Retrofuturism and Utopia in the 21st Century Call for Papers Meetings & Events

Symposium: Retrofuturism and Utopia in the 21st Century – to be held online 28 and 29 August, 2025

The 21st-century internet has provided avenues for the exploration of both nostalgic and utopian visions, often intertwined. Since 2022 we have held a series of online symposia on ‘retrofuturism’—a term we use to denote an embrace not just of lost sensations and imaginaries, but also of lost possibilities and transformation. Music and sound are often central to these ideas of elsewhere, from vaporwave and chiptune to hauntology.

This third symposium turns to the question of utopia. ‘Anemoia’ (or, nostalgia for a time you never experienced) has been at the centre of recent online popular culture. This yearning for past imaginaries or lost futures has a strong element of escapism given the broken promises and squandered opportunities of new technology, as well as a more politically attuned dimension in the form of imaginative resistance to present chaos and the creation of alternative spaces. Utopianism, as Fredric Jameson argued, has begun to ‘seep into what used to be dystopian figures’ such as cyberpunk or revolve around gratification ‘inherent in this very confrontation with pessimism and the impossible’ (2007, 161, 84). What does utopian thinking signify and/or achieve in our world of socio-political and ecological crisis? And how can utopias be found in musical retrofuturism?

We are interested in papers on topics included, but not limited to:
•Utopianism and/on the internet
•Microgenres
•Online subculture
•Nostalgia
•Cultural pessimism
•Prosumership
•Political radicalism
•Queer futurity
•Feminist utopia
•Retrotopia / heterotopia

We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions after each paper). Please submit an abstract (c. 200 words) to musicalretrofuturism [at] gmail.com by 30 June. We aim to communicate the programme decisions by 11 July. If you require more information, please email the organisers Michiel Kamp (m.kamp1 [at] uu.nl) and Ross Cole (r.cole [at] leeds.ac.uk).