Hope: Shortcuts to a Big Idea

David Chandler’s Hope offers a compelling exploration of the politics of hope against the backdrop of a broken world grappling with global crises, from political disillusionment to catastrophic climate change, where alternative futures seem difficult to imagine in positive terms.

Examining hope as an ethicopolitical praxis, Chandler offers a highly readable analysis of how hope can sustain alternative futures amidst widespread uncertainty and disillusionment, critically engaging with hope’s transformative potential, and challenging conventional political approaches and envisioning new ways of thinking about trust, care and relational politics. It traces the concept of hope through diverse critical traditions, including the Frankfurt School, Black Radical Tradition, Queer Utopianism, Critical Indigenous Studies and contemporary Critical Black Studies, and delves into the social and historical contexts of hope, analysing its role in communities of survivance, struggle and experimentation. Crucially, and uniquely, the author emphasises the human subject’s centrality to hope, exploring how unconscious desires and liberated imaginations can foster new political imaginaries and connecting theoretical insights with practical applications for navigating today’s critical challenges.

A thought-provoking examination of how struggles to keep futural possibilities alive in the present strive to move beyond a politics that can only reproduce more of the same, Hope is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental humanities, politics and the social sciences.