Radical Hope Course

Taught by Dr. Anna Antonova, this is a Global Classroom block seminar featuring four collaborative meetings with students from University of Texas Austin (US) and Queen’s University Belfast (UK) on hope as a renewable and essential resource for the environment. Hope is often sadly lacking in academic and popular conversations, with dominant framings of the Anthropocene focusing on overwhelming ecological crises, pragmatic pessimism,
cognitive dissonance, climate denialism, and scientific realism. In online sessions with students from UT
Austin and QUB, we will examine four perspectives on radical hope, from socio-technical thinking to
interspecies relations in a digital era. We will push ourselves to determine how the concept of hope can
help us reframe contemporary discussions and influence sustainability transformations. Students will gain
practice communicating hope to different audiences by designing a unit for the “Radical Hope” syllabus
and then producing a podcast based on it for a wider audience.

Based on The Radical Hope Syllabus created by Dr. Erika Bsumek (UT Austin) and Dr. John Barry
(QUB), who are respectively teaching the UT Austin and QUB sessions of the course.