Hope

Afterword -- Occupy Education: Learning and Living Sustainability by Tina Lynn Evans (Peter Lang, 2012)

by Richard Kahn

Forthcoming book. Order one today!

A kind of manifesto statement on the current state of the so-called socio-cultural turn in environmental education and... more A kind of manifesto statement on the current state of the so-called socio-cultural turn in environmental education and the ecological turn in critical pedagogy, as both move to frameworks of decolonization and hopeful dialogue and solidarity with sovereignty activists and indigenous scholars/educators. A call for hope in the form of the "wild jeremiad" is issued.

‘Hope’ for children and youth in a challenging world?

by Penny Moore

Voice from SHRAYAN_'Tales of Common People's Wisdom'_Written by Amulya Kumar Chakraborty_Posted by Pathik Basu (Bengali Version)

by Pathik Basu

Dr Amulya Kumar Chakraborty, author of this essay is a dedicated social activist, presently attached with Ramakrishna... more Dr Amulya Kumar Chakraborty, author of this essay is a dedicated social activist, presently attached with Ramakrishna Mission Lok-Siksha Parishad (presently he is 87!). Here the writer is sharing about the experiences he gathered from common people, the wisdom inherent in common people that he witnessed from close vicinity during the long tenure of his service. All the characters are real. They are matrixed as ‘common people’ by so-called elitist custom, but strange is their virtue, Dharma. This article is published in SHRAYAN's 2012 Annual Number.

If wishes were fishes

by Deborah Cleland

originally published in the Griffith Review, 2011

Hope and Critical Theory

by Nicholas H Smith

Pre-proof version. Published in R. Sinnerbrink, et al eds, Critique Today, Leiden and Boston, Brill, pp. 45-61.

In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I... more In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong - but, I argue, contingent - association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today.

Analysing Hope

by Nicholas H Smith

pre-proof-read version. Published in Critical Horizons, vol. 9, no. 1, May 2008, 5-23.

The paper contrasts two approaches to the analysis of hope: one that takes its departure from a view broadly shared by... more The paper contrasts two approaches to the analysis of hope: one that takes its departure from a view broadly shared by Hobbes, Locke and Hume, another that fits better with Aquinas’s definition of hope. The former relies heavily on a sharp distinction between the cognitive and conative aspects of hope. It is argued that while this approach provides a valuable source of insights, its focus is too narrow and it rests on a problematic rationalistic psychology. The argument is supported by a discussion of hope understood as a stance and by a consideration of the phenomenological contrast between expectation and anticipation.The paper concludes with some reflections on the relation between hope and illusion and the idea of responsible hope.

Analysing Hope

by Nicholas H Smith

pre-proof-read version. Published in Critical Horizons, vol. 9, no. 1, May 2008, 5-23.

The paper contrasts two approaches to the analysis of hope: one that takes its departure from a view broadly shared by... more The paper contrasts two approaches to the analysis of hope: one that takes its departure from a view broadly shared by Hobbes, Locke and Hume, another that fits better with Aquinas’s definition of hope. The former relies heavily on a sharp distinction between the cognitive and conative aspects of hope. It is argued that while this approach provides a valuable source of insights, its focus is too narrow and it rests on a problematic rationalistic psychology. The argument is supported by a discussion of hope understood as a stance and by a consideration of the phenomenological contrast between expectation and anticipation.The paper concludes with some reflections on the relation between hope and illusion and the idea of responsible hope.

Rorty on religion and hope

by Nicholas H Smith

Pre-proof version. Published in Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 1, 2005, February, 76-98

The article considers how Richard Rorty’s writings on religion dovetail with his views on the philosophical... more The article considers how Richard Rorty’s writings on religion dovetail with his views on the philosophical significance of hope. It begins with a reconstruction of the central features of Rorty’s philosophy of religion, including its critique of theism and its attempt to rehabilitate religion within a pragmatist philosophical framework. It then presents some criticisms of Rorty’s proposal. It is argued first that Rorty’s ‘redescription’ of the fulfilment of the religious impulse is so radical that it is hard to see what remains of its specifically religious content. This casts doubt on Rorty’s claim to have made pragmatism and religion compatible. The article then offers an analysis of Rorty’s key notion of ‘unjustifiable hope’. Different senses of unjustifiable hope are distinguished, in the course of which a tension between the ‘romantic’ and ‘utilitarian’ aspects of Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy of religion comes into view.

From the concept of hope to the principle of hope

by Nicholas H Smith

pre-proof version, published in Janet Horrigan and Ed Wiltse eds, Hope after Hope, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2010, pp. 3-22.

