Focus and Scope
The Revista de Estudios Utópicos responds to the emergence, since the 1970s, of an interdisciplinary field of ‘utopian studies’, which has been developing internationally with an increasing degree of rigour, innovation and pluralism. The expansion of Utopian Studies beyond the Anglo-Saxon academic world and beyond literary studies — where it was born — has given rise to multidisciplinary and international debates and lines of research, for which the journal provides a channel.
Having overcome an initial phase in which utopian studies were directed exclusively towards the analysis of texts of the utopian genre (and, by extension, their reflection in film and audiovisuals), today they encompass a broad spectrum of experiences and phenomena that have in common the challenge to the established order through the imagination of alternative models of better worlds, so radically different that they seem impossible or very difficult to realise at the time they are conceived; but which, precisely because of their audacity, widen the limits of the possible and open up paths for experimentation and change. This field of study also includes dystopias, which, by depicting undesirable futures, seek to draw attention to aspects perceived as problematic in the present.
The Revista de Estudios Utópicos is based on the vision of utopianism as a cultural phenomenon related to the orientation of social, political and cultural change. Utopias and dystopias have been, over time, laboratories of the future that have helped to visualise alternatives, to subject the established order to criticism, to mobilise collective action in pursuit of new horizons, and, consequently, have functioned as drivers of innovation and change.
The journal responds to the transdisciplinary configuration of utopian studies, an academic field that brings together research that studies artistic and literary proposals, political, economic and social thought, social movements, intentional communities, urban planning, cultural practices, scientific or technological proposals, cinema, television series, video games... in short, a whole series of phenomena — both textual and non-textual — that respond to a utopian impulse. The Revista de Estudios Utópicos welcomes all these objects and the multiplicity of theoretical and methodological tools that have been developed for their study as utopias or dystopias: A plural toolbox in which methods from literary studies, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, art history, law and also the so-called ‘environmental humanities’ coexist, which, on the border of the natural and experimental sciences, take up the challenge of the environmental crisis and the need to rethink the life of the human species and its relationship with the planet in a disruptive way.
The Revista de Estudios Utópicos is not only addressed to those whose research is in this field, but also to a wider public, constituted by the various academic disciplines it addresses. Thinking utopia as an engine of historical and social transformation opens up scientific disciplines to new conversations with society and new horizons: subjects, ideas, cases and objects of study. They respond to the social need to promote critical thinking capable of proposing alternatives to the serious problems of the present. They push us to rethink the limits of science, revaluing certain experiences that might otherwise remain on the margins of knowledge. Ultimately, utopias not only constitute an object of study and structure a scientific field, but also, in themselves, constitute an epistemology — with a theoretical and conceptual scaffolding — that allows for a critical reading of reality, approaching it as a web of open and constantly changing processes.
