I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately. I think about it when I read the news. I think about it when I talk with my 26-year-old niece about her future. I think about it when I hear about the rates of anxiety and depression among young people today. I think about it when I see millions of Americans marching in “No Kings” protests. And I think about it when I teach about social problems in my sociology courses.

Sociology, Social Problems, and Social Change

Sociology tends not to be seen as particularly hopeful. After all, from its inception, sociology has focused on what is wrong with society. The roots of sociology are found in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and worker alienation, Emile Durkheim’s concerns about a lack of solidarity and anomie in modern society, and Max Weber’s lament about our being trapped within an “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationality. Moving outward from the Big Three, we find Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s arguments about the oppression of women and W.E.B. DuBois’s prolific writing about the subjugation of African Americans. I could go on.

In any college catalog, you will find sociology courses dealing with a wide variety of social problems caused by inequality and the many ways that social institutions fall short. Sociologists study poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and problems having to do with education, the environment, the family, urban and rural society, etc. 

However, this focus on social problems masks a primary reason to study society—to improve it or at least to improve life within it. The founders of sociology I mentioned above all emphasized how society can change. Early sociologists were also deeply embedded in social reform movements early in the twentieth century; Jane Addams of Hull House fame is but one example. When I read contemporary sociology and talk with my colleagues, I can clearly see that the original goal of social improvement lives on. 

I’ll admit, however, that I rarely find a sense of true hopefulness. That is a problem. What chance do we have of improving society and life within it if we do not have hope?

A Sociology of Hope?

So, I wondered: is there a sociology of hope? I went searching and found two recent books that move us in that direction: Sociology of Hope: A New Theory by Adrian Scribano and Toward a Sociology of Hope: Looking Beyond by Guido Gill and Emiliana Mangone, both published in 2025. 

Defining Hope

To study a phenomenon, we must first define it. Gill and Mangone explore different dimensions of hope as a way of defining it. For these authors, the common characteristics of hope are as follows: 

1. Hope includes the desire and expectation of something in the future that one considers valuable. The authors make clear that this valuable something is subjectively defined. What one person considers valuable may not be considered valuable to another.
2. What we hope for is possible but uncertain. If it is impossible to attain, we have despair rather than hope. If we have certainty, there is no need for hope.
3. Hope is closely related to trust and faith. The authors quote Eric Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope:  “Hope is the mood that accompanies faith. Faith could not be sustained without the mood of hope. Hope can have no basis except in faith.”
4. Hope is not just a belief or desire but also something that requires action. Hope is active rather than passive. 

Gill and Mangone argue that hope is something that exists between people rather than within a single person. Rather than a personal virtue, hope is a relational good. Hope nourishes social relations and is in turn nourished by those relations. Hope, especially hope for societal change, emerges from social relations. Hope rests on mutual support and action to bring about the hoped for future. For these researchers, hope must be cherished and cultivated.

What can sociology tell us about how hope might be cherished and cultivated?

Hope in Sociological Theories

Turning to Sociology of Hope: A New Theory, Adrian Scribano provides us with four components of a sociology of hope along with the predominant emotion in each:

1. The passion in revolution
2. The desire for utopia
3. The expectation of social change
4. The feelings of communion in collective action

Theories of revolution, utopia, social change, and collective action provide a foundation for studying hope as the relational good described above. Combined, they provide the basis for a sociology of hope.

The Passion in Revolution

Theories of revolution are important because of what revolutions teach us about radical social change. Viewed historically, revolutions can be so radical that after time passes, we cannot imagine a world before the revolution. For instance, Scribano notes, “it is inconceivable that nobles [could] kill peasants whenever they want[ed].” Potentially, the power structure we have today will be unimaginable to people living in the future. There is hope in this possibility.

For Scribano, theories of revolution highlight how the acceptance of bodily risk and the experience passion play important roles in creating social change. The leadup to revolutions are crisis points in society when radical change becomes possible but far from guaranteed. 

For example, consider the recent Gen Z uprising in Nepal. According to sociologist Tracy Fehr, the social media ban that started the protests on September 4, 2025, was “just a match to the flame of brewing frustration from a generation with high unemployment and minimal economic opportunities at home.” After a brutal government crackdown, widespread criticism of the crackdown, and the spread of violence, including fires set at government buildings and the homes of political leaders, the prime minister was forced to step down. 

Clearly, this outcome was not guaranteed at the start. Nor was the result of the March 5, 2026 election, in which the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), led by 35-year-old former rapper Balendra Shah, won in a landslide. This election set the stage for potentially lasting change, but only time will tell. 

Citing Franz Fannon’s 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, about armed struggle against colonialism, Scribano describes revolution as a process of national liberation. People must be willing to put their lives and their livelihoods on the line. For a revolution to succeed, passion is not enough. But without passion, hope for this possible but uncertain future will surely fade out too soon.

The Desire for Utopia

Next, Scribano argues that theories of utopia is important because utopias highlight the role of desire for a new and more just society. Desire “sets the movement in action, drives the movement, and pushes to action; in that sense, utopias build hope.” Utopian societies attempt to go beyond imagining a different future by trying to live that future in the present. 

