Book Launch and Conversation: Kristen Ghodsee’s Everyday Utopia—What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, with Liza Featherstone

Everyday Utopia whisks you away on a tour through history and around the world to explore those places that have boldly dared to reimagine how we might live our daily lives: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow all their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparents” to help raise children not their own, to China, where planned microdistricts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby. It offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies. In this conversation, part of the Endowed Chair in Women’s Gender Studies Fall 2023 series “Feminist Futures,” we will focus on feminist utopian visions of love and care, including on the radical imagining of St. Petersburg-born (and half Ukrainian) Alexandra Kollantai.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Liza Featherstone is a columnist at Jacobin and The New Republic, as well as a contributing writer at The Nation. She teaches journalism at NYU and opinion writing at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2015, she was the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College.