The title of a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded by King Henry VIII for his refusal to sign the Act of Supremacy. Derived from the Greek for ‘good place’, More’s Utopia imagines an island cut off from the rest of the world, in which a quite different set of customs and laws than those of his own day are devised. Over time, utopia became a kind of code word for any attempt to deliberately construct a world that was better than the existing world out of which it was produced. It also tended to be overcoded as idealist, impossible, and unrealistic, making utopia into a pejorative, at least in political discourse. But this misconstrues More’s purpose and misunderstands what utopia is: it is not the end result, the perfect place, that is crucial, but rather the process of imagining what it would take to make the present world different than it is. Utopia resides not in the ideal dream of global equality, for example, but in the practical problems associated with achieving that dream. Utopia means being prepared to alter the status quo and refusing to accept the dogma that ‘there is no alternative’. Further Reading: F. Jameson Archaeologies of the Future (2004).