Mariano Croce, Valeria Venditti

Everyday utopias by Davina Cooper, Professor of Law & Political Theory at the University of Kent, is a hopeful and innovative book. It explores how conventional activities are enacted in unusual ways within micro-social spaces where people engage in counter-hegemonic practices. Cooper examines those small-scale utopian projects that do not dream about a better world but struggle to create it. More than anything else, however, it is a book on concepts: how particular social sites develop new understandings of such concepts as equality, care, markets, touch, play and property and how the use of them contributes to social change. In doing so, the book challenges a treatment of concepts as exclusively ideational frames. Approaching concepts as the ceaseless movement between imagining and actualisation, Everyday utopias explores what happens when new concepts are put into practice, including the challenges, unexpected outcomes, and sometimes failures that arise.
Mariano Croce (Sapienza – Università di Roma) and Valeria Venditti (University of Glasgow and Sapienza – Università di Roma) will present the forthcoming Italian translation (Utopie quotidiane,  Edizioni ETS 2016) of this important book by discussing its theoretical presuppositions and the rich potential outcomes on political theorizing.

15.00-17.30, seminar room
University of Verona, Palazzo Zorzi (second floor)
Lungadige Porta Vittoria, 17