https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3647-0939
What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” the feature article of this CRITICAL FORUM on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk’s “dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope,” the way that it couples scrutiny of historical material conditions with the insistence that other ways of living, other social formations, remain possible. Solarpunk dedicates itself to action; it wants to incite political action, of course, but also the more general action of building sustainable infrastructure for the future.1 As Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wagner put it in one of the first solarpunk story collections, “Solarpunk emphasizes innovative interaction with both...
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Research Article|
December 30 2024
Introduction: Hope Through Action—Solarpunk Blueprints, Desires, and Politics
Christian Haines
Christian Haines
Associate Editor
CHRISTIAN P. HAINES is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons (Fordham, 2019). His essays have appeared in journals including Cultural Critique, Textual Practice, symplokē, and the minnesota review. They’ve also appeared in edited volumes such as The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture (Iowa, 2021). He is Associate Editor of the journal Utopian Studies and contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
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Utopian Studies (2024) 35 (2-3): 462–466.
