Special

Interdisciplinary Studies / American Studies

Yelizaveta Barros Santos (University of Michigan - Ann Arbor)
ytis@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel examines the material, print, and social architectures of twentieth-century intentional communities and countercultures as radical experiments in hospitality. Informed by a "Whole Earth" imagination wherein domestic and planetary scales integrate into a single oikos, papers will explore how such groups and movements sought to reclaim domestic governance from institutional regulation. Drawing on Derrida's hostipitality, this panel invites papers analyzing how alternative social experiments, material infrastructures, and utopian imaginations negotiate the promises and failures of unconditional hospitality.

Emerging in the late twentieth century, as an integrated systems-theory praxis and countercultural ethos, the term “Whole Earth” signaled a paradigm shift in modern social and environmental consciousness. At the core of the “Whole Earth” imagination lies a radical collapse of scale wherein the domestic and the planetary are envisioned as a single, continuous system. Through this lens, the notion of “co-evolution”—the continual negotiation of the ways in which bodies, technologies, and environments endure together—serves to vitally recast hospitality as a structural condition of spatial, ecological, and social integration. To view the planetary biosphere as a highly integrated oikos is thus to recognize the sites and rituals of hospitality as active circuits of shared endurance.

This panel considers the physical, environmental, print, and social architectures of twentieth-century intentional communities, eco-utopian movements, and DIY subcultures as radical experiments in hospitality. From geodesic domes to back-to-the-land toolkits, countercultural technologies and spatial practices sought to reclaim the political terms of domestic governance from institutional regulation and linked individual self-reliance radically to planetary systems by reframing technological autonomy as an active threshold of eco-social integration.

However, techno-utopian social projects frequently collided with the realities of material and political boundary-making, internal social friction, and structural complicity. To build an autonomous community is to claim a sovereign space, yet the endurance of such space was continually haunted by what it was designed to leave behind. Collective living often fractured under interpersonal strains, unsolicited guests, and contested divisions of labor; while the countercultural appetite for self-reliance was fundamentally and uncomfortably mediated by the Cold War military-industrial and academic complexes from which its primary technologies and organizing systems were inherited.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hostipitality to recognize the inherent hostility embedded within any act of welcome, and centering the material, social, and print architectures of alternative world-making, this panel invites papers that explore how intentional communities, utopian texts, or countercultural networks negotiate the promises and failures of unconditional hospitality.

We invite papers that examine topics such as:

-Experimental, utopian, or alternative spatial design and architecture.
-Print culture, instructional media, and the dissemination of practical knowledge.
-The institutional, legal, and material borders that police or restrict collective living or self-reliant domestic environments.
-Social, racial, and gendered exclusions within countercultural movements.
-Literary, archival, and speculative narratives of communal failure.
-Ecology and technology as tools for designing the planetary oikos.
-Cross-species cohabitation, posthumanism, and the ethics of non-human hospitality.
-Radical pedagogies, skill-sharing, and the teaching of alternative or practical survival.
-The material infrastructures of shared living, resource distribution, and mutual survival.
-Creative or hybrid works exploring the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of co-evolution.

Please submit an abstract between 200 and 300 words, along with a brief academic bio, to ytishch@umich.edu by September 1, 2026.