environment and rurality seem at the forefront of contemporary impulses for social change. This volume collects both paper and ethnographic film contributions of the fourth Political Imagination Laboratory. The core theme is ‘Utopias of Sustainability–The Sustainability of Utopias.’ Examples include experiments with self-production, new forms of horizontal cooperation, new understandings of rural-urban and nature-culture relations, and reflections on the longevity of social movements. We ask: Which more or less visible utopian impulses haunt contemporary forms of activism? How are, for example, concepts like sustainability, rurality and nature employed by different actors? To which ideologies and/or utopias are these connected? In which context is and is not sustainability, rurality or ecology invoked? How can discourses and practices of sustainability, rurality, ecology and similar concepts be made visible by ethnographers?