About the Anarres Project

Inspired by the speculative fiction of Oregon writer Ursula K. Le Guin (Anarres is the “ambiguous utopia” from her novel, The Dispossessed), The Anarres Project is a forum for conversations, ideas, and initiatives that promote a future free of domination, exploitation, oppression, war, and empire. The Project is based on the understanding that past, present, and future are not separate. We are intent on uncovering the many living futures constantly coming into being in the present, those innovations and creative insurgencies happening everywhere in our midst, and exploring the affinities between them. We seek to bring together activists and scholars from the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences who are writing, thinking, and teaching about the themes explored in Le Guin’s work: gender, racial, and sexual justice, ecological sustainability, bioregionalism, left libertarian/ anarchist traditions, utopias & dystopias, alternatives to war, and cooperative economic arrangements.

We have hosted a variety of community discussions at Oregon State, bringing together students, scholars and community activists to think together and the nature of the radical imagination.  Here are some of our events:

We also regularly host a variety of critical thinkers, such as Mark Naison, Phoenix Calida, Arun Gupta, Teka Lark, Alexander Reid Ross, Irami Osei-Frimpong and numerous guests in our Voices blog.

The founders of the Anarres Project are Tony Vogt and Joseph Orosco, who both teach in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion at Oregon State University.  If you would like to work on a project with us–to host a speaker, community discussion, or a guest spot on Voices, please contact either Tony or Joseph.

You can find us on Facebook @ Anarres Project for Alternative Futures and on Twitter @AnarresProject.

Check out this interview from the Corvallis Advocate about the work of the Anarres Project.

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution.
You can only BE
the revolution.
It is in your spirit,
or it is nowhere.”

–  Shevek from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed