Programme designed and coordinated by Enrico Donaggio, Philosopher, university professor, scientific director of Iméra
« To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing »
(Raymond Williams)
Here are the themes of some of the previous research projects which were selected for residency at Iméra as part of the “Necessary Utopias” program:
- Eliminating the gender wage gap
- African women’s access to high-level legal professions
- Sail-powered container ships that don’t pollute
- Reconciling ecological transition and economic profit
- Religious affiliation and ecological behavior
- A waste bank for the poor
- New rights for rural migrant workers
- Europe’s legal responsibility for migrants who die along its geographically distant borders (Africa and the Indian Ocean)
- Pandemic and the self-organization of subaltern classes (biopolitics from below)
- Pandemic and improving the education of African youth
- Impossible peace (Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, Rojava)
- Mining and the rights of indigenous communities
- Artificial intelligence at the service of workers
- A universal wage for artists
- Work without burnout
- Democratization of algorithms and cooperation in food delivery
- Containers as a fetish of globalization (Arts & Sciences program)
- Imagining a new radical left (Arts & Sciences program)
- Archaeology of the future or what to do with hopes that haven’t come true
The “Necessary Utopias” program aims to provide a framework for reflection and dialogue for such richly diverse projects. For five or ten months, the program welcomes academics and artists from all disciplines and geographical origins to Iméra and to Marseille. The purpose of their residency is not exclusively academic. They are also driven by a radical desire to explore new paths of research outside the often self-referential perimeter of ordinary academic or artistic practice, in the name of critical engagement and the social imagination of knowledge.
The program invites to propose new ways of thinking and acting to tackle a constellation of problems, both local and global, which present the following antithetical characteristics:
a. On the one hand, these problems are major issues that cannot be ignored for the future of our times: they must be tackled before it is too late, or even as soon as possible, hence their necessity;
b. On the other hand, despite the inescapable urgency with which these challenges impose their necessity, it now seems certain that if we continue to adopt the dominant way of tackling them, their resolution will never come.
Necessary utopias are therefore global and local challenges that contemporary society considers decisive and desirable to meet, because of their unquestionable urgency, but impossible to win without actually acting and thinking differently. The “Necessary Utopias” program thus classically refers to what we call “challenges” or “global phenomena”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “Human Development Index Indicators”, and performs a double operation on this set of problems:
a. This program takes a radical approach to these issues, so that they can inspire not only fear, indifference, denial and resignation, but also hope. A necessary utopia is a desired impossible that becomes possible, or at least imaginable, with a degree of attractiveness sufficient to mobilize collective intelligence and passions;
b. This program identifies in an Institute for advanced study like Iméra, based in a city like Marseille, one of the places where it is perhaps most likely that these necessary utopias will be discerned or invented. A sanctuary of intellectual freedom, home to an international and interdisciplinary community of researchers – academics and artists – located in a city where beauty and the most extreme misery meet every day, and which thus seems to offer a context conducive to such an adventure.
The fields of invention and application envisaged by the Necessary Utopias program include, but are not limited to: war and peace, ecological crisises, health, migration, economic and social inequalities, the urban question, the question of living, education, the crisis of participation and political hope, and collective intelligence.
Another of these necessary utopias – work and its unprecedented prospects for new freedoms and new utopias – is at the heart of the activities of a research group, active at Iméra since 2019, which is situated within the theoretical and practical horizon outlined by this program. Residents are invited to take part in its meetings, seminar cycles and conferences – which benefit from the presence of leading specialists as well as local players – as well as its collective research project on utopias of work in Marseille yesterday and today.
The “Necessary Utopias” program benefits from the collaboration and support of partners with whom Iméra proposes thematic chairs: EHESS, AMSE.
For more information, please contact Enrico Donaggio, Programme Director and Scientific Director of Iméra: enrico.DONAGGIO@univ-amu.fr
