Pedagogies of hope in higher education
Capturing visions of hopeful pedagogies
An online symposium
9-20 November 2026
Pedagogies of hope in higher education
Capturing visions of hopeful pedagogies
An online symposium
9 - 20 November 2026
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What does hope look like in your work as an educator in higher education? Hope can be difficult to hold onto in higher education right now. As educators, we are working amid ecological crisis, democratic erosion, institutional pressures, and growing uncertainty about the future. This symposium is an invitation to reflect together on how we conceptualise and practice hope in our teaching, what sustains hope, and what forms of hope feel possible, or impossible, in higher education today.
The Hope Collective is a group of scholars and educators interested in the possibilities and limits of pedagogies of hope in times of crisis. For this symposium, we want to bring together a wide range of experiences and perspectives on what hope looks like in higher education work: practices that try to cultivate hope, but also accounts that question when hope is useful, who gets to practise it, and what its limits might be.
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What does hope look like in your work as an educator in higher education? Hope can be difficult to hold onto in higher education right now. As educators, we are working amid ecological crisis, democratic erosion, institutional pressures, and growing uncertainty about the future. This symposium is an invitation to reflect together on how we conceptualise and practice hope in our teaching, what sustains hope, and what forms of hope feel possible, or impossible, in higher education today.
The Hope Collective is a group of scholars and educators interested in the possibilities and limits of pedagogies of hope in times of crisis. For this symposium, we want to bring together a wide range of experiences and perspectives on what hope looks like in higher education work: practices that try to cultivate hope, but also accounts that question when hope is useful, who gets to practise it, and what its limits might be.
How to take part
We invite you to contribute one photograph, artwork, drawing, collage, or other image that says something about how you understand or practise hope as an educator, in the broadest sense. Alongside your image, we ask for either a short written reflection or a two- to three-minute audio or video explanation. This might tell the story behind the image, describe a particular practice or experience, raise a question, or reflect on something you are still trying to work out.
Your contribution does not need to be a polished example of “good practice.” We are just as interested in uncertainty, difficulty, tensions, experiments and things that have not quite worked as we are in examples of things that have worked.
Please use an image you have created yourself, have permission to use, or that is available under an appropriate Creative Commons licence.
Who is this for? Educators, professional staff, students, and others interested in thinking about hope and higher education. You do not need to already work on hope as a research topic.
How will it work? Across the two weeks of the symposium, participants’ images and stories will build into a collective online collage. People will be able to look through and respond to contributions in their own time, alongside live keynote conversations, discussions and creative sessions. We hope the format will make it possible for people in different places and time zones to take part, and for conversations to grow out of the images, stories and questions people bring.
Timeline:
15 August 2026 – Call for participation opens
26 October 2026 – Images and accompanying text/audio/video due
9–20 November 2026 – Online symposium
Cost: Free
How to take part
We invite you to contribute one photograph, artwork, drawing, collage, or other image that says something about how you understand or practise hope as an educator, in the broadest sense. Alongside your image, we ask for either a short written reflection or a two- to three-minute audio or video explanation. This might tell the story behind the image, describe a particular practice or experience, raise a question, or reflect on something you are still trying to work out.
Your contribution does not need to be a polished example of “good practice.” We are just as interested in uncertainty, difficulty, tensions, experiments and things that have not quite worked as we are in examples of things that have worked.
Please use an image you have created yourself, have permission to use, or that is available under an appropriate Creative Commons licence.
Who is this for? Educators, professional staff, students, and others interested in thinking about hope and higher education. You do not need to already work on hope as a research topic.
How will it work? Across the two weeks of the symposium, participants’ images and stories will build into a collective online collage. People will be able to look through and respond to contributions in their own time, alongside live keynote conversations, discussions and creative sessions. We hope the format will make it possible for people in different places and time zones to take part, and for conversations to grow out of the images, stories and questions people bring.
Timeline:
15 August 2026 – Call for participation opens
26 October 2026 – Images and accompanying text/audio/video due
9–20 November 2026 – Online symposium
Cost: Free
Ideas you might explore
Your contribution might connect with one or more of the themes below (or take us somewhere else entirely!).
What does hope mean in your educational work? Where does it come from, and how is it shaped by different cultural, political, intellectual, or spiritual traditions?
