Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) hosted the Field Day ‘Imagining Possibilities: On Hope’ in June, making a convivial area the place curious minds got here collectively to discover methods we will use hopeful apply to think about higher prospects for residing nicely collectively in a more-than-human world.
What does it imply to navigate the stress between the true, the doable and the imaginative?
While imagining the format and content material of CSF’s Field Day 2025in dialog with the members and associates of the Centre, I tried to answer this query, additionally drawing on earlier explorations examined throughout our LCF Fashion Undressed: Imagining Possibilities Festival organised to have a good time CSF’s 15th anniversary in April final yr. As we needed to make use of the Field Day as a chance to come back collectively to make sense of issues that have an effect on relations, each human and more-than-human, in and thru style, it grew to become clear to me that making sense concerned not solely the senses, but additionally the insensible.
It is thru the phrases of feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad that I discovered an entry level into what the insensible is likely to be, as she writes: ‘The power of creativeness places us in contact with the probabilities for sensing the insensible’, which implies greedy what just isn’t but however is likely to be, not being however changing into. Inspired by Barad’s writing on contact, on coming collectively by contact, we envisioned the Field Day as an area and time that allowed new encounters and new relations, not solely between the individuals who attended the occasion, or between topics and issues, but additionally between imagined areas, imagined occasions, and imagined beings.
It is a type of being accountable and responsive, striving to redefine what it means to be hopeful in a world the place inequality, injustices, genocide, and ecocide appear to be the situations of life. And right here comes the subtitle, or the crucial of CSF’s ‘Imagining Possibilities Field Day: On Hope’. Paulo Freire and bell hooks insist that it is essential that we keep hope even when the harshness of actuality might counsel the alternative. But what’s hope? Or, extra particularly, how can we perceive hope each individually and collectively? When does hope turn into a drive, an motion? Through a sequence of workshops, conversations, and embodied practices on the Field Day we embraced hope in its affective dimension, in its potential to behave upon us and to be activated by us, each individually and collectively. This is what it means to think about prospects of hope, the place hope is each ‘a device and a apply’, to make use of the phrases of one of many Field Day individuals.
What position does hope play in ‘troubled times’ (Facer, 2019)? What position does hope play in difficult dominant exploitative paradigms and forging different pathways for collective thriving?
But what is hope? When we sat right down to unpick the tenets of hope in preparation for facilitating the Field Day, it appeared, at first, apparent – is it to not imagine there’s something higher? Through analysis, discussions with colleagues and experiencing the Day itself, I now perceive that it isn’t merely about being hopeful but additionally appearing on hope.
Hope can really feel like a fickle endeavour, one thing free and tough to understand. Perhaps one thing trivial, Pollyanna or missing depth in criticality and complexity. A throwaway line used to melt the blow of an explosive, tough or uncomfortable scenario. Yet hope just isn’t passive or puerile, it’s inherently energetic and energising. Hope just isn’t solely a potent emotion, however an motion – the potential and capability to behave on goals, with resilience and flexibility (Snyder, 2002).
To be hopeful is to not be naive or to decrease the importance of trepidation or to lack understanding of real-world horrors, however to be adventurous, visionary, brave, daring and certainly imaginative, within the face of such uncertainty, chaos and flux. Journalist and essayist Benjamin de Casseres commented in 1916, ‘In the chic battle of man in opposition to Reality, man has however one weapon, the creativeness’. Amidst the various atrocities raging, humanitarian crises, local weather collapse and ecological breakdown taking place in very actual time, it’s our creativeness, our hopeful imagining, that shakes actuality and transforms it.
I typically really feel pulled by the stress between hoping and despairing. Yet coexisting inside this messy state permits us to maneuver by the drudgery of our issues and envision the sunshine on the finish of the tunnel. As Ahmed (2017) attests, ‘Hope is not at the expense of struggle but animates a struggle; hope gives us a sense that there is a point to working things out, working things through.’ Hope might not present us the trail to take however as an alternative guides us to in direction of empowerment to navigate treacherous paths.
