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, Amsler’s chapter offers a reading of political hopelessness amongst educators in England through a critical epistemology which di...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Amsler, Sarah
Other Authors: Dinerstein, Ana C.
Format: Book Section
Published: Palgrave Macmillan 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46124/
Description
Summary: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, Amsler’s chapter offers a reading of political hopelessness amongst educators in England through a critical epistemology which discloses it as ‘unfinished’ and potent material within a global politics of possibility. She invokes methods from Bloch’s critical process-philosophy of ‘learning hope’ which allows 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.