Where and how is hope practised? How are educators building new pedagogies for hope embedded in course design, classroom relationships, assessment, or other spaces of your teaching practice, and what does this look like in online or asynchronous learning spaces?
How does hope work collectively? How is hope being built through relationships, solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, or action with others?
How does hope move beyond the university? What happens when teaching and learning are embedded in relationships with communities, whānau, iwi, activist groups, workplaces, environments, or places?
How is hope understood and practised through Indigenous and decolonial ways of knowing? What might these perspectives ask us to rethink about education, the future, responsibility, power, and the kinds of hope we value?
What might institutional hope look like? How can leadership, administration, policy, programme design, or institutional activism create openings for change? What do higher education institutions (need to) do to enable or disable hope and hope-based practices?
Who gets to practise hope, and from what position? How is hope shaped by precarity, casualisation, workload, marginalisation, career stage, institutional power, or uneven access to resources?
What emotions sit alongside hope? How do educators and students work with grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, joy, care, or uncertainty?
When and/or how is hope unhelpful? Can hope become a burden, distract from present harms, individualise structural problems, or ask too much of people already working under constraint?
What does hope make possible? How might education create space for imagination, refusal, resistance, experimentation, or more just social and ecological futures?
To register your interest, please fill in this form.
Ideas you might explore
Your contribution might connect with one or more of the themes below (or take us somewhere else entirely!).
What does hope mean in your educational work? Where does it come from, and how is it shaped by different cultural, political, intellectual, or spiritual traditions?
Where and how is hope practised? How are educators building new pedagogies for hope embedded in course design, classroom relationships, assessment, or other spaces of your teaching practice, and what does this look like in online or asynchronous learning spaces?
How does hope work collectively? How is hope being built through relationships, solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, or action with others?
How does hope move beyond the university? What happens when teaching and learning are embedded in relationships with communities, whānau, iwi, activist groups, workplaces, environments, or places?
How is hope understood and practised through Indigenous and decolonial ways of knowing? What might these perspectives ask us to rethink about education, the future, responsibility, power, and the kinds of hope we value?
What might institutional hope look like? How can leadership, administration, policy, programme design, or institutional activism create openings for change? What do higher education institutions (need to) do to enable or disable hope and hope-based practices?
Who gets to practise hope, and from what position? How is hope shaped by precarity, casualisation, workload, marginalisation, career stage, institutional power, or uneven access to resources?
What emotions sit alongside hope? How do educators and students work with grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, joy, care, or uncertainty?
When and/or how is hope unhelpful? Can hope become a burden, distract from present harms, individualise structural problems, or ask too much of people already working under constraint?
What does hope make possible? How might education create space for imagination, refusal, resistance, experimentation, or more just social and ecological futures?
When you submit your contribution, we will also ask you to choose up to three themes or keywords that you think best describe it. These will help us organise the online collection and make connections between contributions during the symposium.
How to register your interest
To register your interest, please fill in this form.
Your images and accompanying text/audio/video will be due on 26 October 2026. When you submit this, we will also ask you to choose up to three themes or keywords that you think best describe it. These will help us organise the online collection and make connections between contributions during the symposium.
Those who have registered will receive a message with more information about taking part from hopeinhighered at gmail.com on the 25th September.
Keynote Workshop "Storytelling in Research: Conceptualizing through Images"
In this workshop, participants will practice integrating artistic practice into their pedagogy. Participants will use a three images that they bring to the workshop to narrate what story the images are telling together to bring the research concept of "triangulation" off the page and into the realm of the sensory.
We will explore how doing so can be used to teach students about the concepts of triangulation in the context of both saturation and narrative. Please bring three images to this workshop. One of these images is welcome to be the one you submit to the symposium. Image themes are open-ended; we ask only that they remain respectful and professional. It is my hope that this adds an additional thread of connection to the themes of this symposium.
Maya Weeks is a Californian feminist political ecologist and poet who merges qualitative and creative methods in her work on environmental issues. Her areas of interest include oceans, pollution, and land stewardship. She prioritizes interdisciplinary community-engaged research and works across academia, the arts, environmental policy, and agriculture. Maya is a lecturer at Rutgers University and visiting researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute. She is the author of Myth of the Garbage Patch (THOUSANDS Press, 2026). Maya serves on the board of the American Association of Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and is a member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. She is a settler of Russian Jewish, Polish, and unknown descent.
