Hope: Alternative Futures and Broken Worlds

About the Event

The event is presented by the Radical Imaginaries Group of Sustainability Spotlight. Learn more about our thematic groups.

We are delighted to welcome David Chandler, Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, to campus for an insightful talk on his forthcoming book "Hope: Alternative Futures and Broken Worlds".

Hope appears to have been lost at a time where ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, when grand narratives of progress and social transformation are exhausted. However, in a world of uncertainty, of relational interdependence and entangled complexity, hope is increasingly central to ethicopolitical imaginaries which no longer focus their attention on traditional political parties and the state-based order. Hope today treads a fine line, on the one hand problematised for its privileged assumptions, on the other, it is held to be necessary for struggle, betterment and survival. It is this contemporary impasse of hope that is the subject of this talk which examines how hope is articulated today, as analysed instrumentally in analytical philosophy and social psychology, and contrapositions this to the ways in which hope is deployed to imagine the world and its politics differently, to work towards otherwise worlds rather than to maintain this one.

For more information please see David's interview about Hope and Resilience published in World Futures Review 2023 here.