Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ruth Raynor
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women ‘on benefits’ in the North East of England, in a period before Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted hopes, pulls towards paradoxical attachments; (3) Suspended hopes, framed by the limits of the now; (4) Negative hopes, invested in promises that despair could be pushed onto others; (5) Hopes for the absence of optimism, a mode of being present in the present, staying with mutual contingency and withdrawing from the cruelty of unknown futures, a strategy increasingly denied to women who were more than ‘left-behind’. By exploring the different forms that hopes take, we can better understand what hopes do. I argue that hopes in decline were not lost, nor orientated towards upward progress, but invested instead in maintaining a position. They were both sustaining and debilitating through situations of loss and uncertainty, and as such constituted a stretched-out present, tensed with decline.
Author(s): Raynor RI
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Year: 2021
Volume: 39
Issue: 3
Pages: 553-570
Print publication date: 01/06/2021
Online publication date: 20/02/2021
Acceptance date: 02/04/2016
Date deposited: 05/03/2021
ISSN (print): 0263-7758
ISSN (electronic): 1472-3433
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775821993826
DOI: 10.1177/0263775821993826
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
