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We are living in an ever-changing world. Considering this, the 2026 OISE Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC) theme, “Generative Hope: Possibilities in Education Research”, is situated within a context of global disorder and educational possibility. Against the backdrop of ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, and intensifying inequality, hope is best understood not as sentiment but as practice. Drawing on bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Rebecca Solnit, Jane Goodall and a wide array of diverse thinkers, hope is framed as disciplined, collective, and intergenerational, predicated on critical consciousness. This essay delves into concrete pathways for enacting generative hope within education research. Moreover, it positions the GSRC as a living site where this hope is not simply declared but performed through collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and community.

A Tilted World, A Practice of Hope

We find ourselves navigating a world marked by distress, disorder, and disorientation. Climate emergencies punctuate our calendars with disaster; public trust erodes under the weight of disinformation and polarization; social services strain as inequality extends its reach. In such a moment, some may suggest the choice to cultivate hope is naïve. However, moving forward with hope is strategic, ethical, and necessary.

This year’s conference theme invites us to understand hope as a practice, as opposed to a theory. The concept of generative hope foregrounds care, critical consciousness, collective action, and ecological responsibility. In an interview, bell hooks famously stated that “hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.” Her words could not be truer. It is not about refusing to see the crisis; it is about refusing to let crisis be the final word.

Educational research is a critical site for generative hope because it equips us to name the world, build solidarities, and mobilize knowledge that transforms practice.

Situating the Crisis: Unmaking and Meaning-Making

Increasingly, institutions are asked to deliver certainty, efficiency, and measurable outcomes within volatile contexts, even as students and educators carry grief, fear, and fatigue. The result is a crisis of purpose: Is schooling primarily a conveyor belt for credentialing? Is it a mechanism to prepare students for the work force and nothing more? Or can it be a public space where we learn how to live together, repair harm, and imagine futures that sustain life?

To retreat into technocratic fixes is tempting; AI platforms, particularly ChatGPT, offer an illusion of control and relaxation in the thunderstorm of uncertainty we live in. Yet generative hope urges something different than generative AI: the courage to hold uncertainty as a condition for creativity. If our world is unmaking itself in familiar forms, we must remake our approaches to knowledge in ways that link personal experience to structural analysis and collective intervention. Education can be a vessel for this remaking.

Neoliberalism, Capitalism, and the Educational Imagination

A central feature of our time is the reach of neoliberalism: the free market colonizes public institutions and recasts students, teachers, and researchers as hyper-competitive entrepreneurs of the self. Within universities, the proliferation of audit culture, rankings, and short-term funding regimes incentivizes productivity over purpose and fragmentation over collaboration. For many graduate students and early-career scholars, this translates into a narrowing of intellectual risk-taking and a corrosion of the collective infrastructures of care that make learning possible.

These dynamics interlock with the destructive consequences of capitalism.  Commodification shapes what research gets funded, what counts as “impact,” and whose knowledge is deemed credible. Under these conditions, “hope” is easily portrayed as individual resilience that does not deserve funding or attention.

Generative hope resists this narrowing. It insists on relationality, solidarity, and the democratization of knowledge production. Naming the systems that constrain educational imagination widens the opening for transformative research. It allows us to ask not only how to survive the present order, but how to reconfigure the terms by which we live, learn, and flourish together.

Global Efforts to Make Sense of the World

Across the world, social movements are reframing what education can be when anchored in justice, reciprocity, and repair. Young people like Greta Thunberg are leveraging the power of social media to start initiatives like “Fridays for Future” and voice the concerns young people have for the future. On the other hand, academics like Eric Kaufmann advocate for hope in the form of active engagement, promoting classic liberalism. Although both of these individuals have differing ideologies, both have inspired people around the world to take tangible steps to cultivate hope.

In parallel, scholarship is moving beyond extractive paradigms that treat communities as data mines. Community-led and participatory action research redistributes authorship and authority, centering those most harmed in defining problems and co-creating solutions. These approaches do not romanticize “the community.” Rather, they emphasize consent, co-governance, and transparent benefit-sharing as ethical commitments.

Theorizing Hope as Practice: hook, Freire, Solnit, Goodall

For bell hooks, hope is inseparable from love as a public ethic. Her pedagogy names care, joy, and healing as rigorous practices that sustain learning and struggle. In classrooms and communities, this ethic refuses domination and insists that all those involved in our inquiries are part of the knowledge we produce.

On the other hand, Paulo Freire frames hope as a verb: a disciplined praxis grounded in critical consciousness and dialogic engagement. To hope, in Freire’s register, is to name and transform the world through collective reflection and action. Here, hope and critique are companions.

Rebecca Solnit reminds us that hope lives in uncertainty and that collective action can shape even when outcomes are not guaranteed. Hope, then, is neither optimism nor denial; it is a commitment to act without certainty, to wager the possibility that our efforts matter.

Finally, Jane Goodall orients us toward interdependence and stewardship, insisting on intergenerational responsibility and attention to the more-than-human world. Her ethic invites education to expand its circle of concern beyond humans, recognizing that our futures are tangled with the soil, water, animals, and air that make life possible.

They as well as others, like Waubgeshig Rice, Arundhati Roy and Byung-chul Han, who confront the world with their thinking and activism, position hope as a socially grounded, ethically demanding practice. Generative hope becomes both method and horizon: it governs how we research and what futures we commit to making possible.

The GSRC as a Site of Collective Radical Hope

Now, the GSRC is not merely an event. It is a laboratory for generative hope. Panels, roundtables, online posters, and workshops will convey expressions of hope from a vast array of scholars. By foregrounding intersectionality and interdisciplinary appreciation, the conference refuses a standard approach to education and invites conversation across different fields, methods, identities, and places.

Essentially, the conference becomes a mirror and a map. It will reflect the lived experiences that shape our scholarship while charting routes toward more just educational futures.

Choosing Hope, Building Worlds

To choose hope now is to refuse inevitability. Generative hope does not deny grief; it honors it as a teacher and companion to struggle. Amid disorder, we commit to the patient work of world-building.

Let this year’s GSRC be a site where hope is not simply spoken but enacted: a space where we rehearse the futures we need and invite others to join us in making them real. In doing so, we remind ourselves that uncertainty is not only a threat, but an opportunity to see what is possible.

Rafiel Rajinthrakumar is an independent writer, whose work focuses on critical pedagogies, teaching, popular culture, and sports. He is a second-year student in the Master of Teaching (MT) program at OISE and resides in the Greater Toronto Area.