We are the Pedagogies of Hope Collective: a community of scholars, educators, artists, and activists committed to collectively imagining and enacting knowledge and world-making projects that transgress the boundaries of mainstream learning and teaching. Over the past two years, as Pedagogies of Hope has moved beyond the imagined boundaries of academic spaces and national borders, we remain rooted in the collective recognition that there is another way—a multiplicity of ways—to learn, to move, and to build better worlds together: to dream, imagine, and co-create decolonial, anticolonial, queer, disabled, and counterhegemonic futures.
Crucial to the continuance of this collective: an ongoing commitment and openness to critical reflexivity. At the beginning of September, finalizing our plans for the launch of the Pedagogies of Hope newsletter, blog and redesigned website, the co-organizers gathered to discuss the question of hope.
In our conversation we found ourselves grappling with that all-too-familiar impulse, shared by members of our communities within and beyond the collective, to approach hope with (warranted) skepticism, mistrust, and aversion. Gathering to discuss what hope is, we quickly realized we had to start with what hope is not.
Hope is not linear; it is not interested in neoliberal progress.
Hope is not one dimensional; it is not apolitical; it is not abstract.
Hope is not resilience; it does not replace anger; it cannot erase pain; it cannot redress harm.
Hope cannot be contained in definition, by the totalizing discourses of neoliberalism, nor the quagmire of political pessimism rooted in and beyond the academic institution that continues to teach us, and our students, that there is no other way but the current world order. Instead, as an ongoing and unfinished process, hope flows through intentional collaboration and embodied (un)learning; through the ongoing and unfinished processes of building, rebuilding, dreaming, imagining, and enacting different futures, in community.
By allowing the idea of hope to remain fluid and dynamic in our discussion, we allow our work to be process-oriented, rather than result-oriented. By this we mean that we are less focussed on where we are going to land, and more on how we are going to get there. As José Esteban Munoz suggests, “The fear of both hope and utopia, as affective structures and approaches to challenges within the social, has been prone to disappointment [. . .] [but] hope can be disappointed [and] such disappointment needs to be risked if certain impasses are to be resisted” (9). Because learning is a happening—an event, an ongoing process—rather than a static or predetermined thing, to enact a pedagogical praxis of hope is to embody—rather than transmit—the process. Here are some of the ways hope has moved within and beyond us.
Hope creates movement: it propels us and connects us. Movement emerges when hope is all you are left with. You don’t want to be trapped by it, you want to do something with it and about it. Reminding us that “the question of the future is an affective one; it is a question of hope for what we might yet be” (183), Sarah Ahmed proposes that hope for alternative futures, although “unimaginable at present,” remains a “political action [. . .] even in the face of exhaustion and despair” (186). Hope as a political action is movement in anger, movement against the systems and structures of the present – a movement that emerges in the collective desire for a different tomorrow.
Hope gathers us in collectivity: it transcends the individual. Hope is handed down: it is given to us, taught to us, and shared across collectives. As an inheritance, hope is felt both within our bodies and through our communities. At its root, hope is a feeling that brings people together and unites them against structures of domination and oppression.
Hope is a process: it is intentional practice. As a process emerging through collective hopelessness: hope brings us together as a means of existence and resistance. If, as Ahmed writes, “politics without hope is impossible, and hope without politics is a reification of possibility,” (184), then a process of hope moves with and towards potentiality. For Munoz, “[u]nlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” (9). Not actually existing in the here and now, the futures we hope for become seeds we plant, wherein we cultivate roots that connect us to something larger than our individual selves, a process in nurturing potentiality, irrespective of what might emerge.
Hope is persistent: it endures despite failure. Hope is like a buckle; it both holds together and breaks apart. This distinction is important because it allows for failure to become part of the process. In allowing this breakage, we create the possibility for fuller ideas of resistance to flourish and become grounded. As Jack Halberstam writes, “the queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (88). By continually moving between hope and failure, we allow for something other than and beyond success to be our uniting force.
Hope is embodied: it moves in and through our bodies. As Ahmed reminds us “to describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (5). Our bodies act as testimonies to the experiences and feelings we go through. They are foundational to any imaginings of who we are and who we desire to become. Our bodies connect us by making us aware of the tethers that bind us, ethically, familiarly, communally, to each other. Most of the time we live in our heads, creating through thinking. Moving away from the traditional mind/body split that extracts and abstracts knowledge, we view the body as a place we learn from. A pedagogical site of potentiality, our bodies and movements ground us in our shared and distinct histories, memories and connections; an always becoming awareness of our connection in/to community.
What began as a gathering of bodies, and an exchange of stories and knowledge, has been reformulated into the ruminations above, representing an amalgamation of voices, a blending of ideas that frame our orientation towards hope. Together, the Pedagogies of Hope co-organizers have landed on hope as an embodied and collective praxis, an ongoing process that will always involve (re)learning, together, what hope is, what hope is not, and what we imagine hope could be.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press,
2014.
Ahmed, Sara, and Jackie Stacey. Thinking through the Skin. Routledge, 2001.
Halberstam, Jack. "The Queer Art of Failure." The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University
Press, 2011, pp. 87-122.
Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York
University Press, 2019.
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