The paper distinguishes two kinds of philosophical reflection on hope. The first is concerned with analysing the... more The paper distinguishes two kinds of philosophical reflection on hope. The first is concerned with analysing the concept of hope. Conceptual analysis seeks to identify the core elements of a concept, and the central features of the concept of hope (as they have been distinguished by philosophers who have reflected on hope in this way) are discussed in section two of the paper. The paper then turns to a consideration of the value of hope. My thesis here is that when we reflect on hope, we unavoidably bring along background, tacit assumptions regarding its worth. In the third section of the paper I attempt to make explicit some of these assumptions, particularly those I believe lie behind the negative evaluation of hope implicit in much western philosophical culture. Finally the paper identifies a second kind of philosophical reflection on hope, which is concerned not so much with the logic or value of hope as with hope inderstood as a ‘principle.’

Notes on the Feminist Manifesto: The Strategic Use of Hope

by Felicity Colman

Journal for Cultural Research
Volume 14, Issue 4, 2010
Special Issue: Hope and Feminist Theory

Manifesto forms are used as signals of a time, a place and an attitude. Narrative histories and historical research... more Manifesto forms are used as signals of a time, a place and an attitude. Narrative histories and historical research for all mediums engage manifestos as historical registers of the time of their production; they are epistemic catalysts that mark specific events and compose temporal registers of political and social moods. The author’s methodology draws from the work of practitioners who make manifesto works, and this is central to the author’s thinking of the historical and political concepts of feminism as a manifesto form. These practitioners include film‐makers such as Chantal Akerman, Bruce LaBruce, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Tracey Moffatt, and activists who engage the politics of cultural paradigms, including Riot Grrrl. The author engages the language of the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, whose notion of becoming‐woman problematically, but also usefully, describes the innovative practices of the feminist manifesto, and whose description of the transversal terms of creating change in any field provides a useful philosophy for recognising the manifesto form. The article argues a number of points: first, the author notes that the form of the manifesto is a radical signal of epistemic change; second, the author argues that for the feminist, the activation of time in the manifesto offers a break from the machinic subjectivity of patriarchal systems; and, finally, the author discusses how this regendered temporal mode can manifest the motive power required to move us into a reinvigorated collective feminism.

Towards a Futurology of the Present: Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest in December 2011. PDF came out weird (I'll replace it when I get time), so better to visit the link!

First paragraph: "Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine... more First paragraph: "Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us..."

THE ASYMMETRY OF HOPE: REFLECTIONS ON A HUMAN PREDICAMENT

by Byron Kaldis

El fundamento de la esperanza en "El intercambio", de Clint Eastwood

by Juan Pablo Serra

Published in Enrique Fuster and John Wauck (eds.), RAGIONE, FICTION E FEDE: CONVEGNO INTERNAZIONALE SU FLANNERY O'CONNOR, EDUSC, Roma, 2011, 361-370 [congress proceedings]

In order to not being a mere fantasy or a delusion, hope needs to spring from a real ground, neither invented nor... more In order to not being a mere fantasy or a delusion, hope needs to spring from a real ground, neither invented nor forced by humans. The last line of dialogue from the film "Changeling" (Clint Eastwood, 2008) refers to the rebirth of hope for the protagonist, which, given the unfair, arbitrary and incomprehensible social environment depicted in the film, tinges with ambiguity such a statement. Can a tragic director like Clint Eastwood propose hope at the end of a movie? After reviewing the critical reception of the film and pointing out the fundamental anthropological insights in Eastwood's filmography, in this paper I shall distinguish between and "existential" and an "ontological" optimism. Then I will go to study whether there is a real change in the view of human nature in Eastwood's recent films, and finally I'll explain in what sense Eastwood himself is entitled to speak of hope -after all, the tragic is also capable of recognizing the existence of valuable realities which "validate" the hope- and in what sense his affirmation of hope is still unfounded, as it is made from a voluntarist attitude -namely, an attitude of expecting things because you "want" to but wait on something.

