Reclaiming Hope: Affect, Temporality, Politics

The critical task I take up in this research is to reconceptualize hope as an affective orientation in time, which requires remaining open to the risks that the unknowability of the future entails. I consider this opening a political contestation that is necessary to critique the current instrumentalization of hope as exclusively forward-looking, individualizing, and depoliticizing. Drawing on selected sources from queer theory, disability studies, affect theory, art, the critique of neoliberalism, and philosophy, each chapter of my dissertation engages diverging contemporary objects, including an online suicide prevention campaign, a Google commercial, self-help books, works of art, and political practices, in an attempt to understand hope anew. Following an interdisciplinary methodology, this research attempts to restore hope as a critical resource that has the potential to contribute to theories of time, affect, and knowledge production.