It felt barely incongruous to plan a gathering designed for individuals to be ‘hopeful’ in sooner or later, as it’s typically the ‘incidental interactions’ (Maier, 2025, p. 250) during which seeds of empathy and connection are planted and pleasure is nurtured. But being along with a bunch of numerous individuals to discover the very essence of what it’s to inhabit our world with care was invigorating.
Underpinned by a post-critical pedagogical lens, we created a ‘Hope(ful) meditation’ and ‘Hope(ful) playing cards’ to problem our preconceived concepts of hope and encourage new methods of eager about and activating hope. The Hope(ful) Meditation and Cards are designed to create a crucial, empathetic, reflexive, reflective and considerate dialogue round hope, personally and conceptually. The Hope(ful) Card apply attracts from Ella Saltmarshes’ ‘The Long Time Dialogue’ methodology, during which individuals in pairs have interaction in free-associating dialogue and empathetic listening.
The poem beneath, ‘Hope Is’, is my approach of expressing the visceral methods hope manifests, how I expertise what hope is.
The feeling(s) inside our goals
An expletive working to shore
Bellows heard by halls.
The nooks and cracks of pavements
Shattered stained-glass home windows
Homes manufactured from sand, constructed by hand
Gardens watered with tears
Wisteria-infused air.
A message from the skies
Folklore whispered throughout time
Glimmering auras and kaleidoscopic ardours
Grown by those that despair
Nourished by those that care.
What does it imply to hope because the world crumbles round me?
When I volunteered to assist facilitate the newest iteration of Field Day, I admit to some scepticism to the theme of hope. While I recognised it because the anchor thought of the day, I dismissed it as a blithe in style sentiment used to paper over private and structural cracks. Allowing my comfy but defensive cynicism to proceed to supply (restricted) balm to my pissed off, offended self, drowning in late-stage capitalism.
Yet, I found, hope is persistent, crucial, energetic, collective. Ultimately, political.
Persistent: You won’t really feel prefer it, however you possibly can’t flip away, it doesn’t work like that. I see your cynicism, your defence however I problem you to look away. Don’t. It’s greater than a passive temper or type of gratitude. It’s a problem. Look, see this connection, this concept, this risk…
Critical: It acts as a device of critique. To hope can be to say, hey, look, cease. This is the change. See the injustice. Explain it. Grapple with it. Name it. Believe that it might change. Freire and hooksremind me.
It’s an energetic motion: And I don’t imply to interact in tautology. But to stress the agential component of hope. While as a sense it perhaps fleeting. As an motion it’s engaged, it’s one thing I can do. I’ve been compelled from passivity. Into a approach of relating. Imagining. Connecting. Believing. Risking. Sharing. It is energetic in creating new methods of being. How can we dare to hope that issues is likely to be totally different, is likely to be greater than they’re now?
Collective: The Field Day was about coming collectively. With these within the room and people past, these we all know and people we don’t. Hope compelled me to place myself apart. Forced me (persistence?) again into relation.
Political: Hope is an moral exercise. An moral exercise involved with exploring prospects and imaginations of the ‘good life’. Pretty a lot the Aristotelian definition of politics. To construct one thing else within the ‘shell of the old’ is to prefigure. It is to interact in some prefigurative politics.
Hope is important. And as Freire prompt from our outset that ‘it is imperative that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite’.
Casseres, B.d. (1916), ‘Shelley’, The Poetry Journal, 6(1), p. 20.
Facer, Okay. (2019). ‘Storytelling in troubled occasions: what’s the position for educators within the deep crises of the twenty first century?’ Literacy53(1), pp. 3-13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12176
Freire, P. (2021) Pedagogy of Hope. 1st edn. Bloomsbury Academic.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education because the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Maier, S. (2025) ‘Hope in an artwork college’, in S. Abegglen, T. Burns, R. Heller, R. Madhok, F. Neuhaus, J. Sandars, S. Sinfield and U.G. Singh (eds.) Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education. Open Book Publishers, pp. 247-256. Available at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0462