[Linganth] panel on the "pragmatics of hope" - IPrA Conference, Switzerland, 2021

[Daniel Silva]

Dear Colleagues,

I am organizing a panel on "The Pragmatics of Hope: Investigating
alternatives to despair in contemporary political arrangements and
communicative practices" at the International Pragmatics Conference that
will (hopefully) take place in Winterthur, Switzerland, June 27-July 2,
2021: https://pragmatics.international/page/Winterthur2021

The general idea of the panel is to investigate how people grapple with
hope, understood as a form of practical reason, to endure scenarios of
uncertainty, precarity or despair, like the current sanitary crisis. A
fundamental question is how people avoid despair by reimagining language
resources, sociolinguistic resources, and temporality.

I provide an abstract of the accepted panel below. If you are interested in
participating in this panel, please email me at dnsfortal at gmail.com with a
concise abstract (min. 250 words, max. 500 words) by September 30.

Many thanks,
Daniel N. Silva
Professor at UFSC/PIPGLA-UFRJ, CNPq Fellow
CV: http://lattes.cnpq.br/0522724697395740
Texts: https://ufsc.academia.edu/DanielSilva

The Pragmatics of Hope: Investigating alternatives to despair in
contemporary political arrangements and communicative practices

Panel Organizer: Daniel N. Silva (Federal University of Santa Catarina,
Brazil)

In *Radical Hope,* Jonathan Lear (2006) delineates how the Crow people, a
nomad indigenous group in the Midwest of the United States, resisted the
cultural devastation predicated in their confinement to a reservation by
the U.S. government in the end of the 19th century. Lear focuses on the
authoritative account of Plenty Coups, a Crow leader, and describes that
this indigenous group refused to give in to despair by imagining a “radical
hope”. Through the realization of loss and the working out of pragmatic
resources such as collective interpretation of dreams, writing with
literate collaborators, and imaginations of alternative futures, Plenty
Coups managed to transform the “destruction of a *telos *into a
teleological suspension of the ethical” (p. 146). Instead of
short-circuiting reality in his dream visions, Plenty Coups engaged with
reality in practical ways. Lear points that the Crow, in their
collaborative work to survive cultural devastation, rephrased the questions
about hope that Kant addresses in C*ritique of Pure Reason*. Kant asks:
“What can I know? and What I ought to do?” For Lear, “these questions are
better transposed to the first-person plural” (p. 103).

Hope is an affect that engages temporality in creative ways. It is also a
principle of explanation (Bloch, 1986) that has received growing attention
in linguistics and the social sciences (see Crapanzano, 2003; Myiazaki,
2004; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Borba, 2019). As the Crow case highlights,
hope is fundamentally a pragmatic and metapragmatic resource in which
people oppose despair, inequality, and violence by reimagining past harms,
current disjunctures, and alternative futures.

Given that the contemporary world has been affected by a major health
pandemic, which adds to a growing economic crisis and to political
instabilities of all sorts, this panel invites scholars in pragmatics to
reflect on language practices and forms of practical reason that are aimed
at producing hope. Scholars from all fields in pragmatics are invited to
discuss the pragmatics and metapragmatics of hope in the contemporary
world.

As scholars interested in language, some fundamental questions that we may
ask ourselves and our empirical data are: How do people in debilitating
scenarios engage with practical reason in order to avoid despair? How do
they imagine the access and distribution to linguistic and semiotic
resources in this moment of crisis? How do subjects reimagine temporality
to prospect alternative futures while redressing past harm?

*References*

Bloch, E. (1996). *The principle of hope*. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Borba, R. (2019) Injurious signs: The geopolitics of hate and hope in the
of a political crisis. In P. Amiena, S. Christopher, and W. Quentin.
(Eds.) *Making
sense of people and place in linguistic landscapes*. London: Bloomsbury.

Crapanzano, V. (2003). Reflections on hope as a category of social and
psychological analysis. *Cultural Anthropology, 18*(1), 3-32.

Heller, M., & McElhinny, B. (2017*) Language, capitalism, colonialism:
Toward a critical history*. Toronto: UTP.

Lear, J. (2006) *Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation*.
Cambridge: HUP.
Miyazaki, H. (2004). *The method of hope*. Stanford: SUP.
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