People continuously contemplate motion – physical, social, spiritual or imaginary – even when they do not move, or all the more so if they feelstuck. What role does hope play in the pursuit of a better life? How do motion, emotion, and immobility enable or disable each other? Hope can be understood as a form of “cruel optimism” and a “cluster of promise”, but also as an antidote to cynicism and resignation in the face of the various contemporary instances of suffering and disenfranchisement. Whether as an aspiration to a better life, justice, and happiness, or as explanatory vocabulary generated by the belief in change, hope and the repertoire of alternative imaginaries that it summons, are often part and parcel of mobility and immobility alike. At this conference, we endeavor to tease out the implications of thisjuncture, its historical and cultural genealogy, and the consequences that it has for the reproduction ofsocial inequalities and difference, and how it is addressed by their actors and by researchers alike. To this end, we inquire beyond the structural conditions that prompt or limit people’s attempts to overcome geographic, social, or imaginary boundaries, and explore the moral and affective processesthat motivate and in turn are shaped by these pursuits of change. Rather than tackling these approaches separately, either favoring emic or phenomenological accounts of whatsets people into motion, or accounting for the systemic causations endured by neoliberal subjects, at this conference, we seek to overcome this analytical separation, and to pursue a relational analysis of hope and (im)mobilities.
