If You Rebuild It, They Will Come: Reimagining Higher Ed with Pedagogies of Hope

“Hope is a discipline.”  Mariame Kaba We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. (2021) 

“We must dare to imagine and to dream. It is precisely in hopeless times that the act of teaching becomes a radical gesture of hope.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (1994)

In an era marked by uncertainties such as the climate crisis, polarization, digital disruption, and ongoing inequities in higher education, hope can seem like an endangered resource. Across universities today, hope has become both urgent and endangered. Neoliberal reforms, administrative precarity, algorithmic surveillance, and the erosion of public trust have reshaped the landscape of higher education.  Yet, in university classrooms across the world, educators and students continue to enact small, radical gestures of hope through the communities they form, the futures they imagine together, and the questions, answers, and actionable energy they enact. Teaching, as bell hooks reminds us, “is an act of love” and thus always an act of hope (Teaching to Transgress, 1994)., 

This anthology invites contributions that explore hope as a pedagogical practice, theoretical framework, and ethical stance within university settings. We invite educators, researchers, and practitioners to consider how hope functions as a form of critical persistence i.e., a refusal to surrender the future of learning to despair or technocratic inevitability rather than as naïve optimism or affective comfort.

This collection takes its cue from Zembylas (2014), who describes “critical hope” as the emotional infrastructure of pedagogy... the capacity to act ethically and politically even in the face of uncertainty. Not the opposite of despair but its interlocutor, Hope is a practice of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) while still insisting on the possibility of transformation. By assembling voices from across disciplines, identities, and geographies, If You Rebuild It, They Will Come: Reimagining Higher Ed with Pedagogies of Hope seeks to offer both a scholarly intervention and a living archive of educational resilience. Our aim is to cultivate a vocabulary for hope that goes beyond naïve optimism or affective comfort to practices that are rigorous, situated, and sustaining.

Aims and Scope: If You Rebuild It, They Will Come: Reimagining Higher Ed with Pedagogies of Hope will bring together interdisciplinary essays and creative-critical contributions that consider how hope operates across the intellectual and institutional terrains of higher education. We ask:

• What does it mean to teach hopefully amid exhaustion, crisis, and institutional, administrative, and political constraint?

• In what sense might hope be an intellectual practice and theoretical framework for continuing resistance and transformation in contexts of grief, disruption, or calamity? 

• In what ways can hope serve as a methodology for equity, imagination, inclusion, and care in university teaching and research?

Drawing on traditions of critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux), feminist and decolonial praxis (hooks, Ahmed), and affective and posthuman theory (Berlant, Braidotti, Zembylas), this collection seeks to document and theorize the powerful radicalism of hopeful teaching.

Possible Themes:

• Reclaiming teaching as resistance and equity within neoliberal institutions.

• Hope as a shared affective labor and emotional and ethical commitment.

• Re-storying education as decolonial, relational, and restorative pedagogical practice.

• Replacing burnout and uncertainty with pedagogical renewal and openings.

• Imagining new forms of intimacy, solidarity, and connection through ethical and equitable use of technologies in teaching.

• Hope as a collective and infrastructural, not individual, responsibility.

• Concrete ways of working for institutional change in higher education in ways that rejuvenate instead of burn through those doing this labor.

• Student agency, mutuality, and radical imagination in university life through collective and co-created learning.

• Teaching as a speculative and world-building exercise.

Editors: Dr. Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey Associate Professor, English, Gender Studies, Alma College, USA & Dr. Ellen Moll Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University, USA. 

Submission Details:

• Abstracts: 300–400 words with a short bio (100 words)

• Chapters: 5,000–7,000 words (inclusive of references)

• Formats accepted: Scholarly essays, co-authored dialogues, creative-critical works, narrative inquiries, pedagogical case studies, critical responses, etc.

• Abstract deadline: July 15, 2026

• Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2026

• Full chapters due: January 30, 2027.

• Publisher: Two university presses have expressed interest; a decision will be made based on submissions and fit. 

Contact:

Please submit abstracts and inquiries to dora-laskepm@alma.edu with the subject line “Pedagogies of Hope”

Select References:

• Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.

• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1994.

• hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

• Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ’Til We Free Us. Haymarket Books, 2021.

• Zembylas, Michalinos. “Theorizing ‘Difficult Knowledge’ in the Aftermath of the ‘Affective Turn’: Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogy.” Curriculum Inquiry 44.3 (2014): 390–412.

• Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.