BASCE Creative Jam - Online workshop on "Writing Utopia"

In this workshop, David Lombard, PhD candidate in American literary studies and the environmental humanities at the University of Liège and the KU Leuven, will break down the genre of utopia into its essential parts. Drawing on examples from literature and visual arts, he will address the spatial and temporal assumptions of the genre, as well as its narratological conventions (epistolary style, fictional ethnography). He will also illustrate the variety of subgenres in utopian writing (e.g. solarpunk, post-apocalyptic fiction) and touch on some of the more complex aspects of the genre, for example its relationship with dystopia, and its politics of creative destruction. Equipped with this knowledge, participants will then be invited to put all these pieces together again in ways that speak to their personal hopes and concerns for the future, or in search of forms that challenge mainstream, Western, conceptions of ideal societies. This output may take any form the participants are comfortable with, and the workshop will provide plenty of examples for inspiration.