Learning hope: an epistemology of possibility for advanced capitalist society

Drawing on the critical theories of Ernst Bloch and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as well as on the knowledge and learning practices of counter-capitalist social movements, this chapter offers a reading of political hopelessness among educators in England through a critical epistemology which discloses it as ‘unfinished’ and potent material within a global politics of possibility. It invokes methods from Bloch’s critical process-philosophy of ‘learning hope’ which allow for three reality-shifting operations: (1) the making of distinctions between what is ‘not’, ‘not-yet’ and ‘nothing’ in experience and historical process; (2) identifying and creating ‘fronts’ of possibility for mediating reality in concretely utopian ways; and (3) the recognition of a multiplicity of anti-hegemonic scales and modes of transformation, and explains why these matter in movements not just for social change but for the immanent creation of an other reality