While utopias are impossible in a literal sense, the endeavor to create a perfect society is not. Attempts at such societies, for Scribano, are “narratives sent to the future… carry[ing] within themselves both the act of wishing and what is wished for.” A sociology of hope built on theories of utopia helps us to better understand the role of both personal and collective desire in imagining and creating a potential future. Without such desire, hope for a potentially brighter future falters.

The Expectation of Social Change

Theories of social change are the third key element of a sociology of hope. Social change shows us that change is inevitable, even if the direction of change is not. Scribano points us to four essential elements of social change that matter for a sociology of hope.

• A sociology of hope must consider how social norms or rules of behavior have changed in the past. Certainly, how people of different social classes were expected and taught to behave in the 18^th century is quite different from today. For instance, the expectation that a person must be educated at least up to the end of high school and increasingly until the end of college is much more widespread than it was in the past. Laws, or codified norms, have changed as well. 
• A sociology of hope must consider how rewards and compensation systems have changed in the past. For example, in a feudal system, rewards and compensation are based on currying favor with the local nobility. In a capitalist system, rewards and compensation are based on contracts for salary or wages in exchange for labor. Other incentives have changed as well. For instance, think about contemporary capitalism and the incentives of conspicuous consumption and the enjoyment of material goods.
• A sociology of hope must consider how social relations have changed in the past. As the contexts of social involvement change, social relations also change. Think, for instance, about how relations between bosses and employees as well as coworkers change as we move from an industrial economy to a service economy and finally to a knowledge economy. We can also think about changes in family relations as we move from agricultural families to breadwinner-homemaker families to dual-earner families. 
• A sociology of hope must also consider transformation of hierarchical resources. Here, Scribano examines the relations of authority and obedience. This brings us back to revolutions. For instance, after the American Revolution, Americans were no longer obedient to the King of England but instead to the set of laws being developed in the newly formed United States.

Theories of social change provide narratives about how change can happen. They help us to know what to do as we as we work toward a hoped-for future. This knowledge gives us the expectation that something will change, and this expectation is needed for hope to flourish. 

The Feelings of Communion in Collective Action

Finally, Scribano turns to studies of collective action to emphasize the elements of communion in hope. Collective action, broadly speaking, happens wherever people coordinate to achieve a shared goal they could not accomplish on their own. Revolutions and attempts at development of utopian societies are examples of collective action, as are political protests, strikes, and crowdsourcing. 

Collective action is not simply a large number of individuals coming together because they have common interests. Instead, the development and success of collective action, and especially social movements, is tied up with the subjective meanings related to the action. Scribano points to several theoretical concepts that help explain this point:

• The role of collective identity, which can precede collective action but also develops within the action, sometimes resulting in a collective identity that did not exist before. Collective identity, here, refers to the way we think of ourselves as a “us” rather than just a bunch of individuals. Collective identity binds us together as a unified whole. For instance, a neighborhood that comes together to fight against the construction of a data center may come to see themselves as a true community through this process.
• The concept of cognitive liberation, which focuses on the degree of belief that collective action can bring about a real possibility of change. In the small city of Menominee, Wisconsin, residents found out about and successfully fought a development agreement for a data center in their town. Their efforts brought together a statewide coalition, giving hope to other communities in the same position.
• The process of framing that gets people to think similarly about the problem, its causes, and what ought to be done about it, and that also gives them the conviction to get involved. For instance, Healthy Climate Wisconsin – one of the members of the statewide coalition in Wisconsin – has published the Big Tech Unchecked Toolkit. This toolkit explains the problems caused by data centers and provides tools and resources communities can use. 

Returning to Gill and Mangone’s Toward a Sociology of Hope: Looking Beyond, if these theorists are correct that hope is a relational good and active rather than passive, collective action is clearly essential to the hope for social change – and we can see this happening in the fight against data centers in Wisconsin and other places. 

Scribano paraphrases Alberto Melucci when he writes that “collective action is a prophet of hope: the social relations mark the traces of the nomadic journey in today’s thinking about tomorrow.” Without collective beliefs about change and the motivation to work for that change, hope for a possible but uncertain future becomes merely wishful thinking.

Conclusion

We are living in a time of social change and uncertainty—political, economic, and environmental. But I have hope because I see examples of all four elements of a sociology of hope—passion, desire, expectation, and communion. Some of these examples are large scale and covered in the news—like the No Kings rallies and the community resistance in response to ICE in Minneapolis. 

But many others are smaller in scale and more hidden from those not directly involved. If you are feeling hopeless, I encourage you to do the following:

1. Watch public sociologist Stephanie A. Malin’s Ted Talk about moving from climate grief to hope through engagement in collective action.
2. Watch Veronika Kovácsová, an urban designer with an MS in Sociology, discuss how individual actions can result in collective resilience.
3. Find your people! Get involved in something going on in your community that is important to you. 

And always remember—hope must be cherished and cultivated through social relations and through collective actions toward a future we want to see.