Hope: Probing the Boundaries Project Page

Project Leader: Nancy Mardas Billias

Welcome to the Hope: Probing the Boundaries project home page. This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research project aims to explore contemporary definitions, meanings and expressions of hope. In particular, it will seek to examine the individual, social, national and international contexts within which hope emerges as well as its counterpart, hopelessness.

The project will critically engage with a number of core themes:

Human awareness of the passage of time and changing bases for thinking about the future
Expressions of these attitudes in contemporary culture – science fiction and cinema
The psychological basis of fear of the future. Millennial hopes and millennial fears
The concept of a new age. Utopian thinkers. The connection with political movements
Hopelessness, despair, indifference and resignation. The meaning of life
The science of the future. Prediction, risk and disaster management
The phenomenology of hope
Does hope and the act of hoping differ from culture to culture? How is hope differently instantiated among cultures?
The notion of open and closed futures
Risk, possibility and hope.
Envisaging possible futures. The question of choice. Cultivating hope. To boldly go.

Related themes will also be identified for development and exploration. Out of our deliberations it is anticipated that a series of related cross context research projects will develop.