From its earliest incarnation in labor movements in Scandinavia in the 1970s, Participatory Design has had an emancipatory politics inscribed in it. As PD is appropriated in other contexts, this emancipatory politics can continue to be foregrounded or, as Bannon & Ehn (2013) worry, it can be diluted into corporate practices of “usercentered design.” One way to advance the emancipatory politics in PD is to continue PD’s early embrace of utopian thinking. Yet utopianism today has a poor reputation, openly rejected by many activists. In this talk, I will revisit some of the criticisms of utopianism, in particular, the dismissal of utopianism in Dunne & Raby’s work on Critical Design. Next, I will explore an alternative framing of utopianism—derived from feminism and science fiction studies—that could productively inform PD, both epistemologically and methodologically, in its most openly political design goals.