Judy Thorne

I am an anthropologist of utopian desire.

I look at how particular places at particular times feel to those living through them, by asking people what they want the world to be like in the future.

I am currently working on a book project entitled Utopian Desire in Ordinary Crisis, due to be published by Berghahn in 2025.

This book builds on my PhD thesis (2022), which was entitled ‘What do you want the world to be like in the future?’ Utopian ethnography in the crisis-ordinary of late 2010s Pátra, Greece. It ethnographically explored the felt reverberations of the post-2008 crisis, long since become ordinary, among a variety of different social groups prefiguring, in different ways, futures they identified as desirable.

I first developed the elicitation of utopian desire as an ethnographic method in my masters thesis, which was entitled The anthropology of utopia in the factory of souls: Daydreaming in the UK Jobcentre. It discussed jobseeking under the 2010s neoliberal workfare regime in the UK as a form of affective labour, the product of which was a disposition of docile despair. It also explored how the utopian desires which some jobseekers expressed to me suggested the instability of this disposition.

My research interests also include care; gender; kinship; creative ethnographic methods; political activism; and crises economic, ecological and emotional.