Anthropologists have long examined how people imagine, inhabit, resist, and remake worlds marked by promise and peril. This student and staff symposium explores utopia and dystopia not as opposed endpoints, but as entangled social, political, ecological, ethical, and affective formations that shape lived experience in uneven ways. Across contexts marked by colonialism, capitalism, war, displacement, climate crisis, technological transformation, and more-than-human change, we ask how better and worse futures are envisioned, contested, and enacted in the present. What kinds of hope, fear, critique, endurance, and experimentation animate these worlds? How do people navigate the tensions between aspiration and catastrophe, repair and ruin, survival and abandonment?
Bringing together diverse ethnographic and theoretical perspectives, and supporting staff and student research collaborations, the symposium foregrounds anthropology’s distinctive capacity to trace how imagined futures are grounded in everyday life, moral struggle, and material conditions, while illuminating forms of endurance, refusal, creativity, and radical possibility in deeply uncertain times.
