Reclaiming Utopia

‘Reclaiming Utopia: Challenging the Financial Imagination’ took place on November 25, 2016 at King’s College London. It was organized by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou with the support of King’s College London’s Doctoral Training Centre and Utopia 2016, a collaboration with Somerset House and the Courtauld Gallery.

The panel invited provocative reflections from theorists, activists and artists, on the possibilities of reclaiming radical utopias as a response to an increasingly dominant ‘financial imagination’. Set in London, a hub of such financial imagination (imbued with liberal utopian notions of ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’), the panel addressed questions such as: What types of imagination drive economic fiction and financial utopias? How do contemporary debt dependencies, risk speculations and fictitious capital produce dominant visions of the future? Why do counter- utopias lag behind liberal and financial utopias?

Chair

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Assistant Professor in Social Theory, University College London

Panel participants

Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York ‘Imaginal politics and the non-place of financial capitalism’

Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University ‘Financial Utopias and the Colonization of the Imagination’

Cassie Thornton, Artist, The Feminist Economics Department ‘The Dreams, Risks and Benefits of Working Very High, in Finance’