A Manifesto for Inventing Hope
Location
Bigfoot Room 124
Start Date
22-4-2023 1:00 PM
End Date
22-4-2023 2:15 PM
Publication Date
2023
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Law | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Description
Waning democracy, climate derangement, public health crises, rising white supremacist regimes, and ongoing threats to policies and practices that safeguard human (and more-than-human) rights all make up a short list of what contemporary college students face in everyday life. Encountering students in campus contexts, it has become quite clear that they carry a level of emotional weight that culminates in a sense of despondence and existential dread. For students already on and at the margins of higher education, the burden is even greater. Given that our Jesuit orientation emphasizes the active promotion of social justice, the common good, care for the planet, and preference for the poor and marginalized, we discuss injustice at each turn, in depth, and with the hope that critical examination of meaning, power, and identity might inspire student engagement, activism, and transformation. Yet, these critical conversations take an emotional toll. Thus, we find ourselves asking: how does our current critical pedagogical attitude also foster hope? As our students confront complex reactions and rational anxieties to violence, neglect, destruction, and hatred, we are tasked with improving our students’ relationship to hope. For educators, the question becomes: How do we respond to hate and hatefulness? What do we do now?
With this in mind, we have begun the process of structuring hope into our syllabi, our classes, and our program. Drawing from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including communication studies, environmental studies, and feminist theory, this roundtable seeks to extend our own conversations about what is possible as we think creatively about pedagogical approaches to hope. A roundtable at a Hate Studies conference offers a fantastic opportunity for a wide-ranging discussion to inform our work.
Our roundtable will invite participants to explore how “education is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness” (hooks, 2003, p. xiv) by engaging the following questions:
- What kinds of practices might help spark, and foster, student capacities to inventively, creatively, and meaningfully engage in re-imagining and re-shaping everyday life?
- What cultural and institutional norms impede pedagogies of hope, creativity, and imagination?
- Where do we find the imaginative resources for fostering hopeful pedagogies?
- How can hope be scaffolded/structured in pedagogical settings?
- How do we engage in radically hopefully pedagogy that is radically inclusive and takes account of how pedagogies of hope are interconnected with questions about power, identities, and positionalities? Who does a pedagogy of hope help? Who is burdened with the labor of developing and maintaining hopeful pedagogies?
In addition to conversation, this roundtable includes interactive components. Participants will engage and experiment with developing and sharing hopeful pedagogical practices that can be incorporated into the classroom context. As Jenkins, et al. (2020) said, “There can be no politics without hope, and it is through imagination that our hopes are rekindled” (p. 3). A pedagogy of hopeful imagination can resist the proliferation of hate in the 21st century and help establish communities of resistance that can imagine something better coming into being.
Description Format
html
Recommended Citation
Favara, Jeremiah; Crandall, Heather; and Gordon, Jeremy, "A Manifesto for Inventing Hope" (2023). International Conference on Hate Studies. 58.
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/icohs/2023/seventh/58
Full Text of Presentation
wf_no
Media Format
flash_audio
Type
Roundtable
A Manifesto for Inventing Hope
Bigfoot Room 124
Waning democracy, climate derangement, public health crises, rising white supremacist regimes, and ongoing threats to policies and practices that safeguard human (and more-than-human) rights all make up a short list of what contemporary college students face in everyday life. Encountering students in campus contexts, it has become quite clear that they carry a level of emotional weight that culminates in a sense of despondence and existential dread. For students already on and at the margins of higher education, the burden is even greater. Given that our Jesuit orientation emphasizes the active promotion of social justice, the common good, care for the planet, and preference for the poor and marginalized, we discuss injustice at each turn, in depth, and with the hope that critical examination of meaning, power, and identity might inspire student engagement, activism, and transformation. Yet, these critical conversations take an emotional toll. Thus, we find ourselves asking: how does our current critical pedagogical attitude also foster hope? As our students confront complex reactions and rational anxieties to violence, neglect, destruction, and hatred, we are tasked with improving our students’ relationship to hope. For educators, the question becomes: How do we respond to hate and hatefulness? What do we do now?
With this in mind, we have begun the process of structuring hope into our syllabi, our classes, and our program. Drawing from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including communication studies, environmental studies, and feminist theory, this roundtable seeks to extend our own conversations about what is possible as we think creatively about pedagogical approaches to hope. A roundtable at a Hate Studies conference offers a fantastic opportunity for a wide-ranging discussion to inform our work.
Our roundtable will invite participants to explore how “education is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness” (hooks, 2003, p. xiv) by engaging the following questions:
- What kinds of practices might help spark, and foster, student capacities to inventively, creatively, and meaningfully engage in re-imagining and re-shaping everyday life?
- What cultural and institutional norms impede pedagogies of hope, creativity, and imagination?
- Where do we find the imaginative resources for fostering hopeful pedagogies?
- How can hope be scaffolded/structured in pedagogical settings?
- How do we engage in radically hopefully pedagogy that is radically inclusive and takes account of how pedagogies of hope are interconnected with questions about power, identities, and positionalities? Who does a pedagogy of hope help? Who is burdened with the labor of developing and maintaining hopeful pedagogies?
In addition to conversation, this roundtable includes interactive components. Participants will engage and experiment with developing and sharing hopeful pedagogical practices that can be incorporated into the classroom context. As Jenkins, et al. (2020) said, “There can be no politics without hope, and it is through imagination that our hopes are rekindled” (p. 3). A pedagogy of hopeful imagination can resist the proliferation of hate in the 21st century and help establish communities of resistance that can imagine something better coming into being.