Symposium After Hope: Future Forms and Alternative Methods,
AAMSF, Sept. 25-27, 2020
After Hope seeks to engage critical explorations of hope as an aesthetic and embodied experience. The prompt to think “after” hope is intended as a way to consider hope’s complex relationship to the future and the past. Through presentations and workshops focused on cultural, material, and technological expressions of hope, this interdisciplinary symposium aims to explore hope as a dynamic index of change. To do so, it asks what it means to go after hope and what comes after hope.
Hope is an important historical, cultural, and social marker. Its significance for social action, however, is hotly debated. Often associated with general naiveté, or unrealizable utopian thought, hope can also be understood as a critical lens for understanding collective values and approaches to many of today's most pressing issues. It functions as an emotional register that underwrites, connects, divides and in other ways animates relationships between different communities, driving active processes of imagining, representing, and creating the conditions for desirable and eclectic futures. Through a discussion of hope in art, activism, and global alliances, we seek to understand expressions of optimism, pessimism, fear, and anticipation as part of cultural, material, and technological practices.
