Table Of ContentHope Under Oppression
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Allison Weir
Hope Under Oppression
KATIE STOCKDALE
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Stockdale, Katie, author.
Title: Hope under oppression / Katie Stockdale.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University
Press, [2021] | Series: Studies in feminist philosophy series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003871 (print) | LCCN 2021003872 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197563564 (hb) | ISBN 9780197563571 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780197563595 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hope. | Oppression (Psychology)
Classification: LCC BD216 .S76 2021 (print) | LCC BD216 (ebook) |
DDC 152.4— dc23
LC record available at https://l ccn.loc.gov/ 2021003871
LC ebook record available at https://l ccn.loc.gov/ 2021003872
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197563564.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Dedicated to Dave
Acknowledgments
This project began its life when I was a doctoral student at Dalhousie
University. I was initially interested in forgiveness, then anger, then finally
hope. At some point, I realized that I wouldn’t have much to say about for-
giveness until I thought more about anger. And it was reading Sue Campbell’s
influential “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” then
tracing back to Lynne McFall’s “What’s Wrong with Bitterness?” cited in that
article, that brought me to feminist approaches to hope in the first place. If
bitterness involves a loss or absence of hope, as I found myself thinking, then
what is hope? I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie for
being so supportive of me and my early work investigating these questions.
I am especially grateful to Chike Jeffers, Greg Scherkoske, Susan Sherwin,
and Lisa Tessman, who helped me develop early versions of the ideas in this
book. They have all been sources of insight, support, and guidance for many
years. I also owe a great deal of thanks to Cheshire Calhoun, who originally
suggested that I think about a book at the 2016 Nature and Norms of Hope
Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. Cheshire’s feedback on the man-
uscript, and ongoing support, made writing a book seem like something
I could actually do.
During my time as a residential dissertation fellow in the Hope and
Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations project at Cornell
University, I learned much about hope from conversations with Luc Bovens,
Andrew Chignell, Alex Esposito, Nicole Hassoun, Miriam McCormick,
Michael Milona, Hannah Tierney, and Andre Willis and through confer-
ences and workshops that brought hope scholars in different disciplines to-
gether from across the world. I used to be more critical of hope than I am
today, in part thanks to my experience in this project.
David Hunter, Mercy Corredor, Michael Milona, and Catherine Rioux all
read the manuscript in full as part of a Zoom book club generously organized
by David during our collective COVID-1 9 isolation. I am very grateful for
these philosophers’ valuable feedback on the manuscript, which helped me
reframe and strengthen many arguments and examples in the final stages of
x Acknowledgments
writing. Colin Macleod and Audrey Yap also provided feedback on multiple
chapters that helped me strengthen the book significantly.
Many other scholars have contributed to ideas in this book through
conversations and written feedback that have shaped my thinking about this
project. Thanks especially to Clifford Atleo, Claudia Blöser, Barrett Emerick,
Matt Hernandez, Chris Howard, Graham Hubbs, Alice MacLachlan,
Ben Mitchell- Yellin, Colleen Murphy, Maura Priest, Titus Stahl, Olúfẹmi
Táíwò, students at the University of Victoria, students at Sam Houston State
University, and anonymous reviewers at various journals. I also received val-
uable feedback from audiences at the New Directions in the Philosophy of
Hope conference at Goethe University (2018); the Philosophy, Politics, and
Economics Society Meeting in New Orleans (2018); the Hope and Optimism
Midpoint Conference in Estes Park (2016); the Hope, Social and Political
Perspectives Workshop at the University of Groningen (2016); and the Notre
Dame Hope and Optimism Workshop at the University of Notre Dame
(2016). I am also grateful to audiences who attended my colloquium talks at
Dalhousie University, Sam Houston State University, and the University of
Redlands, and my job talks at various institutions that shall remain unnamed.
I was very lucky to have had Lucy Randall and Cheshire Calhoun as
editors, who both believed in this project from the beginning and whose en-
couragement kept me going as the book evolved. The reviewers at Oxford
University Press, Adrienne Martin and an anonymous reviewer, were also
the best reviewers for the book I could have hoped for. Their suggestions and
criticisms on multiple drafts transformed the book into something I am very
proud of. I am particularly indebted to Adrienne for her ongoing mentorship
throughout my writing process and for pushing me to continue working on
parts of the book that needed improvement even when I felt as though I had
nothing left to say. I did have more to say, and the book is now much stronger.
Thanks also to Hannah Doyle for editorial assistance and Lisa Fedorak for
help preparing the index. All remaining errors are very much my own.
I am grateful to family and friends for continuing to encourage me
throughout these many years of writing, especially my mom Kristine,
stepdad John, and sister Sarah, who were much more optimistic that I’d finish
and publish this book than I was. And I owe everything to Dave Dexter, the
love of my life and best person I know. Dave read multiple drafts of the manu-
script in their entirety, and his insights have contributed to every chapter and
argument in the book. Dave’s love and unshakable faith in me have sustained
Acknowledgments xi
me since I was a first-y ear doctoral student trying to find my path in philos-
ophy. I would be lost without him.
