31.060 - Critical Hope and Social Justice

Session Type: Working Group Roundtable

Abstract

This session includes presentations on critical hope from five international contexts, illuminating conceptual and theoretical understandings and action-oriented responses to hope and despair encountered in social justice educational work. Critical hope, we suggest, is not only undertheorized in educational studies, but is central to collective organizing against injustice and to educational equity. Our notion of critical hope is distinctive in three ways. Firstly, it is used as a unitary concept which cannot be disaggregated into either hopefulness or criticality; secondly, as an analytical concept, which recognizes its affective, political, intellectual and spiritual features. Thirdly, the papers explore both the local and global significance revealing differentiated nuances of “critical hope” in social justice education for distinctive international and local contexts.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Educators for Social Justice

Chair

• Megan Boler, University of Toronto

Papers

• Exploring "Critical Emotional Praxis" in Pedagogies of Critical Hope - Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus

• Beyond Naïve Hope: The Emotional Challenges of Critical Hope in Pedagogies - Megan Boler, University of Toronto

• Discomforting Dialogues Across Difference and Critical Hope in South Africa - Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape; Ronelle L. Carolissen, Stellenbosch University; Brenda Lana Leibowitz, University Of Johannesburg

• Critical Pedagogy and Redemptive Narratives of Hope - Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University

• Embracing Struggle for Critical Hope Against Despair in Antiracism Education - Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Black British Education Movements: Political Struggle, Critical Hope - Paul Warmington, The University of Birmingham