Abstract
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.
Highlights
Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity
(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 ; (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’
We talk while our children play in the creche. This is a time following financial crisis, after the onset of austerity – but before a vote to exit the European Union (Gateshead voted ‘leave’ with 58,529 votes, 44,429 voted for ‘remain’) in a place high on the index of multiple deprivation1 facing some of the hardest effects of cuts to local authority budgets relative to the rest of the UK (Gray and Barford, 2018)
Summary
Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. In the stretched-out present, hopes are orientated towards maintaining a position by avoiding decline. This is research material in its own right (Raynor, 2019) used here to introduce forms of hope as relations with disruptions and despair, and optimisms as pervasive feelings associated with organisational structures around austerity.
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