Lived Utopianism: Everyday Life and Intentional Communities

Introduction: Lived Utopianism and Everyday LifeUtopias seek to imagine a good life, and members of intentional communities attempt to live a good life.This article examines what happens, conceptually and experientially, when people try to realize shared ideas of a good life by joining or living in intentional communities.We evoke a phenomenon that we call "lived utopianism," which draws together the concerns of two cognate but different fields of research: communal studies and utopian studies.The former often involves close and detailed individual empirical case studies, examining different aspects of the challenges and rewards of communal life, including the challenges of realizing a shared ideal.The latter includes literary, theoretical, and empirical research but often examines utopian ideals in the abstract or through fictional examples.Our own research on intentional communities crosses the boundaries between communal and utopian studies, as does this article.We ask, "What happens when people