Imagining Alternatives: Utopia, Community and the Novel, 1880-2015

This project explores how the novel has been used since the late nineteenth century to imagine better forms of community, and the problems and opportunities revealed by such attempts. Insights from this research are employed with local communities, as the utopian imagination is harnessed to help achieve positive, sustainability-related change in the present.

While issues such as environmental crisis, the relation of narrative to cognition, and the idea of utopia are established topics in scholarship, they are still often handled in isolation. Critics have also tended to stick to established boundaries of period and genre, such as those which divide the nineteenth-century romance from the early twentieth-century modernist novel, or from late twentieth-century science-fiction. However, this project finds fundamental continuities through the work of four writers who span these categories: R. L. Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These continuities demand that we look beyond established disciplinary boundaries to analyse how a shared history of atomised communities and environmental destruction led all four writers to use the novel to try and work out alternative ways of living together. The shared problems and possible solutions they encountered not only shed new light on the history of the modern novel, but bring into clearer focus issues which will be central to any future attempts to conceive of better forms of community.

Recent ecocriticism has begun to focus on the difficulties in representing a global environmental crisis that spans the individual and communal, local and global. Similar problems of scale have been a longstanding concern for utopian studies, though detached from this environmental context. Meanwhile, researchers investigating the nature of narrative representation have drawn on cognitive science to advance our understanding of the potential and limits of literature. This project fuses together insights from all these fields to trace how issues of scale, cognition and representation are repeatedly encountered by the four writers as they try to imagine more harmonious communities. It argues that this utopian impulse - however qualified or frustrated - overrides established categories of literary study, drawing together varied modes of non-realist fiction such as the romance, the modernist novel, and science-fiction, and demanding that we reconsider the relationship between how we go about trying to change the status quo, and how such changes are imagined and represented.

The project's findings will be shared through a major new monograph, completed during the award period. This will build on research already published in major journals and edited books, and a new article prepared during the fellowship. The research ideas will also drive a community engagement project, 'Feast for the Future', in which people come together to hold a series of utopian feasts, with input from experts in sustainable energy, food, architecture and design. These events will harness the power of future-facing narratives to help communities transition to more sustainable behaviour in the present. Multi-media accounts of the Feasts will be disseminated more widely on purpose-built webpages; and the event will generate a further article as I work with a Research Assistance to compare participants' changing understanding of utopian narrative with established descriptions of the genre.

The fellowship's key ideas will be discussed further at filmed public lectures connecting arts and sustainability communities in Plymouth; and with practitioners and academics from a variety of disciplines at an international research workshop on 'Imagining Future Communities'. Research in progress will also be presented at major conferences, helping develop an international network of scholars concerned with the link between the imagining of a better future community, and the realisation of one in the present.

The task of imagining better forms of community has considerable contemporary relevance, given their role as sites for intersecting issues such as the environment, economy, and wellbeing. The fellowship will benefit a variety of users outside academia: a not-for-profit; community groups; and the wider public.

1) Regen SW, a green energy not-for-profit. 'Feasts for the Future' has been developed in consultation with Regen to achieve one of their core aims - helping groups explore renewable energy and build more resilient communities - in a unique and innovative way. Recent changes in government policy have placed a greater emphasis on the need for communities to develop local plans that incorporate renewables. This process requires communities to be actively engaged in visioning the future. My research will provide Regen with a new model for harnessing such activity, showing through the 'Feasts' how the utopian imagination can be employed with communities to identify and empower positive change that is achievable in the present. Both the organised 'Feasts' and the project webpages will raise Regen's profile; provide them with new data regarding community engagement with energy related issues, that will inform future procedures and policy making; and generate a legacy of contacts with groups seeking to move to more sustainable behaviours. The end of award workshop will allow Regen to explore further collaboration with multidisciplinary researchers and other not-for-profits.

2) Place-based communities (e.g. villages, wards) interested in moving to more sustainable modes of living. These will be identified through Regen and Paul Hardman, Manager of PU's Institute for Sustainability Solutions Research (ISSR). Through the Feast activities potentially abstract new knowledge is concretized and actualized. Communities are empowered by an increased understanding of the scientific, economic and societal issues that impinge on the transition to more sustainable behaviours; and gain new skills in translating such understanding into action. For instance, the Feasts will provide both new knowledge and a demonstration of how communities might achieve beneficial change with regard to food (local and ethical sourcing), energy (using and selling energy as a community) and quality of life (co-operation, art, dialogue). Cohesiveness across groups will be facilitated by the disseminating pathways: guests spread new knowledge by holding their own 'Feasts', at which new ambassadors are recruited; the designed 'object' will be passed on to new ambassadors as a teaching tool and symbol of this process; the webpages will enable instruction, dialogue and participation.

3) Organisations already engaged in sustainability. A select number of guests will come from groups who will use the Feasts to add new knowledge to their practice; to form new collaborations; and to share their expertise. Confirmed participants for the initial Feast are: OrganicArts, a charity promoting creative farm-based learning; Windsor Hill Wood, a sustainable community run by Tobias Jones, author of popular book Utopian Dreams; and North Devon Permaculture, a network promoting sustainable education and community. These groups will gain further networking opportunities at the end of award workshop. Participants for spin-off Feasts will be identified during the fellowship.

4) Members of the public. The filmed lecture series at Plymouth will change the public understanding and awareness of issues central to Imagining Alternatives by providing three disciplinary perspectives on representing and achieving future communities: Literature (myself), Psychology (Sabine Pahl) and Geoscience (Iain Stewart, well known from TV and popular books). My lecture will combine with the webpages to promote awareness of and participation in 'Feasts'. These pathways will stimulate debate and promote change related to key community issues such as sustainability and co-operation.