This project began to take concrete shape in March 2020. I was quarantined in an old Soviet sanitarium (once used to train Olympic athletes) just outside Tyumen, Russia about six hours by train from Yekaterinburg. I had been teaching in Russia since the fall of 2017. I had recently finished my PhD in political theory at Johns Hopkins and the idea of joining a start-up liberal arts school in Siberia thrilled my sense of adventure. (For a more intimate look at what working there was like, read my former colleague’s brilliant and raw article in Open Democracy.)
As luck would have it, I had kept my wits enough about me when hurriedly packing to bring volume one of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. It was my first time really reading Bloch. Bloch inspired me, literally. Reading him filled my belly and chest with an airy, earth-smelling spaciousness I came to recognize as hope. Perhaps it was just the thawing Siberian forest beyond the window, but reading Bloch over those 11 days shifted something in me and sent me looking for concrete signs and practices of hope.
As an academic, I naturally applied for a grant, and as luck would have it a second time, I found funding (it took 1.5 years) to do fieldwork in and write about intentional communities and postcapitalist futures. The notes and stories that compose this research diary/blog are the first tangible fruits. I do not own them, but my “tracks” are all over them and I do accept responsibility for the way they are told here. As the research progresses, I hope to be able to include more of the original voices I first heard these stories from.
A Question of Style
I used to love to write. I wanted to be a writer growing up. Then sometime during my undergrad–just about the time I decided to commit to pursuing an academic career–all that changed. Writing was no longer joyful and playful, but a necessary means to an end: obtaining a career and ultimately making money. Writing became about arguments, logic, and conveying information rather than wonder, play, and sensuous meaning. This was no doubt an important part of my education, but I languished here for many years with the bleak songs of experience in my head.
Over the past couple years, I have been trying to bring more of this wonder and play back into my writing and thinking. Storytelling–the sharing of “communicable experience” as Walter Benjamin defined it (Illuminations 84, download here)–has been the primary craft I have been employing following the lead of feminist and critical thinkers like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, William Connolly, and Chessa Adsit-Morris.
Other ways I have described this type of writing include: fieldnotes; research diary; confessions; stream of consciousness; psychoanalytic self-indulgence, self-help consumer product review; blog; newsletter; grant deliverable; reflection; environmental critique; ecological politics propaganda; an auto-ethnography of becoming earthbound
Funding
This project is receiving funding from the European Research Council via a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant. Utopian Intentions: Critical Theory, Intentional Communities, and a Politics of Limits, EU Horizon 2020, MSCA, Grant Agreement No. 101031071, 2021-2023. The project is hosted by Leiden Universiteit, Institute of Political Science (Netherlands). You can find my university bio here.