Claudia GEBAUER (geographer, Bonn University)

Claudia Gebauer holds a B.A. (European Studies) from the University of Passau and a M.A. (Cultural Geography) from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. She subsequently worked as a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth (2011-2015) and completed her PhD at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) in 2016. Since April 2016 she is working as research assistant at the Department for Development Geography at the University of Bonn.

Utopia technically is a literary concept, utilized by authors to express their social critique in an artistic and digestible way to the public. While there is an abundance of literary utopias, none of them in the past sparked direct materialization. However, there were, and currently are, projects that share some of the characteristics of literary utopias. Often, these are coined by descriptions of ideal worlds, intentional communities, or – historically – communes. The presentation aims to give a short overview over the literary and scientific concepts of utopia while at the same time casting a look on their temporality and relationship to real-life experiments.