ABSTRACT
The neoliberal educational policies and paradigms within which contemporary critical pedagogues must work can easily cultivate outlooks of despair and hopelessness. Within this context, critical hope offers a praxis-oriented means of countering a climate of cynicism and transforming critical pedagogues’ ways of being and relating with students. In this critical autoethnography, the author considers the pedagogy of critical hope as an antidote for the darkness of our times, and in particular, situated in the context of faculty retrenchments in one graduate degree program at a mid-sized US university. She argues that the pedagogical practices of radical mentorship and embodied emotionality among faculty and students at this university both led to and were further reinforced by collective action in solidarity with retrenched faculty members. While the fight against retrenchments at this university is ongoing, the author argues that these enactments of the core tenets of critical hope prefigure transformation, both in the local struggle against retrenchment and in the broader struggle against neoliberal practices in US universities.