Keynote conversationalists
We are thrilled to announce our keynote conversationalists!
Professor Wendy Steele is a writer, activist and educator at the nexus of environmental humanities and critical social sciences. She is the Director of the Planetary Civics Inquiry at RMIT and leads research on the nature of cities in climate change with a particular emphasis on governing planetary commons, climate activism, rethinking urban infrastructures and living universities as a transformative agenda within higher education. Her recent books include 'Planning Wild Cities: Human–nature relationships in the urban age' (Routledge 2020), 'Quiet Activism: Climate action at the local scale' (Palgrave 2021), 'Hot Cities' (Edward Elgar City Series 2023) and 'Wild Imaginings, Wild Forms, Wild Curation' (Actar Publishers 2026).
Dr. Leonora Souza Paula specializes in Literary Studies and Latin American Studies, with a focus on intersections of race, gender, memory, and Black geographies in contemporary Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Diasporic culture. Her current research examines the role of Black spatial imagination as a mode of claiming literature and culture as heritage recovery and epistemic reparation. An American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow and established public humanities scholar, she co-founded the Black Women Shaping AfroFutures initiative and directs the AfroFutures Now Digital Archive.
Dr. George Veletsianos is Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and Bonnie Westby Huebner Chair in Education and Technology. His scholarship revolves around three intersecting questions: How do we design exceptional online and blended learning experiences? How do educators and students actually work, learn, and negotiate with today’s emerging technologies? And what futures might we proactively create for higher education? His career spans two decades, six books, more than 100 peer‑reviewed publications, and over $5 million in competitive funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Formerly Canada Research Chair, Commonwealth of Learning Chair, and Fulbright scholar, he has led various organizations in advancing educational excellence.
Associate Professor Te Hurinui Karaka-Clarke (Te Arawa, Ngāi Tahu) is Associate Professor of Mātauranga Māori in Kura Toi Tangata School of Education and Associate Dean Academic for the University of Waikato’s Division of Education. An experienced teacher educator and academic leader, Te Hurinui has taught and led programmes in te reo Māori, tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori and Māori-medium education. His teaching and research focus on culturally sustaining pedagogy, language revitalisation, equitable and authentic assessment, and the critical use of generative artificial intelligence in education. Throughout his career, Te Hurinui has worked to strengthen the place of Māori language, knowledge and ways of being within teacher education and to prepare educators who can uphold the mana and aspirations of Māori learners, whānau and communities.
Chris Eames is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Waikato. He teaches pre-service teacher education and supervises many research students in environmental and sustainability education. His current research focus is climate change education, and specifically what curriculum could look like in this field in Aotearoa New Zealand and other countries. Chris is a founding member of the Aotearoa Climate Education Coalition.
Dr Adreanne Ormond (Rongomaiwāhine, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a Māori academic at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa. Adreanne grew up on the Māhia Peninsula on the East Coast of Aotearoa, on the ancestral lands of her whānau and iwi, and this grounding in place and people shapes everything she brings to her scholarship. This is a rural area and predominantly Māori, and she is privileged to have grown up in a Māori community knowing she is Māori. Her research is anchored in Kaupapa Māori, a Māori worldview that centres the Māori world as a legitimate and vital way of understanding and being in the world.
Dr. Jessica Riddell is a Full Professor at Bishop’s University (Québec, Canada) and the inaugural Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. A nationally recognized educator, public intellectual, and higher education leader, she is known for reimagining universities as public institutions oriented toward human and ecological flourishing. She is the founder of the Hope Circuits Institute and the author of Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities for Human Flourishing (MQUP, 2024) and co-author of Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning (UTP, 2023). Dr. Riddell serves on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and has received Canada’s highest teaching and engagement honours, including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship (2015) and election to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars for her national contributions to the humanities (2025).
Dr. Florencia Rojo is an Assistant Professor of Social Relations and Policy at James Madison College, Michigan State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. As a publicly engaged teacher-scholar, her research examines how race, food, and immigration shape experiences of inequality and community life. Her scholarship draws on qualitative, community-based participatory, and place-based methodologies, with a particular focus on community knowledge, foodways, immigration, and racial inequality. Rojo teaches courses on U.S. immigration policy, social theory, qualitative research methods, and food justice, among other topics. Her teaching emphasizes experiential and community-engaged learning, connecting sociological concepts to contemporary social issues and the communities students study.
