Hopeful attachments on a ruined planet

Organizers: Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Futures of Sustainability’, University of Hamburg, 09–11 October 2024

What orientations towards the future are emerging as intertwined ecological, social, and political crises intensify? The conference explores the entanglements of catastrophic and hopeful thinking in the Anthropocene. In particular, it examines the role of hopeful attachments in the midst of the ongoing destruction of life-worlds. As more and more ecosystems and social fabrics are threatened, what forms of visionary, future-oriented politics might still emerge? What promises are made at a time when the future seems lost (Garcés 2023)? Where are people investing in alternative ‘architectures of possibilities’ (Simone 2020), and to what effect?

The programme included the following talks:

- Hope in Ruins: Rethinking Hope in Dystopian Times. A Critical Assessment

- Hope & Critique in the Anthropocene: Negativity as Hope. A Lens for Critique in the Anthropocene

- Feminist and Decolonial Recoveries of Hope: Situating Critical Hope From Dialectical, Queer Feminist, Decolonial Perspectives

- World-Making Otherwise: Worlding as Radical Hope. An Abolitionist Agenda for World-Making Otherwise

- (Urban) Polycrisis & Hope: Hope in Crisis. Reconsidering Resilience in the Wake of COVID-19

- Global Politics of Hope: Technologies of Hope(Lessness). The Anticipatory Politics of Climate Overshoot and Carbon Removals

- Social Movements, Extinction, and Hopelessness: Before It’s Too Late. The Extinction Script, Multi-Species Reproductive Futurism and Extinction Rebellion

- Climate Justice, Hope, and the Law: Five Acts of Hope in Environmental Law

- Hope, Loss and Life, Concrete Experiments in Temporality: Practising Hope and (Re)Generating Life. Experiments in Weaving a Global Tapestry of Alternatives

- (and others)

More information
https://www.zukuenfte-nachhaltigkeit.uni-hamburg.de/aktivitaeten/events-conferences/2024-10-09-11-annual-conference.html