"Economies of Hope in a Period of Transition; the Time of Parents Leading up to Livertransplantation of their Child"

by mare knibbe

Mare Knibbe & Marian Verkerk, 2008. Published as a chapter in
H. Lindeman, M.A. Verkerk & M.U. Waker (eds), 2008, 'Naturalized Bioethics, Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice', Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

In which ways can the future that parents of liver transplant patient’s hope for be present in hoping? And how are... more In which ways can the future that parents of liver transplant patient’s hope for be present in hoping? And how are professionals involved in the hopes of parents? In our empirical-ethical study about liver transplantation of children and living parental liver donation, the various answers to these questions were mutually related: Ways of attending to the future were geared to the way parents entered relations with professional caregivers and vice versa; relations were geared to specific patterns of hope and inviting a future.
In interviews with parents about the liver transplantation of their child, the time leading up to transplantation is depicted as a period of transition. The illness of their child and the uncertain prospects of transplantation had abruptly interrupted their lives. In this period they had to learn how to live with the child’ disease and threats to its future and they had to find their way in a complex medical practice that was new to them. Parents testified to different ways of carving a route through this period of transition. In this process, hope seems to be a central quality.
A focus on the futurity and social character of hoping in our study sheds light on some interesting variations in ‘economies of hope’; the investments of thought, attention, imagination and feeling, and in divisions of ‘hoping labor’ between patients, parents, professionals, or other caregivers. Our respondents had different ways of involving others in their hopes. We think that recognition of these variations in economies of hope is important if we want to estimate the value and vulnerabilities of specific hoping patterns.

Love, Hope, and the Nature of _Merci_ in Machaut's Musical Balades _Esperance_ (B13) and _Je ne cuit pas_ (B14)

by Elizabeth Eva Leach

Link via MUSE.

Hopeloos lijden (Hopeless Suffering)

by Titus Rivas

Online paper, written in 1994.

A Passion for the Possible: On Jakob Dylan, Cormac McCarthy, Japan, and Prevenient Hope

by Matthew Josiah Miller

Published in Curator Magazine, 15 July 2011
Short piece in a well-established online culture magazine

The Negative Shadow Cast by Positive Psychology: Contrasting Views and Implications of Humanistic and Positive Psychology on Resiliency

by Brent Robbins

Co-authored with Harris L. Friedman. Draft submitted to The Humanistic Psychologist, in review.

Resiliency is the ability to survive, or even thrive, during adversity.  It is a key construct within both... more Resiliency is the ability to survive, or even thrive, during adversity.  It is a key construct within both humanistic and positive psychology, but each sees it from a contrasting vantage.  Positive psychology decontextualizes resilience by judging it as a virtue regardless of circumstance, while humanistic psychology tends to view it in a more holistic way in relationship to other virtues and environmental affordances, clarifying how resiliency can actually be either a virtue or a vice depending upon circumstances.  Adolf Hitler is presented as an example of a resilient person who would not be seen as virtuous, while the U.S. Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness study training warfighters in resiliency illustrates possible ethical problems with a decontextualized view of resiliency. 

Hobbes and the future: looking beyond "homo oeconomicus"

by Lucas Perkins

Introduction: The Hope and Crisis of Pragmatic Transition: Politics, Law, Anthropology, and South Korea

by Amy Levine

Dissertation Introduction: comments welcome.

This dissertation demonstrates how the urgent condition of crisis is routine for many non-governmental (NGO) and... more This dissertation demonstrates how the urgent condition of crisis is routine for many non-governmental (NGO) and non-profit organization (NPO) workers, activists, lawyers, social movement analysts, social designers and ethnographers.  The study makes a contribution to the increasing number of anthropological, legal, pedagogical, philosophical, political, and socio-legal studies concerned with pragmatism and hope by approaching crisis as ground, hope as figure, and pragmatism as transition or placeholder between them.  In effect this work makes evident the agency of the past in the apprehension of the present, whose complexity is conceptualized as scale, in order to hopefully refigure ethnography’s future role as an anticipatory process rather than a pragmatic response to crisis or an always already emergent world.  This dissertation is based on over two years of fieldwork inside NGOs, NPOs, and think tanks, hundreds of conversations, over a hundred interviews, and archival research in Seoul, South Korea.  The transformation of the “386 generation” and Roh Moo Hyun’s presidency from 2003 to 2008 serve as both the contextual background and central figures of the study.  This work replicates the historical, contemporary, and anticipated transitions of my informants by responding to the problem of agency inherent in crisis with a sense of scale and a rescaling of agency.  I demonstrate this scale of agency—ideology, field, sacrifice, discourse, project, and agenda—along with its double bind entanglements. In so doing this dissertation shows the utopian and post-utopian hope in rescaling kinship from filiation to affiliation and rescaling agency from person to movement and from revolution to social design.  Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of scale and its shifts in the generation and sustainability of hope for NGO and NPO workers, activists, lawyers, social movement analysts, social designers, and ethnographers alike.