Hope in changing social imaginaries

Hope is a powerful and critically important sensibility. It is intimately related to other human emotions that variously offer counterpoints to the future: insecurity, precarity, and even despair. Hope thus offers projected alternatives to present circumstances, from intimate difficulties to planetary crises. This chapter works out of the elds of social theory, sociology, anthropology, and history to explore the changing ontological and imagined meanings of hope across space and time and, most importantly, across different ways of being.