Sociolinguistics of hope: Language between the no-more and the not-yet

Abstract

Sociolinguistics has recently turned its attention to the production of hope in language. Although hope is dismissed in several everyday and academic discourses as escapism or cruel optimism, if investigated ethnographically, the affect and practice of hope emerge contextually as both practical reason and semiotic ideology with important political implications. The articles in this special issue variously engage with hope as situated action whereby individuals and communities struggle for material resources, reorient temporality, recalibrate registers, create alliances, and reflexively engage with social practice to build forms of life that in many ways resist despair and paralysis. While the collection of articles gathered here does not share a single view of hope, a common thread is that hope in different ways coheres with the Brazilian Portuguese esperançar-that is, hope not as sheer or passive waiting but as pragmatic and reflexive action.