Hope against hope

In my work I tend to work through an ethnographic lens, situating small moments of meaning making within cultures and contexts, over time, with an attention to reflexivity and collective thinking (Campbell and Lassiter 2015). This work requires an attention to ‘small stories’ (Gorgakopolou 2008) and moments within meaning making when children and young people articulate something, or describe the world in a new way. I see the actions of young people as inherently hopeful, although what they say can be less so. Hope here is actualised in the small, particular moments, when a child might look at the skyline and observe a crane, or will look up and measure a tree. In Peter Kraftl’s words: 

…the task is to understand how hope is figured through the matters, routines, and practices of everyday lives—in this case, those of young people. (Kraftl 2008:86)

This idea of hope is situated in the lived moment of the everyday, and in that sense, hope is a precarious space (Nunn et al 2021). Moments of meaning making could be described as ‘prefigurative activism’ that involves actions that are carried out, collectively and cumulatively, by people's efforts of producing through their daily choices the desired reality they are committed to creating.  This is the work we see in the children’s drawings as activist moments.