"the Dynamics of Hope in the Everyday Society of Pain in the Gaza Strip: Multiple Futurities and Temporalities"

This paper tracks how Palestinians in the Gaza Strip can produce a sense of the future and time from within the structure of colonial genocide, which aims to prevent them from flowing and thinking toward the future, making them prisoners of the present moment, running from place to place in search of lost bread, water, and security. More specifically, the research explores the ways in which the daily social pain experienced by Gazans—such as the loss of loved ones, intimate places, roles, social relationships, and routine rituals—becomes a productive site for the multiple future imaginaries they hope for. The research aims to:1.Construct a relational political and socioeconomic analysis map of the diversities, collective intersections, or conflicts among these futures. 2.Track how their hoped-for futurities, which penetrate their difficult presents, produce diverse social practices, feelings, and emotions that work to redirect and reshape their painful daily lives governed by death, waiting, and uncertainty. These futurities create ways to negotiate the present, whether through resisting genocide, coping, enduring pain and resilience, or believing in fate "hope in God is great," among other possible meanings. 3.Explore how a local, horizontal process of producing, distributing, and disseminating hope can emerge among individuals within the "society of pain" in Gaza, where the afflicted themselves become capable of offering and exchanging hope amidst ongoing genocide and pervasive uncertainty, by utilizing their own local resources and religious, cultural, and national beliefs, independently from hierarchical frameworks of the political economy of hope. Drawing on the voices and narratives of the sufferers, this paper explores a new epistemic space within the field of Sociology of hope, focusing on tracking the forms of hope's emergence and their operations when uncertainty of the next moment becomes an objective fundamental condition governing the Gazan lives in the time of genocide.