Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) hosted the Field Day ‘Imagining Possibilities: On Hope’ in June, creating a convivial space where curious minds came together to explore ways we can use hopeful practice to imagine better possibilities for living well together in a more-than-human world.
CSF’s Camilla Palestra, Hannah Riley and Anna Fitzpatrick designed and facilitated the day together, curating an experimental programme of participatory workshops, sensorial interventions, reflective and walking conversations, meditative spaces and calls to action. Here, they share their reflections.
What does it mean to navigate the tension between the real, the possible and the imaginative?
While imagining the format and content of CSF’s Field Day 2025, in conversation with the members and associates of the Centre, I attempted to respond to this question, also drawing on previous explorations tested during our LCF Fashion Undressed: Imagining Possibilities Festival organised to celebrate CSF’s 15th anniversary last year. As we wanted to use the Field Day as an opportunity to come together to make sense of things that affect relations, both human and more-than-human, in and through fashion, it became clear to me that making sense involved not only the senses, but also the insensible.
It is through the words of feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad that I found an entry point into what the insensible might be, as she writes: “The force of imagination puts us in touch with the possibilities for sensing the insensible,” which means grasping what is not yet but might be, not being but becoming. Inspired by Barad’s writing on touch, on coming together through contact, we envisioned Field Day as a space and time that allows new encounters and new relations, not only between the people who attended the event, or between subjects and matters, but also between imagined spaces, imagined times, and imagined beings.
It is a form of being responsible and responsive, striving to redefine what it means to be hopeful in a world where inequality, injustices, genocide, and ecocide seem to be the conditions of life. And here comes the subtitle, or the imperative of CSF’s ‘Imagining Possibilities Field Day: On Hope’. Paulo Freire and bell hooks insist that it is crucial that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite. But what is hope? Or, more specifically, how do we understand hope both individually and collectively? When does hope become a drive, an action? Through a series of workshops, conversations, and embodied practices at Field Day we embraced hope in its affective dimension, in its potential to act upon us and to be activated by us, both individually and collectively. This is what it means to imagine possibilities of hope, where hope is both “a tool and a practice,” to use the words of one of the Field Day participants.
What role does hope play in ‘troubled times’ (Facer, 2019)? What role does hope play in challenging dominant exploitative paradigms and forging alternative pathways for collective thriving?
But what is hope? When we sat down to unpick the tenets of hope in preparation for facilitating the Field Day, it seemed, at first, obvious – is it not to believe there is something better? Through research, discussions with colleagues and experiencing the Day itself, I now understand that it isn’t simply about being hopeful but also acting on hope.
Hope can feel like a fickle endeavour, something loose and difficult to grasp. Perhaps something trivial, Pollyanna or lacking depth in criticality and complexity. A throwaway line used to soften the blow of an explosive, difficult or uncomfortable situation. Yet hope is not passive or puerile, it is inherently active and energising. Hope is not only a potent emotion, but an action – the capability and capacity to act on aims, with resilience and adaptability (Snyder, 2002).
To be hopeful is not to be naive or to diminish the significance of trepidation or to lack understanding of real-world horrors, but to be adventurous, visionary, courageous, bold and indeed imaginative, in the face of such uncertainty, chaos and flux. Journalist and essayist Benjamin de Casseres commented in 1916, ‘In the sublime war of man against Reality, man has but one weapon, the imagination’. Amidst the many atrocities raging, humanitarian crises, climate collapse and ecological breakdown happening in very real time, it is our imagination, our hopeful imagining, that shakes reality and transforms it.
I often feel pulled by the tension between hoping and despairing. Yet coexisting within this messy state enables us to move through the drudgery of our problems and envision the light at the end of the tunnel. As Ahmed (2017) attests, ‘Hope is not at the expense of struggle but animates a struggle; hope gives us a sense that there is a point to working things out, working things through.’ Hope may not show us the path to take but instead guides us to towards empowerment to navigate treacherous paths.
