5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Hope has colours of multiplicity, ranging from philosophy, ethics, economics and sociology. It can be taken as a political principle, a philosophical virtue, a religious norm, an emotion or a social practice. In fact, in sociology, hope has been thematised in association with revolutions, utopias and optimism only to emphasise three research fields with which it is most usually connected. Books such as "The Principle of Hope" (Bloch, 1986), "The Revolution of Hope" (Fromm, 1968), and " The Sociology of Hope" (Desroche, 1979) are recurring testimonies of emotional ecology, where different practices are inscribed on diverse transformations, changes, and future actions. So far in the 21st century, hope has also been thematised in connection with social movements against neoliberalism (Dinerstein, 2015), hope about interconnections concerning welfare, culture on European migration (Norocel, et al. 2020), and the centrality of hope from diverse theological and philosophical approaches (van den Heuvel, S. C. 2020).
In this context, we propose to open a space for discussion on the construction of a sociology of hope that is nourished by social theory in general and the sociology of emotions in particular. We call for papers on the epistemic and methodological foundations, on the theoretical components, on the experiences of empirical inquiry and on the role of the sociology of hope in social criticism.
We encourage the presentation from a plural, post-intersectional, post-speciesist and postcolonial perspective to elaborate a systematic reflection on hope as practices that anticipate the future and transform the world.