Our first blog post of 2015 celebrates the publication of Dr Ricarda Vidal’s new book: Alternative Worlds: Blue-sky Thinking since 1900. This is an edited volume from Ricarda and Ingo Cornils, and it seeks to counteract the doom and gloom of the economic crisis and the politicians’ overused dictum that ‘there is no alternative’.
It is an interdisciplinary collection that presents a number of alternative worlds that were conceived over the course of the last century. While change at the macro level was the focus of most of the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, the real impetus for change came from the blue-sky thinking of scientists, engineers, architects, sociologists, planners and writers, all of whom imagined alternatives to the status quo.
The idea of alternative worlds is an emerging and important strand in CMCI’s scholarly research: Our Reader in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Dr Richard Howells’ A Critical Theory of Creativity: Utopia, Aesthetics, Atheism and Design is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan later this year.
Ricarda’s new volume is published in Oxford by Peter Lang.
