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The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asylum seeking galvanises brutal state responses. The challenge of confronting the brutality of border security is understanding the elusive interlocking of knowledge and power that normalises technologies of securitisation, detention, and defiance of international conventions. In this paper we employ Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to interrogate the temporal horizon of border security discourse revealing the act of asylum seeking as a form of activism threatening breakthrough to an alternative future. In this analysis we expose discourses, such as Australia's Operation Sovereign Borders, as formations marked by temporal closure as much as by a specific imbrication of knowledge and power. Drawing on nine vignettes, we discern opposing versions of hope as people seeking asylum, politicians, activists, practitioners, and Australian citizens are enrolled into the diffuse and multifaceted global response to asylum seeking. We demonstrate differing temporalities distinguishing and advocating the overwhelming vision of hope in the act of asylum seeking itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Böll's famous novel seems in danger of being forgotten; this paper attempts to demonstrate its enduring topicality and relevance to the present day. It focuses on three themes: concern for humanity (Menschlichkeit), rejection of a capitalist market economy, and a re-evaluation of the concept of 'wastefulness', including racist and economic aspects. Set in Germany over half a century (1920–1971), Böll's critique of power politics, socio-economic and religious predominance is still relevant today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the figure of Thomas Müntzer in Marxist historiography, as well as the "utopianisation" of Müntzer in Ernst Bloch's 1921 study on Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution. I review some of the differences in Martin Luther and Müntzer in their competing views for the future after the break from Rome, and the theological thrust of Müntzer's vision. This is then connected with elements from Bloch's Müntzer, chiefly focussing on spirit and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a reading of Hari Kunzru's novel Red Pill to frame our contemporary political moment, this article asks what techniques of cultural critique are available to the Left today when the strategies of imaginary worldbuilding have become so central to the ethnonationalist politics of the Right. It argues that the end of the Cold War prompted a reconfiguration of political identities and public discourse in both the West and the former Soviet territories—through distinct but interrelated logics—that highlighted the failures of liberalism in ways that set the stage for the mainstream return of fascist politics of white supremacy. In this context of alternative histories taken as fact, of conspiracy rhetoric seemingly impervious to reason, this article asks how we can respond in intellectually robust ways that will help us to ground an inclusive culture and build a better future, practices the author situates in the broad field of Marxist-informed utopian studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the discourse of the new generation of environmental youth movements highlights time and temporality in order to explain the possibilities of change that the movements offer. This is done by analyzing three influential and transnational youth climate movements—Earth Uprising, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays For Future—in relation to three influential diagnoses of the current political condition: postpolitics, populism, and postapocalypse. The article argues that the movements should be understood as mobilizing through negative utopian energies. Using theoretical inspiration from Ernst Bloch, the article states that the discourse should be read as containing acts of hope and utopian impulses that reach forward toward a new beginning of a future possible. The article shows how the movements challenge the diagnoses of populism and postpolitics by their constant critique of capitalism, by reinstalling the people as heterogenous political subjects, and by representing a new temporality. Moreover, the article shows how the mainstream climate discourse contains two temporal narratives that run parallel to each other: one that can be thought of as a vernacular eschatology and one that is seemingly postapocalyptic. However, the article argues that both narratives provide visions of a better future to come, and by using the notion of anticipation, the article states that even the postapocalyptic narrative can be mobilizing. Thus, the environmental youth movements offer a new kind of discourse, one that is non-postpolitical, nonpopulist, and non-postapocalyptic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the temporal rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future to discuss how the new generation of climate movement organizations offers ideas of an open future that can be acted upon. Research has shown how climate organizations create economic and social disruptions. However, as the article shows, they also create temporal disruptions. Taking theoretical inspiration from critical utopian studies, the article states that the climate activists should be understood as utilizing a disruptive utopian method that aims to disrupt the present and thereby open the future. The method relies on utopias that are relational and open, not static or absolute. Hence, the utopianism employed by these groups is not about closure and perfection, but rather about openness and offering alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American echoes of the Paris Commune have been muffled by the nation’s obsession with freedom at the expense of solidarity, but performative responses to social upheaval, including drama, parades, and protests, have tested the boundaries of public space and multiple temporalities from 1871 to 2021. This article notes traces of the Commune in the writings and performances of nineteenth century American anarchists but analyzes this legacy primarily in the 2012 performance of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune (1949) at New York sites claimed by the Occupy Movement in 2011. It also uses the argument of Brecht’s contemporary Ernst Bloch for cultural action grounded in an understanding of historical disappointment to anticipates setbacks while maintaining hope for future revolution. The paper delineates five theses on the politics of time: 1) the dramatic appeal of the clean break hides the tension between gradual evolution and a sudden event that ruptures the long span of history (Badiou); 2) historiography, the narrative that turns data into evidence, challenges the illusion of objectivity and thus a simple split between timely intervention and untimely interference with the established order (Nietzsche); 3) ana-chronology, the logic of untimeliness reads contemporaneity as companionship between events and agents across different times and places (Barthes); 4) recollecting history requires acts of forgetting, which shatter the constraints of the past to meet demands of the present (Renan, Nietzsche); 5) the politics of time entails the politics of place and thus requires the analysis of multiple temporalitieslayered on one site as well as political acts and performance in distinct places.