Configurations of hope at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music

Abstract

In settings of conflict and hardship, education can be a portal through which future lives are imagined. Experiences of schooling are thus tied closely to the generation of hope and the transformation of young lives. The goal of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), a vocational music school in Kabul, is to transform lives through music and education, by restoring music practices, cultural rights, and the country’s relationships with the rest of the world. Hope is central to this multi-faceted project and is cultivated within the school, strategically, as a source of protection and a driver of desired change. Conceptual in scope, this article explores how hope was situated and configured within the learning experience at ANIM and entwined with the school’s transformation goals during the years 2015–2017. Using concepts of hope from critical anthropology and sociology and thematic analysis of interviews with ANIM students and teachers, it presents four configurations of hope at ANIM. It examines how these configurations were produced, nurtured, and distributed through activities, organisational culture, and environmental factors, in varying degrees of intensity and dynamism. In so doing, this article shows hope to be a complex and ambivalent resource for social impact in contexts in which music education, social transformation goals, and international aid converge. Hope produces agencies that can drive transformation, but it is always shaped and conditioned by the complex challenges and power asymmetries of the wider context.