Music Education and Utopia

This chapter applies the ideas developed in the previous chapters to music education theory and practice. It presents utopia as method in music education, emphasizing its meaning as a hermeneutic, visionary, and exploratory tool. This leads to reconceptualizing music education as utopian theory and practice regarding two different approaches of music education: politically or socially responsive music education and esthetic music education. They represent two sides of music and music education, which need each other regarding political engagement and musical autonomy, being based on music as social fact or as existing for its own sake. This reconceptualization helps to overcome a long-standing dichotomy in international music education.

Rethinking Music Education and Social Change

The arts and particularly music are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society’s current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? This book offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. It is optimistic and realistic. It rethinks music education’s relation to social change and offers a new vision in terms of music education as utopian theory and practice. This allows one to unearth the utopian energy of the music education profession and to openly imagine how the world could be otherwise—while at the same time critically scrutinizing respective conceptions. Utopia, being an important topic in sociology and political science, offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education’s relation to social change. However, music education is not only a means for social transformation. It also has artistic and aesthetic dimensions. Thus, connecting music education with utopia leads to two approaches in terms of politically or socially responsive music education and “esthetic” music education. Rethinking music education and social change within the framework of utopia offers much-needed opportunities for reconceptualizing music education in the 2020s.

DYSTOPIAN THEME IN SOUTH KOREAN LITERATURE AND FILM

The theme Dystopia began as a response to Utopian theory, which isrelated to perfect communities. A dystopia is an imaginary community or society that is dehumanized and is therefore terrifying with people who are forced to battle for survivalin a ruined environment with technological control and oppression by the governing authority. Dystopian novels or films can challenge readers to think differently about the current social and political contexts, and can even promptpositive actions for the future of human beings. Recently, not only America and Europe but also South Korea has witnessed the increasing release of a range ofdystopian or post-apocalyptic films and novels. These creations reflect the harsh reality of our modern life in which human beings have to confront disasters, pandemics and problems of the modern industrialized society. Though usually set in a future scene, the dystopian theme can function as an open gate, an objection from the present, or as the “archaeology of the Future”. The success of South Korean literature and film on this topic claims the strong rise of SouthKorean wave in the world’s pop culture. It also shows that sci-fi works with dystopian theme can be seen as an anti-social discourse as well as their possibility of merging with the mainstream works.

On the prognostic and modeling functions of the social utopias of Russian cosmists

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the utopian direction of Russian cosmism and its influence on the Soviet cosmonautics and the development of society in the USSR. This philosophical theory was created in the period that made it possible to incorporate the applied aspects of utopia into scientific and technological progress and thereby embody a number of steps towards the outer space exploration. The authors have developed criteria and parameters for assessing the utopian component of the Russian cosmism theories, which made it possible to bring this construct to a higher level of abstraction and thereby create a working model for conducting such studies in the context of other utopias of models. The purpose of the article is to show the influence of the Russian cosmism utopia on the cosmonautics development in the USSR, develop empirical criteria for evaluating the phenomenon. Achieving the goal required solving the following tasks: 1) considering and analyzing the subject matter of the cosmism utopia; 2) developing parameters for assessing the impact of utopia on the development of the social system; 3) applying the developed parameters to assess the impact of utopian ideas on the development of the Soviet cosmonautics system. Methods. Developing the theoretical model for assessing social utopias, as well as considering and analyzing the cosmism utopia, required the use of structural-functional and systems analysis. The research was conducted within the framework of a synergistic paradigm. Scientific novelty of the research. The article conceptualizes the concept of utopia. It is shown that most of the definitions of utopia as a socio-political ideal focus on the limitations of its existence: utopia cannot be embodied, often has an unscientific character, does not correlate with the real state of the system, i.e. definitions of utopia are often reduced to the negative format. The authors believe that the influence of utopia on society, as a rule, is positive. It is noted that, along with limitations, utopianism has certain unique essential features that qualitatively affect the social projects implementation. Utopia in the systemic understanding acts as a complex of ideas influencing the development of the system, being both internal (since it is created artificially and consciously by the very elements of the system) and an external factor of influence. Unlike Plato’s eidos, the projection of which is reality, utopia is created inductively, but after its creation it again “descends” to the level of reality, since it begins to influence the social model in which it was created. Results. The article discusses the prognostic and modeling functions of the social utopias of Russian cosmists. It has been proved that one of the essential functions of the Russian cosmism utopias is the formation of an ideal type, towards which, in a historical perspective, the real social system begins to strive. It is convincingly demonstrated that utopia acts as a cognitive support and inevitably forms the canvas along which society begins to move, defining the utopian model as an attractor, although such a goal is not always formulated when creating a utopia. This relationship makes it possible to assess the degree of influence of utopian ideas on the formation of reality in each specific case, which, in turn, provides an opportunity to answer the question of how and to what extent the utopian ideal type participates in determining the characteristics and parameters of a real social system. Conclusions. It was found that the social utopia of cosmists as a cognitive concept is an important effective factor influencing the development of the space industry in the USSR. The parameters adopted in the study allow us to describe the measure of its influence as both an internal and an external factor on the development of the society in which it is implemented. The validity of perceiving the utopia of cosmists as a construct with a certain life cycle, the main part of which is the period of functioning, is stated. During this time period, utopian theory can have a significant impact on the actual development of society from various angles.

