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Utopia as Heresy: Hope, Possibility, and the Cultural Imaginary

abstract: The utopian impulse represents hope for another world; a reflection of the injustices inherent to the hegemonic order that are understood as natural, necessary, desirable, and unchangeable. Those who challenge this orthodoxy are heretical utopians; pioneers of the counterintuitive who explore the types of relations that rather than reproduce the dominant order, shatter it, and manifest new ones based upon principles of justice. This project explores how ideological mechanisms of control embedded within the hegemonic fascist imaginary landscape of the United States render the visions of emancipatory social movements, that challenge dominant ways of knowing and being, as the "merely utopian" so as to instrumentalize the behavior of civil-society towards the maintenance of the established social order and the suppression of alternatives (Gordon 2004). In a rapidly changing world reeling under the pressures of late-stage capitalism, it is essential for those who value social and political justice to incessantly cultivate the cultural imaginary so as to shift the boundaries of what types of social relations are possible, feasible, and desirable through the process of struggle in heretical spaces. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Justice Studies 2015

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:29910
Date January 2015
ContributorsBrown, Andrew Gordon (Author), Quan, H.L.T. (Advisor), Lauderdale, Pat (Committee member), Romero, Mary (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher)
Source SetsArizona State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeMasters Thesis
Format131 pages
Rightshttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/, All Rights Reserved

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