In this time of mounting institutional, national, and global crises, the need to discern and harness hope is more urgent than ever. Indeed, summoning hope may be key to imagining a more just future, strengthening our connections, and building resilience. Borrowing from Jonathan Lear, we conceive of “radical hope” as a potentially powerful, affect-laden state of mind. This kind of hope tells us why we can anticipate, in Paulo Freire’s words, “a future goodness” even as we “lack the appropriate concepts” to understand what that future would look like and how we might achieve it. Such hope is not naïve optimism; rather, it is, according to Freire, an ontological need that must be anchored in practice.

Of hope, Freire writes: The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naïveté, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is frivolous illusion (Freire, 1997: 8).

In this spirit, we remain committed to interrogating hope through the kind of nuanced, multidisciplinary, and generative discussion that is always the goal of this conference. Our gathering this year will host presentations by scholars and others, such as activists, artists, and journalists, who will explore the uses—and misuses—of hope in all its complexity to help us better understand its role in social change aimed at advancing race, gender, class, and other forms of equality in business and society. We will examine what it means to cultivate hope both individually and collectively and what different approaches offer (or, perhaps, do not offer) to those working to build new, fairer systems that honor the humanity of all peoples.