Hope: The Future of an Idea
In a troubled age, hope may seem an elusive feeling. Alongside its history as a virtue, a political concept, and a psychological state, it enjoys a vivid presence as a necessary but poorly understood experience in everyday life. To reframe it in the context of this Colloquy, we might ask: how has hope been defined and critiqued? Where does it lie latent or unacknowledged? And how does the work of the humanities depend on hope, and perhaps arouse it?
MoreReflecting on the 2024 Spring Celebration event held at the Stanford Humanities Center, Phillips asks “what sort of thing do we mean when we talk about hope”?
Kontos reflects on how humanities disciplines can help teach and cultivate hope. “Are the humanities a necessary and positive component of our lives as a source of hope," Kontos asks.
Pentcheva contemplates on hope as it emerges in the visual imagery of the eleventh-century Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas.
Oeler draws links between cinema and hope by asking "What can students of film hope for? And how are they to cultivate that hope?"
Brust reflects on the value of higher education in the U.S. What one can hope to achieve from this institution that is currently in crisis?
Reflecting on Ever Given, the cargo ship stuck for six days in the Suez Canal in 2021, Young discusses the call to open a single cargo container as an Afrofuturist manifestation that moves beyond the logics of individual capitalism.
Wager reimagines hope as emergent in postconflict Colombian literature, art, government reports, and cinema.
Getachew reflects on two forms of hope: a deference to fate and fortune on the one hand, and an active prefiguration or performance of hope on the other.
Contreras asks what happens when we wait for some end to materialize.
Two Stanford Humanities Center Fellows for 2023–24, Marroquín and Zuo, discuss the concept of hope.
Menon discusses the public art that proliferated at Stanford and in Palo Alto in response to the "Black Spring" of 2020.
Bashkin tells the story of Amal/Tivka, a twentieth-century Iraqi Jewish woman.
Errazzouki reflects on her personal identity as the Muslim granddaughter of a Jewish grandfather.