Excerpt from the chapter

Each year, students enroll in college courses with a heightened understanding of planetary crisis and with that, often a heightened sense of anxiety and despair. Environmental classes often discuss the systemic character and urgency of current crises but leave little space to manage and explore the emotional response to these realities.

Professor Dan Suarez (Middlebury College) chose a different approach in his one-month course The Politics of Hope. He challenged students to intentionally sit with the more difficult feelings that come with studying planetary transformation and upheaval and to use that experience to think critically about the sociocultural and political contexts of hope.

For the final assignment, he asked students to answer the question “How should we hope?” This chapter includes four of those responses as well as a reflection by Professor Suarez. There are some common threads among them – coexisting truths, collective and compounding hope, uncertainty – but I invite you to read them in full to get a better sense of how they both explore and deviate from these ideas.

“To say that despair is unproductive and dangerous is not to say that the feelings that fuel it should be ignored.” - Sidra Pierson

“Just as we should not forget the implications of a collective “we” or the nonhuman cohabitors of this earth, we should not forget our complex history.” - Sophie Chalfin-Jacobs

“We must learn from our grief, anger, and anxiety, and channel them into both gratitude and loving, transformative action in order to lose as little as we can moving forward. Grief and hope can coexist.” - Annaliese Terlesky

“We need a hope that extends beyond the future of individuals. We must hope for a collective future that we take an active role in constructing.” - Hannah Gokaslan

Contact details

Dan is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can contact him via this email.