Professor Caroline Edwards's Inaugural Lecture: Where is hope taking us? The utopian art of desecration amidst capitalist ruins
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
This inaugural lecture will trace my journey from the literary genre of utopia to the ontological necessity of hope. My academic career has been forged in the conjunction of capitalist crisis and escalating climate emergency – I was doing my PhD when the global financial crisis rocked the neoliberal world order in 2007-8. I started lecturing in 2010 when students took to the streets to protest tuition fee increases. As an early career researcher, I was writing utopian Marxist critiques of ceaseless capitalist productivity, with its repressive temporalities of exhaustion, competition, and over-production. Meanwhile, my profession picketed against pension reforms that amounted to wage theft, the precarity and enshittification of our sector, and the almost inevitable collapse of British higher education into full-blown crisis.
For me, the Marxist utopian philosophical tradition in which I trained helps make sense of a world where alienation feels rife and the only winners are the billionaire capitalist class. It fostered in me an angry activist sense that hope is collective – we build it together every day. This is what literature, art, and culture can teach us. My recent scholarship on utopian aesthetics explores the limits of the human as a privileged signifier of utopian hope and possibility. As we accelerate into a dangerous and uncertain era of ecocidal climate catastrophe, we must rapidly relearn what it means to live alongside trees, rocks, plants, and the mycorrhizal hyphae that connect them. This, I argue, requires rekindling a repressed phylogenetic relationship with nonhuman points of view. It forces us to rethink the category of the human and its embeddedness within nonhuman networks of matter, energy, and agency.
In this inaugural lecture I will consider literary and cultural works in which the discrete human subject is both literally and figuratively pulled apart – dramatically reconfigured into porous and penetrable viscera. The novels, films, artworks, sculptures, and sound installations I analyse gleefully desecrate the predominantly white, male, rational, Enlightenment subject through a variety of apocalyptic, dystopian, and disgusting ways. They perforate the epidermal barrier between human skin and a rich variety of nonhuman entities; including Earth’s molten lithic interior, networks of fungal mycorrhizae, proliferant entanglements of forest ecology, and floodwaters that confuse our own uterine fluidity with the rising sea levels around us.
Taken together, these texts offer a perspectival and ethical shift that is urgently required at a time of climate emergency. In this increasingly necrotic world of capitalist ruins, such texts force us to ask: where is hope taking us? As I will suggest we can, indeed we must, build hope in the least likely of places.
Biography
Caroline Edwards is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She has authored and edited five academic books – most recently Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture Since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Caroline’s research on contemporary literature, utopian theory, and science fiction has been featured by BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, BBC One South East, New Statesman, Times Higher Education, The Guardian, and SFX Magazine. She has gained recognition within her field of contemporary literary studies, having launched two academic journals and a scholarly society, the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies. In 2017-18, Caroline’s research was displayed in a dedicated exhibition titled “Imagined Futures” at the Museum of London. Beyond the university, Caroline is widely known for her work in journals publishing. She currently leads a team at Birkbeck who run the award-winning Open Library of Humanities. In 2026, Caroline launched the Open Journals Collective, an international, non-profit research infrastructure designed to transform how academic journals are supported and disseminated.
This inaugural lecture will be held in the Clore Management Centre basement lecture theatre, B01. The lecture will also be live-streamed via Teams and recorded. Please select a live-streaming ticket if you are unable to attend in person. You will be emailed a live-streaming link the day before the lecture.
This inaugural lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name: Chris Fray
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