Hope against hope: COVID-19 and the space for political imagination

Abstract

COVID-19 has loosened neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip on the future. Amid the enormous suffering experienced internationally, there is much discussion of how to ‘Build Back Better’, and hope for a more caring, just and sustainable world. But competing futures are being imagined and planned. Hope is never politically neutral, and the content of collective hope is a key site of political struggle. This is partly a question of space: who has the literal and discursive space in which to develop visions of the future? The following article considers the role that cultural studies can play in this struggle. ‘Conjunctural analysis’ has a key task, making visible the competing futures contained within the present. But cultural studies should go further: combining conjunctural analysis with methods drawn from a range of scholarly and activist traditions – including critical pedagogy, devised theatre and the interdisciplinary field of futures studies – that deliberately create spaces for imagining new futures.

Emerging from the global syndemic crucible: Finding belonging in a post corona future

“…In the course of imagining these future scenarios, authors update their understanding of what is possible in the future given the new conditions instigated by Covid-19 ( Gross, 2021 ). Imagining the future through narrative futuring and letter writing are creative processes that involve critical consciousness-raising and taking a moral inventory which can bolster letter writer’s moral sensitivity, judgment, and intentions for the future ( Narvaez & Mrkva, 2014 ).…”

“…These feelings of disconnection may be amplified by the syndemic, where people confront measures which further isolate them from people, spaces, and routines which help constitute belonging. As Gross (2021) argues, COVID-19 has transformed the material conditions within which life is experienced. Some individuals are sensitive to the virus’ syndemic quality.…”

Publicness and commoning: Pandemic intersections and collective visions at times of crisis

“…The hundreds of mutual aid groups, initiated digitally and enacted in practices and communication of solidarity on and offline across London's neighbourhoods, represent a striking example of commoning, even if ephemeral (or perhaps precisely because of this ephemerality). Mobilising the value of mutuality and horizontality of localised care, these networks shifted urban publicness away from conceptions of threat to publicness as radical hope ( Gross, 2021 ). Importantly, the groups were built on the basis of mutuality and interdependence, recognising the value of life and wellbeing to be protected not on the basis of pre-existing relations but on the basis of the collective threat.…”

“…Increasingly, reflective accounts note how this in turn produces the conditions for hope and optimism, where popular sensibilities can attune to the need for profound ecological, political-economic, social transformation. As Jonathan Gross argues, ‘Covid-19 has derailed hegemonic accounts of the future, making it possible and necessary to re-imagine many dimensions of human life’ ( Gross, 2021 : 2). Yet, as the pandemic moves into a stage of more diffuse and unequal impacts across and within states, Gross’s follow-up questions are pressing – ‘But who will do the imagining?…”

“…We examine the intensive publicness of the crisis to reflect on its assumed and established equation with progressive political possibility – transparency, accountability and democratic procedure. The informational dynamics of the pandemic have rendered this a significant area of current commentary and research ( Bratton, 2021 ; Gross, 2021 ; Nguyen et al, 2020 , among others), and thus our contribution to this discussion is limited and specific. Theoretically, we cut into the contemporary ambiguity of publicness by putting it into conceptual dialogue with the idea of commoning .…”