PhD. Workshop: The Conundrum of Hope: Anthropological Engagements with Hope and Despair

Description

In this PhD course we want to untangle the slippery concept of hope. Participants will become familiar with different theoretical perspectives of hope and despair and methods to engage with the subject. In the literature hope has both been seen as pivotal for change and resistance against the order of things but also as deception and escapism potentially leading towards further suffering. Anthropologist encounters hope in a range of different ways and settings and levels of life. Hope is simultaneously personal and social; emergent from the individual or social body. As a personal aspiration or orientation we encounter hope ethnographically when meeting people who seek to move spatially and/or socially. In such situations questions of hopes, dreams and futures become especially poignant; what are people moving towards? What are they escaping from? What kind of life is imagined or wished for? Equally, the flipsides of hope also become especially pronounced in such circumstance in the form of despair, discouragement and liminality as people’s aspirations for mobility may falter and fail. Hope however is not only embodied in subjective experience, it is also embedded in larger social and societal contexts. In a range of areas it can be examined on a structural level; in political governance and collective visions of a good life, in humanitarian efforts of who is worth rescuing and who can be left behind, as well as in urban planners’ ambitions to develop housing and slum areas for future social change, to mention a few examples. In this context it becomes relevant to ask: What kind of social and political institutions facilitate or block hope? The course will theoretically configure the problem of hope on two levels: Firstly we want to delve into how hope has been dealt with theoretically/analytically in anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Here we wish discuss ways of conceptualizing people’s engagements with future present and past by exploring concepts such as nostalgia (Piot), potentiality (Agamben, Vigh) and the not-yet-conscious (Bloch) to name a few. Thus, presenting possible conceptual tools as well as methodological inspiration for the participants’ own work. Secondly we want to explore how our interlocutors engage with and experience hope and, not least, despair in their lives. In what ways can our empirical material be grasped analytically through the lens of hope and despair? With reference to the participants’ own work and the course literature we will try to grasp questions such as: How is hope re-made and negotiated along the path of uncertainties and suffering? How do local contexts shape our interlocutors’ hopes and aspirations for the future, but also their ideas of sacrifice and despair? And who are the “brokers of hope” in our interlocutor’s life worlds?

Period	25 Mar 2015 → 26 Mar 2015
Event type	Workshop
Location	København, DenmarkShow on map