This Symposium is a joint project of the Irish World Academy and Ralahine Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick. The Symposium will be held at the Irish World Academy on Wednesday, 20 February 2013, from 4 pm to 6 pm, followed by a reception in the Academy Foyer. The event will be addressed by Uachtaran na hEireann Michael D Higgins (via video link) and will be attended by Professor Don Barry and all previous UL Presidents.

The inspiration for the Symposium arose from a speech given by President Higgins at the London School of Economics on 21 February 2012. In this speech, entitled “Public Intellectuals, Universities, and a Democratic Crisis,” the President called for the revival of the university as a place for critical thinking and utopian vision. In speaking of the role of utopianism in this revival, the President made explicit mention of the ongoing work at UL:

“Independent thought, from home and abroad, and scholarly engagement with our current circumstances are crucial. A paradigm drawn from the fiction of rational markets, I humbly suggest, needs not only to be let go. It needs to be replaced by a scholarship that is genuinely emancipatory, centred on originality rather than imitation, one that, for example, restores the unity between the sciences and culture in their common human curiosity, discovery and celebration of the life of the mind, enables new visions to emerge. …. Following Ernst Bloch I believe of course that utopian alternatives must be accompanied by a praxis that is envisaged and I suggest that it must be one that is applicable within, and in the context of, institutions…. The concept of utopia is being recovered in … intellectual work such as that of Ruth Levitas and others and the insistence of Ernst Bloch that utopianism not only involves a rejection of what is, and a hope for an alternative, but also a strategy for its implementation is central to the new writing as that of the scholars in the Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick.”