Dr. Bea Rodriguez-Fransen is an Assistant Research Professor in Principled Innovation and Senior Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Her work explores decolonial pedagogy and futures thinking as practices of hope and freedom, how educators, practitioners, and learners can collectively imagine and enact more just, liberated futures. She authored Education and Decolonial Futures in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and created sawali, a decolonial design futures framework inspired by Filipino bamboo weaving and relational epistemology. A certified foresight practitioner, her 2024 TED talk, "Unlocking Indigenous Knowledge: A New Path for Education," offers strategies for undoing colonial mindsets, practicing long-term thinking, and co-creating our futures.
Keynote Workshop
Storytelling in Research: Conceptualizing through Images
In this workshop, participants will practice integrating artistic practice into their pedagogy. Participants will use a three images that they bring to the workshop to narrate what story the images are telling together to bring the research concept of "triangulation" off the page and into the realm of the sensory.
We will explore how doing so can be used to teach students about the concepts of triangulation in the context of both saturation and narrative. Please bring three images to this workshop. One of these images is welcome to be the one you submit to the symposium. Image themes are open-ended; we ask only that they remain respectful and professional. It is my hope that this adds an additional thread of connection to the themes of this symposium.
Maya Weeks is a Californian feminist political ecologist and poet who merges qualitative and creative methods in her work on environmental issues. Her areas of interest include oceans, pollution, and land stewardship. She prioritizes interdisciplinary community-engaged research and works across academia, the arts, environmental policy, and agriculture. Maya is a lecturer at Rutgers University and visiting researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute. She is the author of Myth of the Garbage Patch (THOUSANDS Press, 2026). Maya serves on the board of the American Association of Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and is a member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. She is a settler of Russian Jewish, Polish, and unknown descent.
Hope Collective Members
Associate Professor Alice Beban
Alice holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. Her research explores environmental change, land and agrarian politics, and the ways people respond to uncertain futures, with a particular focus on Aotearoa New Zealand and Southeast Asia. She is also interested in pedagogies of hope and leads He Kaupapa Tūmanako / Project Hope, which works with secondary-school students to explore social and environmental issues through critically engaged social science.
Associate Professor Elaine Khoo
Elaine holds a PhD from the University of Waikato and a master's degree from Vanderbilt University. She is an expert in digital teaching methods. Elaine collaborates across learning contexts from early learning to tertiary study. Her work enhances teaching and learning across digital contexts like online, blended, mobile, flipped and virtual environments.
Dr. Clare Mouat
Clare holds a PhD in Planning from the University of Auckland. She is an interdisciplinary scholar-storyteller specialising in community, planning and governance. Her work planning and designing for hope has inspired many ways to build a flourishing future. Her work also influences law and policy in multiple places.
Associate Professor Amanda Flaim
Amanda holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. She uses ethnographic, participatory, and survey methods to understand problems and paradoxes in human rights policy and development programs in mainland Southeast Asia. Her research agenda attends to political tensions in statelessness eradication programs at local and international scales, and the effects of precarious status on health outcomes, educational attainment, (un)safe migration and land-use/land claims among indigenous and ethnic minority communities in upland Thailand, in particular.
Associate Professor Daniel Ahlquist
Daniel holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. His teaching and research explore diverse human relationships to place. He examines the political-ecological dimensions of landscapes and land use, engaging issues related to agriculture, conservation, development, displacement, migration, climate change, settler colonialism, and environmental justice. He is particularly interested in how social inequalities play out through uneven relationships to the environment, state, and market.
Dr. Lisa Vonk
Lisa holds a PhD in Media Studies from Massey University. Her research broadly considers the social and environmental impact of networked information and communication technologies. Lisa has a particular interest in issues of care as they pertain to the media. She is a Research Assistant with the Hope Collective, and will be the person answering your emails!
Supported by funding from Massey University College of Humanities and Social Sciences, with administrative support provided by the Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre.
Images by Hide Obara, Lina Trochez, and WonderLane