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Climate and failure: for a weak utopianism

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Lisa GarforthORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Abstract

Attempts to imagine a better future from within the climate emergency must work in and through failure: failing eco-social systems, failed narratives, failures of political will, failures to change consumerist lifestyles. Utopia is intimately related to failure. It is a response to something wrong or missing. As a mode of critique and creation it is definitionally impossible to realise. But the climate crisis brings distinctive dimensions, disrupting linear temporalities, resisting solutions and posing existential dilemmas. This paper works through theoretical ideas linking utopia with failure in contemporary utopian and queer theorising, adapting them to the climate context and articulating a weak utopianism in response to theorists calling for a hard or strong utopia in times of crisis. It argues that climate crisis is better understood as a world than asa problem, and explores what kinds of implicated, everyday, and entangled utopian desires might enable us to navigate the Anthropocene.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Garforth L

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: European Journal of Social Theory

Year: 2025

Pages: Epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 06/11/2025

Acceptance date: 16/10/2025

Date deposited: 18/11/2025

ISSN (print): 1368-4310

ISSN (electronic): 1461-7137

Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310251392829

DOI: 10.1177/13684310251392829

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