In Howard Zinn’s memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press 1994), he tells us that, “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It’s based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness.” Of course, it may feel counterintuitive—even if, arguably, it is of heightened importance—to bear Zinn’s message in mind as we are teaching in a sociohistorical moment that is heavily burdened by a looming sense of hopelessness.
For many of the undergraduate students entering our classrooms this fall, the global pandemic was the backdrop to their adolescence. They have grown up watching the atrocities and human rights violations of their time play out in the palms of their hands via livestream, on devices that provide them with a real-time window into the anguish of others from half a world away. Most have never known a world without a media environment saturated with sound bites and flashing images that normalize interpersonal graphic and state violence—often absorbed in isolation, from the private spheres of their bedrooms. Access to consumption of this material has been pervasive throughout formative periods of their cognitive and psycho-social development, comprising unprecedented generational vulnerabilities to the adverse impacts of such exposure.
These young people are now entering adulthood in an age of American politics that is powerfully hewn by the divisive influences of vitriolic rhetoric and weaponized disinformation. The environs of their broader world are shaped by a public discourse and public policy calling for and implementing the annihilation of the social safety net, as well as the revocation of hard-earned and long-established civil rights and civil liberties by an increasingly unchecked and emboldened executive branch. All of this accompanies the amplified dehumanization and scapegoating of minoritized and structurally oppressed groups, as well as—increasingly—anyone who voices audible dissent against those in positions of power.
It is difficult to imagine how youth that have known no other “normal” could be both well informed about the present and even remotely optimistic about the future. A clear-eyed, unvarnished view of our current political climate in the United States certainly seems bleak. It is conceivable that a factual, moment-to-moment accounting of unfolding events could be viewed as antithetical to preserving the collective energies and bandwidth necessary to plan for long-term organizing. As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider (The Crossing Press 1984), “What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest, and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.” The inclination to look away—to disengage, to seek refuge in distraction—is certainly well-incentivized by the seemingly unending headlines that keep us appraised of each day’s catastrophes.
Yet, despite all of that, we stand in front of our new students with the audacity to ask them to look closer, rather than avert their eyes. We call upon them to peel back the layers of the social phenomena that they observe, even when doing so reveals something painfully difficult to see. In fact, in sociology, we specifically require that they learn deeply about what undergirds the social injustices, deep inequities, and profound suffering in our world.
And, of course, this is what we must do.
In order to examine the social world with integrity, it is our responsibility as scholars and as educators to shine a light, unflinchingly, on the myriad abuses of structural, economic, political, and state power that contextualize the intersections of our students’—and our own—biographies and histories.
Considered in context, however, we must also ask ourselves, “How can we provide these students with learning opportunities that feel—convincingly, to them—like worthwhile investments of their already scarce focus and energies, rather than additional drains on them?”
Hope as a Strategy
An intellectual purist might argue that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a pursuit worthwhile enough to justify students’ efforts to acquire it. But can we assume that this approach is sufficient to meet our current moment, in which our diverse populations of students—many of whom are themselves increasingly and variously vulnerable—are intersecting with this particular history?
In reflecting on this question, I was reminded of an event I attended recently while leading a group of undergrads through an experiential learning program titled Engaged Citizenship, Social Impact, and Social Responsibility. We had the privilege of meeting with H. Art Taylor, who was recently appointed president and CEO of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). Taylor has a long career of advancing ethical fundraising practices for non-profit organizations—many of which provide critically necessary services and resources to structurally neglected communities and populations. Speaking to our students, Taylor quipped “People have always tried to tell me that ‘hope is not a strategy.’ But for me, it is. It absolutely is.” He explained that, to get resources to organizations that needed them, a critical part of his fundraising efforts has been finding what inspired hope in those with resources to share. Hope, he explained, is what keeps people invested in wanting to participate. Without it, disengagement becomes inevitable.
The message was simple, but powerful. It was also an apt metaphor for effective and engaged pedagogical praxis in chaotic times. As we cultivate spaces in our classrooms for the critique and deconstruction of existing systems and structures, do we do our students a disservice if we fail to also provide them with the accompanying intellectual tools necessary to construct hope and imagine the possibilities of a different world?
Consider veteran civil rights leader and U.S. Senator John Lewis’s entreaty: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.” In 1978, civil rights icon and San Francisco mayor Harvey Milk also invoked hope as a central political organizing principle for the gay rights movement: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you…and you…and you…you’ve gotta give ’em hope.” In both cases, hope is neither an empty rallying cry for performative solidarity nor an obsequious abstraction. Rather, the echoing call for hope is articulated by individuals who dedicated their lives’ works to transforming society’s unequal distributions of power. Lewis and Milk operated both externally, as activists who put their own bodies in harm’s way for their ideals, and internally, as elected officials working within our governmental institutions to fight for representation and progressive legislation. Clearly, hope was never being tendered as a stand-alone panacea for societal transformation. Instead, hope was proffered as the strategy necessary to sustain the engagement of those upon whom the critical work of societal transformation would depend, in the face of what likely seemed to many to be insurmountable odds.
