Imagine All the People: Socio-Eco-Technical Imaginaries & Utopian Movements

IN PERSON EVENT

John Lennon’s famous directive to “imagine all the people” is virtually impossible for social movements that require enemies and scapegoats to foster egalitarian visions of the future. Building on research into the far right, this talk describes the emergence of powerful socio-ecological-technical imaginaries in the 21st Century and their relation to social movements and community organization. Discussing the rising movement against data centers and right-wing social media, it locates imaginaries in the complex, mimetic struggles for freedom in which technology seems to threaten as much as it promises. In the contexts of theories like “abundance,” accelerationism, and eco-modernism, it possible today, as utopianism and pessimism surge, for “all the people” to fit into our imagined past, present, and future?

About Dr Alexander Reid Ross
Alexander is award-winning geographer working at the intersection of human-natural systems, focusing on climate, water, and the political far right. He holds a doctorate from Portland State’s Earth, Environment, Society program, and his work has appeared in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the Hydrological Sciences Journal, The Public Historian, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers Review of Books. He has produced three books, with a forthcoming work on Shakespeare and the concept of the sublime due out later this year.