Sections from “Hope’s Place in Our Lives” and “The Value and Risks of
Hope” were published in the Journal of Social Philosophy 50, no. 1 (2019): 28–
44. Parts of “Losing Hope, Becoming Embittered” were published in Hypatia
32, no. 2 (2017): 363–3 79. I am grateful to these journals for their permission
to reuse these works in the book.
Introduction
Oppression and the Question of Hope
I’m sure that all readers can remember times at which they were told to “be
hopeful,” to “never give up hope,” and that “there is always room for hope.”
Hope, we learn at a very young age, is always good to have. Fortunately, too,
there is apparently always hope to find. If we focus hard enough, we are sup-
posed to be able to sustain hope—e ven when the world around us is fright-
ening, dark, and unjust. Losing hope, or being suspected of losing hope, is
often met with condemnation. “You shouldn’t get bogged down in negative
thinking like that. Stay hopeful!” we often hear from our family, friends, and
the media. But what is this thing “hope” that ends up in so many sayings,
news headlines, and inspirational quotes? And why is hope so valuable that
we are so often urged to preserve and protect it?
This book is about the role of hope in human life, particularly in the lives
we lead as moral, social, and political beings. It is about the nature and value
of hope in the real world in which we live, a non-i deal world that includes
suffering, disadvantage, luck, violence, harm, and loss. I want to understand
what human agents hope for in this world, whether hope is valuable to us as
we navigate our vulnerabilities and the hardships of life, and the relation-
ship between hope and other elements of our psychologies including expec-
tation, trust, anger, and faith. This project is, ultimately, an inquiry in moral
psychology: a field concerned with how “we function as moral agents” and
the roles of cognition, perception, and emotion in moral agency (Walker
2004, x).1
The approach to hope I take is quite different from how philosophers
have traditionally approached the subject. Discussions of hope in the
1 As Margaret Urban Walker (2004) explains, philosophical moral psychology is part of ethics. It is
a descriptive and normative project that “discovers our real possibilities and limits, and assesses mor-
ally our adequacy for living our lives” (xiii). Although it is not itself empirical, philosophical moral
psychology “can and should take a searching and critical view of scientific claims” (xiii). Walker’s
description of moral psychology captures how I characterize my work.
Hope Under Oppression. Katie Stockdale, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197563564.003.0001
2 Hope Under Oppression
philosophical literature have typically taken place in the existential and
pragmatist traditions. Until recently, hope had earned surprisingly little
attention in analytic philosophy, the field in which I situate my work.2 But
beginning in the 1950s, analytic philosophers began to see the relevance of
hope to areas of the discipline such as epistemology, rational decision theory,
and moral psychology. Hope, most of us agree, involves some combination
of belief and desire; and realizing that hope involves cognitive and conative
elements, philosophers interested in rationality and motivation were nat-
urally drawn to think about hope. In 2014, Adrienne M. Martin published
her highly influential How We Hope: A Moral Psychology and proposed a
sophisticated theory of hope, its relationship to faith, and the role of hope
in interpersonal relationships. The John Templeton Foundation launched
the Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations project
at the University of Notre Dame and Cornell University that year, bringing
together philosophers, social scientists, and religious studies scholars from
around the world to explore hope, optimism, and related states.
Although investigations of hope once lay at the periphery of analytic phi-
losophy, there is growing interest in different facets of the subject. My own
interest in hope emerged as I engaged more with feminist approaches to
moral, social, and political philosophy. Feminist perspectives have helped
to make visible the ways in which persistent, widespread, and multifaceted
forms of oppression structure certain individuals’ lives, oppressions based
not only on gender but also on race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and
other features of social difference. Oppression is commonly theorized as a
type of structural or social injustice that confines, restricts, or immobilizes
people in virtue of their membership in certain social groups (Frye 1983;
Young 1990; Cudd 2006). As Marilyn Frye (1983) famously argues, the ex-
perience of oppression is analogous to that of a bird locked away in a cage. If
you look closely at just one wire, you do not see the other wires, and you may
wonder why the bird doesn’t just fly around it and escape. To understand that
the bird is caged in, you must step back and look at the cage macroscopically.
Only then does it become obvious that the bird is caught within a network of
systematically related barriers and forces (Frye 1983, 5).
Taking a macroscopic perspective involves a shift in focus from the indi-
vidual to the collective and institutional. We might ask: How is a particular
2 Hope had also earned surprisingly little attention in psychology. Matthew W. Gallagher (2018)
notes that “with other positive psychology constructs, hope was largely ignored as a topic of study for
much of the 20th century” (3).
