Experiencing Imminent Justice: The Presence of Hope in a Movement for Equitable Schooling

In: Space and Culture, Band 11, Heft 2, S. 109-124

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the affective dimensions of social change has pointed toward hope as an ethically promising form of belonging. In this article, the articulation of hope in the context of a reform-oriented social movement provides the basis for interrogating the political promise of hope. The author examines the ascent of a movement for small, equitable schools in Oakland, California, to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. To do this, the author contrasts the movement's assertion of its equity-centered strategy with the complex race and class hierarchies that grounded power relations within the movement. The question that emerges from this discontinuity is how reformers come to experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progressive. The author finds that the gap between reformers' ideals and their material circumstances is bridged by the movement's ample production of hope.