Panel proposal #6 for the ASAP 17 Conference 
Madison, WI | October 15-17, 2026

How Soon is Now? Co-Constructing Hope for the Collective Present

Right before the 2017 presidential inauguration, Angela Davis spoke at the Women’s March, issuing a powerful call: “We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance. […] Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.” Almost halfway into Trump’s second term, “don’t despair, organize” is yet again a recurring imperative among activists and thinkers alike, resonating with notions of resistance, and hope to navigate the present. In this sense, the very condition of vulnerability (Butler, Gambetti, Sabsay 2016) constitutes hope-in-action. Linked with those “stories about navigating what is overwhelming” (Berlant 2011), vulnerability and hope are to be understood in terms of a collective effort to craft a different present, and not directed at an abstract, distant “better future.” Times of socio-political despair call for collective awareness and resistance in order to move beyond and against mere survival and/or acceptance of the imperialist, neoliberal status quo. This panel aims to look into narratives that give voice to the sense “of urgency, of impending” (Weinstein 2018) that permeates the current moment, works that can activate a cascading side effect of “collateral resilience” (Dimock 2025) and “respair” (Ward 2020). In other words, narratives that bring to the fore how the narrative act is a communicative and collaborative world-building practice that can foster the co-construction (Effron et al. 2019) of a collective present and thus serve as a means for social change.

Much contemporary fiction rethinks the idea and fact of vulnerability (Pellicer-Ortín and Sarikaya-Şen 2021; Fernández- Santiago and Gámez- Fernández 2022) as foundational to build a present not mediated by dominant authoritarian forces that distance individuals from communal efforts. Indeed, the urgency for non-utopian modes/strategies of care is increasingly generating unconventional narratives of hope and sociality (Berlant 2022), as in the case of Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) and Claudia Rankine (Just Us), or, just recently, Patricia Lockwood (Will There Ever Be Another You) and Angela Flournoy (The Wilderness). We seek papers investigating contemporary texts in which collective resistance is directly or indirectly arising from merging personal and communal vulnerability, and examining the narrative strategies and theoretical frameworks through which this process unfolds as hope-in-action.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, twenty-first-century fiction and:

• the reconfiguration of narrative time as a means for social change
• digital activism and its limits
• relationality/sociality (and lack thereof)
• narratives of care as counter-narratives
• the ethics of earnest/sincere narrative discourses
• hope emerging from genre-bending novels mixing fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, etc.
• genres reconfiguring their specificities to establish new strategies of care and collective resistance, including poetry and visual narratives
• direct address/deixis and narration as a “sign of relation” (McHale 1987, 223)
• we narratives, and other forms of collective storytelling

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 100-word bio to chiara.patrizi6@unibo.it and virginia.pignagnoli@uab.cat.