Catastrophe and Utopia: Imagining Democratic Futures in an Age of Crisis begins from a defining contradiction of our historical moment. Across the world, war, authoritarianism, ecological collapse, forced displacement, rising fascism, deepening inequality, and the erosion of democratic institutions have produced a widespread sense of uncertainty about the future. Yet catastrophe has also repeatedly become a terrain from which new political imaginaries and experiments emerge.

Drawing on political anthropology, critical theory, decolonial thought, feminist scholarship, utopian studies, and social movement research, the seminar asks how communities imagine and construct alternatives under conditions of crisis. Students will engage with struggles and experiments from Kurdistan, Rojava, Iran, Palestine, Indigenous movements, Latin America, and other contexts, examining practices of democratic autonomy, mutual aid, commoning, feminist organizing, self-government, and collective resistance.

Rather than understanding utopia as a perfect society located somewhere in the distant future, the seminar approaches utopian politics as practice: the attempt to create elements of another world within the conditions of the present. We will consider how solidarity, care, collective organization, and democratic experimentation can become ways of confronting catastrophe while opening possibilities for different political futures.