Situating hope in community

One of my favourite parts of December is planning future projects and professional development. I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I will happily plan a full year of learning, study, and projects.

I’ve had a rough last week (challenges during the week of IDPwD got the better of me), and so (like the nerd I am), I’ve opted to plan out professional development for next year to cheer myself up. A little moment of solace and hope.

This blog post was meant to focus on professional development as a pleasant and easy-on-the-brain topic. That’s not where it ended up, though, so we’re about to take a sharp turn into community, hope, resilience, and situatedness.

Hope

I often use the word ‘hope’ or ‘hopeful’ – though I am very conscious of the politics surrounding it, especially ‘hope labour.’ There’s already plenty of writing on this across libraries, ¹ cultural and creative work, ² and other professions.

My thoughts on mitigating hope labour are well beyond the scope of this post; however, my current ‘hope’ doesn’t quite fall into the ‘competitive imperative‘ framing I usually see. I am hopeful, and there’s undoubtedly labour that goes into that. Yet, most writing on hope labour is presented as an individualised practice.

When I think about hope now, it’s a hope that’s built through and for community, cultivated through an ethics of care. This hope is not detached from community members’ individual aspirations, identity, precarity, or other circumstances, but it does center a collective pride and strength.

My favourite part of the paper ‘Hope labour and the psychic life of cultural work‘ is actually the last page, which shifts concepts of hope and change away from the individual:

“Nevertheless, some of the collective and personal values attached to cultural and creative labour we have observed illustrate its importance as something that cannot be subsumed by economic rationalities, and its role as a form of personal and community care … . ‘Hope’, in this sense, is critical, rather than neoliberal, in its desire for a more flourishing future” (Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020, p. 1859).

Community

It also presents a good example of resilience as a relational concept. I forced myself to re-read parts of this presentation recently. I’d forgotten that it ended on courage. The idea of resilience as relational feels less abstract now. It also feels like I presented it further back than in 2023.

My personal resilience (and sometimes courage) is tied to community-focused hope. This is, in turn, tied to collective resilience, impact, and care being centred. ³

When reviewing a community survey recently, I smiled, seeing how often the words ‘community,’ ‘connection,’ and ‘shared experiences’ appeared. When co-leading or leading together, I’ve observed how mutuality and care can strengthen and sustain everyone.

There’s a different type of hope at play here. While aspirational, it’s a hope grounded in present and collective impact for future change. It’s also a hope that insists we don’t reproduce the structures that created the need for such hope in the first place.

Situatedness

On a panel a few months ago on ‘digital social justice,’ the questions quickly turned toward community. I’d threaded ‘community’ as a theme through my slides and noticed some co-panelists emphasising this, too. It felt fitting.

Digital social justice became a conversation on trust, community, and relationality. I’ve added one of my slides below, which includes a quote by Donna Haraway (1988):

“Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular”.

Essentially – our knowledge is situated in specific local contexts. It comes from specific experiences, perspectives, and positionalities and is shaped by communities and collective experiences.

Lately, I’ve been considering situated knowledge in the context of empathy and understanding. I’ve started asking and reading up on:

• Which (empathy/understanding) comes first, and how do or don’t they depend on each other?
• How does/should empathy facilitate access to situated knowledge?
• What are the risks of misunderstanding situated knowledge?

I think knowledge could be switched out for hope in each of these questions.

Situated hope

And with that, I’m heading back to my planning and professional development. While a seemingly blasé annual expectation – I really love it. I usually start on this early, and there’s some hope attached to it, too.

Some of that hope is situated individually – learning tends to cheer me up. Some of that hope is situated socially – I like considering professional development beyond individual skills and understanding how my learning and work are situated within broader contexts.

Hopeful or not – I do have to go ‘kill some darlings’ from my 2025 planning, projects, and professional development list this week.

1. In the Australian LIS context, see Andersen (2023) on hope labour’s connection with disability and LIS leadership, as well as McCulloch (2019). ↩︎
2. Mackenzie et al. (2020) ↩︎
3. Some people know I choose not to use the word ‘resilience’ with my teams. Maybe one day this will change. It’s not because resilience is unimportant but because its co-option (as individualised and inspirational) is too pervasive, and I’ve heard too much of its harm. Even if well-intended in using the term, I prefer finding words that people are more responsive to, that support or energise rather than immediately landing on negative connotations, and that better allow for shared understanding. ↩︎