It felt slightly incongruous to plan a gathering designed for people to be ‘hopeful’ in one day, as it is often the ‘incidental interactions’ (Maier, 2025, p. 250) in which seeds of empathy and connection are planted and joy is nurtured. But being together with a group of diverse people to explore the very essence of what it is to inhabit our world with care was invigorating.
Underpinned by a post-critical pedagogical lens, we created a ‘Hope(ful) meditation’ and Hope(ful) cards to challenge our preconceived ideas of hope and encourage new ways of thinking about and activating hope. The Hope(ful) Meditation and Cards are designed to create a critical, empathetic, reflexive, reflective and thoughtful dialogue around hope, personally and conceptually. The Hope(ful) Card practice draws from Ella Saltmarshes’ ‘The Long Time Dialogue’ methodology, in which participants in pairs engage in free-associating dialogue and empathetic listening.
The poem below, ‘Hope is’, is my way of expressing the visceral ways hope manifests, how I experience what hope is.
The feeling(s) within our dreams
An expletive running to shore
Bellows heard through halls.
The nooks and cracks of pavements
Shattered stained-glass windows
Homes made of sand, built by hand
Gardens watered with tears
Wisteria-infused air.
A message from the skies
Folklore whispered across time
Glimmering auras and kaleidoscopic ardours
Grown by those who despair
Nourished by those who care.
What does it mean to hope as the world crumbles around me?
When I volunteered to help facilitate the latest iteration of Field Day, I admit to some scepticism to the theme of hope. While I recognised it as the anchor idea of the day, I dismissed it as a blithe popular sentiment used to paper over personal and structural cracks. Allowing my comfortable yet defensive cynicism to continue to offer (limited) balm to my frustrated, angry self, drowning in late-stage capitalism.
Yet, I discovered, hope is persistent, critical, active, collective. Ultimately, political.
Persistent: You might not feel like it, but you can’t turn away, it doesn’t work like that. I see your cynicism, your defence but I challenge you to look away. Don’t. It’s more than a passive mood or form of gratitude. It’s a challenge. Look, see this connection, this idea, this possibility…
Critical: It acts as a tool of critique. To hope is also to say, hey, look, stop. This is the change. See the injustice. Explain it. Grapple with it. Name it. Believe that it can change. Freire and hooks, remind me.
It’s an active action: And I don’t mean to engage in tautology. But to emphasise the agential element of hope. While as a feeling it maybe fleeting. As an action it is engaged, it is something I can do. I have been forced from passivity. Into a way of relating. Imagining. Connecting. Believing. Risking. Sharing. It is active in creating new ways of being. How can we dare to hope that things might be different, might be more than they are now?
Collective: The Field Day was about coming together. With those in the room and those beyond, those we know and those we don’t. Hope forced me to put myself aside. Forced me (persistence?) back into relation.
Political: Hope is an ethical activity. An ethical activity concerned with exploring possibilities and imaginations of the ‘good life’. Pretty much the Aristotelian definition of politics. To build something else in the ‘shell of the old’ is to prefigure. It is to engage in some prefigurative politics.
Hope is essential. And as Freire suggested from our outset that ‘it is imperative that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite’.
Casseres, B.d. (1916), ‘Shelley’, The Poetry Journal, 6(1), p. 20.
Facer, K. (2019). ‘Storytelling in troubled times: what is the role for educators in the deep crises of the 21st century?’ Literacy, 53(1), pp. 3-13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12176
Freire, P. (2021) Pedagogy of Hope. 1st edn. Bloomsbury Academic.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Maier, S. (2025) ‘Hope in an art school’, in S. Abegglen, T. Burns, R. Heller, R. Madhok, F. Neuhaus, J. Sandars, S. Sinfield and U.G. Singh (eds.) Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education. Open Book Publishers, pp. 247-256. Available at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0462
