Professor Mathias Thaler -- No other planet: utopian visions for a climate-changed world IPT Masterclass

Mathias Thaler is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is in contemporary political theory. Thaler regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights, and the morality of war and violence. He currently serves as Co-Director of Research in the School of Social and Political Science.

Visions of utopia — some hopeful, others fearful — have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. No Other Planet (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a groundbreaking, timely book that examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene, as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking.

This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N K Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

Thaler is also the author of Naming Violence (Columbia University Press 2018), Moralische Politik oder politische Moral? (Campus 2008), and co-editor (with Mihaela Mihai) of Political Violence and the Imagination (Routledge 2020) and of On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave 2014). His papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Environmental Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, amongst others.

His recent research has been funded through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Commission (2013 to 2017), through a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020 to 2021), and through an AHRC Networking Grant (2023 to 2024). Thaler has, moreover, been the recipient of competitive awards from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Theodor Körner Fonds, and the Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as smaller funders. Over the past ten years, he has held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, the Université de Montréal, KU Leuven, and the University of Sydney.