Here, too, may be a lesson for those of us ostensibly fomenting revolution from the ivory tower. Perhaps hope flourishes most readily at the juncture between the achievable changes that we can implement in our lifetimes and the sociopolitical transformations for which we can only aspire to lay the groundwork. If hope is to function as a strategy to sustain engagement, it requires action beyond the formulation of vision and intention.
One way that students of sociology might begin to cultivate the hope that they will need for the work that lies ahead is by identifying the most immediately actionable issues to which they can contribute their efforts in their own schools, workplaces, and communities. Sociology students’ familiarity with the analytic tools needed to deconstruct dominant paradigms and “make the familiar strange” equip them to critically reimagine longstanding institutional practices and processes in ways that center equity, and can be redesigned from the ground up. This kind of institutional and organizational change work undertaken in the short term does not preclude the possibility of simultaneously undertaking the important work of building radical, systemic transformation in the long term. These efforts must not be conceptualized as mutually exclusive. In fact, the incremental gains made through the former may be what keep those working toward the latter hopeful—and thus engaged—long enough to persist in their efforts until the broader landscape can be shifted.
Put another way, we might celebrate the eloquent and impassioned anti-establishment manifestos our students can pen by graduation and see them as evidence of successful learning outcomes. But, if, at the same time, our courses leave those students resigned to a view of social justice work as an esoteric exercise in Sisyphean futility, we might need to rethink our metrics of self-assessment as educators.
Toward a Pedagogy of Critical Meliorism
What might we do to ensure our pedagogical praxis reflects this understanding? For one thing, we can consider as many dimensions of critical engagement as our course structures allow. When we teach the canon of our discipline, we can do so through a critical lens that encourages students to question who is excluded from, or disadvantaged by, the scholarly discourse that the field has reified. We can bring into our classrooms the voices of organizers, community leaders, and change agents across various sectors, directly exposing our students to models for work informed by sociological understandings—models that yield progressive social impact in a wide range of occupational spaces. In the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, we can develop participatory research projects through which students have the opportunity to gather data about the communities in which they are personally invested. Students can then share their findings with those communities in ways that could yield benefits to community members. Elevating the legacy of Jane Addams, we can thoughtfully incorporate service– or community-based learning into our syllabi, building partnerships with local organizations to demonstrate the impact of coalitions and the power of working in solidarity with like-minded others. Lastly, we can center experiential learning as the key pedagogical tenet for deep learning—rather than diminish the work undertaken in its pursuit to benefit real people and communities as “co-” or “extra-curricular.”
As educators, we labor in institutions that are part of the same larger social systems that we teach our students to critique. Our charge, then, must include modelling ways to actively identify when, where, and how there may be opportunities to make those institutions—and others—more inclusive, and fair. While we teach students to think critically about broader structural forces that reproduce inequality, we can also help them find ways to change those small-scale structures in their immediate orbits. To embrace a “pedagogy of critical meliorism” means to teach students to make things progressively better, even if incrementally, through deliberate effort. Certainly, fundamental transformation of society’s large-scale distributions of power and resources in support of health, safety, civil rights, and human rights should remain our aspiration as sociologists. Yet, through a pedagogy of critical meliorism, we can hold space to recognize the value of making continuous, progressive gains at the level of local structures in the short term, while still keeping the long-term goal of achieving fundamental change towards a just and equitable society squarely in our sights.
Sociology educators could be well-served to remember that our students’ activism is often grounded in lived experiences far more tenuous than our own, even as our own experiences as faculty vary tremendously along various intersecting axes of identity. I have heard members of my generation—and those before mine—deride the online activism of young people, dismissing their digital organizing as superficial. But I would argue that where there is engagement, there is evidence of hope. We have already seen examples of this through Gen Z’s primarily-online-due-to-COVID advocacy around issues of climate change and sustainability. They have already shown us their power as change agents, using online networking tools and social media to increase the efficacy with which they can reach broad audiences and identify potential collaborators and allies. These, too, can be generative sites for hope to grow in community with others, where sustained engagement can take root.
Recently, my departmental colleague, Katherine McClelland, was honored by Franklin & Marshall College— home of the F&M “Diplomats”—in recognition of her decades of distinguished service to the institution. In a riff on our school motto “The world needs more Diplomats,” she concluded in her acceptance speech that “The world needs more sociologists.” Of course, as they forge their futures in the increasingly uncertain landscape in front of them, we know that not all of our students will become academic sociologists. But they can all be applied sociologists in their own right, if we can provide them the tools to translate their sociological imaginations and nurture the kind of hope that will sustain them for the future that lies ahead.
To paraphrase H. Art Taylor, hope absolutely has to be part of the strategy. They’ll need hope.
And, to echo Katherine McClelland, the world needs them.