VI ULP/Rivoli Conferences: 'Spaces, Places and Territorialities' with Fátima Vieira

On 25 October, the Rivoli Theatre will host the conference "Towards a theory of complex utopianism", by Fátima Vieira. Part of the VI ULP/Rivoli Conferences: 'Spaces, Places and Territorialities', the event is scheduled to start at 6.30 pm. Free entrance.

In the book he published in 2019, A Theory of Complex Democracy, the Basque philosopher Daniel Innerarity argues that we are currently experiencing a serious conceptual problem, as we have been trying to understand the problems of the 21st century with conceptual tools that were defined at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Innerarity argues that, in order to understand the complex world in which we live, we need complex theories capable of analyzing and communicating sometimes contradictory ideas. While science has changed most of its paradigms, the concepts central to contemporary political theory have not undergone an equivalent change.

Subscribing to Innerarity's argument, I argue that, in order to understand today's utopian thinking – the way it feeds our social imaginary, thus contributing to the transformation of communities – we need a theory of complex utopianism. Far from grand narratives, contemporary utopianism has become practical, realistic, and polyphonic, feeding, to a large extent, on heterotopic experiences. Its understanding, therefore, calls for a spatial approach. As Michel Foucault announced at the conference he gave in Paris on March 14, 1967, “the present epoch will perhaps be, above all, the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, in the epoch of far and near, side by side, of the dispersed”. It is precisely this profusion of utopian proposals that I propose to analyze.

 Bio:

Fátima Vieira is Vice-Rector for Culture and Museums at the University of Porto and Full Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto (FLUP), where she has taught since 1986. At the University of Porto, over the last 4 years, she has been responsible for the cultural promotion of the CASA COMUM and CORREDOR CULTURAL projects, which he created, as well as the Museum of Natural History and Science of the U.Porto, the Biodiversity Gallery, the Porto Planetarium, the Marques da Silva Foundation and the U.Porto Press / University of Porto Publishing House.

She was President of the Utopian Studies Society / Europe between 2006 and 2016, having been awarded the Larry E. Hough Distinguished Service Award, established by the American and Canadian Society for Utopian Studies. She is the coordinator of the Porto Hub at CETAPS – Center for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, where she leads the research line Mapping Utopianisms. She has coordinated several FCT-funded projects, is a Visiting Professor at the University of Ferrara, where she teaches in an international doctoral program on sustainability and well-being, and a lecturer in the European doctoral program MOVES. She has given a large number of conferences in Portugal and abroad, has consulted for scientific journals and projects, organized multiple national and international congresses, and has organized and contributed to many volumes in the areas of Utopia Studies and Literary Translation.