Critical Hope Collective

Critical Hope Collective brings together people from across Queen Mary who are interested in examining the concept, practice and politics of hope in a time of climate change, environmental destruction, intensifying inequality and political instability. Rather than taking hope to be a universal, timeless and necessarily positive relation to the future, they seek to explore the historical and geographical contingencies of hope and the political implications of its different mobilisations, enactments and effects.

Hope stands for an array of meanings and serves contrasting positions on what the world can and should be. With its promise of happiness via consumption and financial security through meritocratic effort, hope supplies capitalism with desire and labour (Pettit, 2024). Hope is thus entangled in the system that has caused the earth crisis and can be deployed to deflect calls for fundamental economic and political change, including indigenous people’s demands for justice and redress (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen 2022). Hope can frame technical fixes to climate change that serve business as usual. Yet, for some climate activists, including those facing immediate climate induced threats, hope is a resource and practice that emerges from collective effort, requires work and enables action (Solnit and Lutunatabua 2023). This is a version of hope that is far from naïve or passive optimism (Eagleton 2015). It is hope as radically oppositional and vital to the possibilities of a post-capitalist future (Holloway 2022). ‘Active Hope’ is the basis of efforts to acknowledge climate grief and anxiety and work in the present and towards that future, despite uncertainty about what that future could be and how it can be achieved (Macy and Johnstone 2022). Those addressing eco-anxiety among children and young people also argue for the need to foster hope (Buchanan, et al. 2021; Ojala 2015). These different iterations of hope evoke different temporalities and reflect spatially and socio-economically differentiated possibilities of and forms of hope in a highly unequal world in which the effects of climate change have greatest impact on those already most affected by capitalism, colonialism and racism (Kumar and Pickerill 2024).

Critical Hope Collective explores the risks, tricks, limits and radical potential of hope. They ask: Under what conditions is hope possible, for whom and where? What is being hoped for? How is hope enacted? What does hope enable and foreclose?

Their activities include:

• Critical Hope research seminar series, reading groups and other events. Details for 2024-25 will be provided as plans develop.
• Critical Hope pedagogic initiatives to help provide students with the knowledge, understanding and personal skills to engage with and navigate the complexities of the nature, causes and consequences of the earth crisis. These include the creation of teaching resources and development of teaching practices that are informed by academic and educational research and in discussion with students. 

Call for Members

The Collective welcomes contributions to:

• their research discussions and events, teaching initiatives and other activities;
• formulating cross-School large grant applications;
• developing small research projects involving two or more Schools;
• developing a strategy for public dissemination of their collective research through public events, cultural activities, social media, websites, and blogs.

Professor Catherine Nash (School of Geography), Dr Heather McMullen (Wolfson Institute of Public Health) and Dr Tibisay Morgandi (School of Law, Centre for Commercial Law Studies) co-convene the Collective and look forward to working with colleagues across and beyond Queen Mary who share an interest in this field of enquiry. Please get in touch with them if you would like to be involved.