Valerie Waldow – författare

New modes of Hope have emerged in the Anthropocene, increasingly grounded in an ethics of attentiveness and responsibility. Through incorporating contemporary approaches to both theory and policy practice, including critical, feminist, black and indigenous perspectives, this book analyses how Hope works with the uncertainties and interdependencies of human agency and interaction. It draws out the problems of integrating Hope into governance and policy management, and engages with Hope as a potentially negating force, in a world which can be seen as one of unending catastrophe.

New modes of Hope have emerged in the Anthropocene, increasingly grounded in an ethics of attentiveness and responsibility. Through incorporating contemporary approaches to both theory and policy practice, including critical, feminist, black and indigenous perspectives, this book analyses how Hope works with the uncertainties and interdependencies of human agency and interaction. It draws out the problems of integrating Hope into governance and policy management, and engages with Hope as a potentially negating force, in a world which can be seen as one of unending catastrophe.

This edited collection explores the contemporary stakes of ‘working with the negative’ at a time increasingly defined as ‘after the future’, when catastrophe appears less as a coming event than as a persistent condition. Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, politics, media, geography, critical Black and Indigenous Studies and critical theory, the volume examines how critique might persist without reliance on promises of progress, redemption or repair.Through engagement with debates on negation, pessimism, opacity, the Anthropocene and refusal, contributors rethink subjectivity, agency, temporality and resistance. Structured around Encounters, Mobilisations and Aporias, the book traces how the negative is theorised and mobilised across contemporary critical thought, opening ‘working with the negative’ as a key problem for critique in the wake of modernity’s exhausted promises. By drawing these threads together, it engages the complexities of ‘staying with the trouble’ of modernity’s entanglements, providing space for critical thought that refuses the impulse to replace them with new ontological certainties.