Chaos and hope: nano-utopian moments of activist self-organisation

Arguably, chaos and entropy are adaptive to activism and utopian theory; they trouble normative approaches to temporal progress, applying a non-linear and emergent approach to thinking about activism and possibility. [...] This initial exploratory definition of the nano-utopian describes moments that are fractions of [...] micro- utopian structures, or that may initially sit at a disconnect from them, differing mainly in the fact that they are unpredictable, unplanned or unexpected.

My utopia is your utopia? William Morris, utopian theory and the claims of the past

This article examines the relationship between utopian production and reception via a reading of the work of the great utopian author and theorist William Morris. This relationship has invariably been defined by an inequality: utopian producers have claimed unlimited freedom in their attempts to imagine new worlds, while utopian recipients have been asked to adopt such visions as their own without question. Morris’s work suggests two possible responses to this inequality. One response, associated with theorist Miguel Abensour, is to liberate reception, with Morris’s utopianism containing an invitation to readers to reformulate the vision proffered. However, this response, despite its dominance in contemporary utopian theory, not only misreads Morris but also undermines the political efficacy of utopianism. Consequently, I suggest that Morris responds to the problem of utopian inequality by constraining production, proposing a historical control on utopianising; new utopias are directed by an archive of visions articulated in past struggles.

The Allure of the Ideal

This chapter identifies several different enduring models of utopian-ideal thought, arguing that one stands out as meriting closer investigation. It argues that this is an attractive understanding of utopian-ideal theory, that it makes sense of the theory's appeal, and why those such as Oscar Wilde thought ideals are a necessary part of any “map” of political reform. This understanding is broad enough to include a wide range of traditional utopian theory, as well as many current ideal theories. It also makes sense of many of the current facets of the ideal theory debate among contemporary philosophers, such as that between Amartya Sen and Rawls on the importance of ideals in pursuing justice.

Realisms in International Political Theory

This chapter explores the concept of realism in political science. It examines challenges and critiques against realism in this field, particularly when compared to its opposite—moralism. The chapter goes on to illustrate the unrealistic nature of certain realisms applied to political science, by citing three examples: the “realistic utopian” theory, immanence to practice, and a realism driven by a Nietzschean critique of morality and insisting on the categorical difference between morality and politics. The realisms of these examples are then rejected, paving the way for a discussion into the principle of justification. Finally, the chapter elaborates on two components for critical realism with regard to justice and democracy in transnational contexts: normative and empirical.