Fellows Feature: Julia Watts Belser on the functions of hope
The Fellows program is an opportunity to bring together Georgetown faculty from across the University—as well as visiting scholars—for community building, curricular development, and pedagogical experimentation. At these gatherings (also known as “salons” or “jam sessions”), the expanded Ethics Lab team comes together to share ideas and research, discuss best practices, and identify areas where their work overlaps through engaging and playful facilitation.
Julia Watts Belser is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, as well as core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program and a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, and disability in rabbinic literature, as well as queer feminist Jewish ethics. She directs an initiative on Disability and Climate Change, which brings together disability activists, artists, policy makers, and academics to address how disability communities are disproportionately affected by environmental risk and climate disruption.
In this interview, Belser discusses her Fellows salon on the functions of hope, as well as related work.
Julia Watts Belser
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies
What drew you to Ethics Lab?
I’ve been working with Ethics Lab now for three years. I started working with the team on a project related to my Religion and Disability Studies course where we were imagining an immersive, creative way for students to learn skills for analyzing norms in a space to consider questions of access and disability justice from a deeper, more integrated perspective. One of the things I loved about that experience was the way in which Ethics Lab thinks about how to approach ethical questions both inside and outside the classroom, and how and why they matter in our lived experience.
I’ve also loved the opportunity to meet and just be able to play with Fellows and colleagues in other departments who come from different perspectives. It’s such an amazing group of people and also a really rare and precious intellectual space because it’s so deliberately playful and encourages creativity, risk-taking, and sharing ideas that are just sort of coming up in the moment.
What sparked your interest in exploring hope?
I’m thinking and teaching a lot about climate change these days, and one of the questions that comes up so frequently is: Do you have hope? It’s such an important but big question, and as I have grappled with how to answer it, I realized that we mean so many different things when we talk about hope. Hope has such an extraordinary charge—so many of us want it, wish we had more of it, feel like we need it, grasp after it, and despair over the lack of it. So I began investigating: what are some of the different manifestations of hope? What are the different implications of hope when they charge us up to do different things in social movements and political activism?
There are a lot of evocations of hope that depend on the idea that good news is right over the horizon, and I think that’s dangerous when we’re looking at big challenges like climate change. It’s my sense that we need to develop a more robust repertoire for imagining hope in different ways, such as long-term community-based political action rather than a big moonshot techno-solution. A technological fix asks very little of us—it doesn’t ask us to change our thinking or practice, or to engage politically. I’m much more interested in helping us ground an understanding of hope that emerges out of shared dreams and struggles–and one that isn’t immediately shattered if we receive bad news.
Where does one begin?
I wanted to start by getting us thinking about some of the different associations we have with the term “hope,” because it’s a loaded but amorphous term. Hope has a wide range of effects, and they also pass between us: When you’re in a room with people who are feeling optimistic, hope is often contagious. But if you’re in the grip of depression or grief, it can be deeply alienating to be in a space where everybody’s cheery, where there’s a de facto expectation that you have to find something optimistic to say.
I also wanted us to explore how feelings operate, beyond the individual sphere. When it comes to politics and culture, I find myself quite critical of the way “hope” gets used. Consider, for example, how fantasies about “cure” or a “miraculous fix” drive a lot of our public conversations about disability. Disabled folks have often strongly critiqued the way in which disability is often understood as a tragedy, something best addressed through a purely individual solution. With regard to illness or disability, when somebody asks, “Do you have hope?” it often means: “Is there a cure? Is that person going to get better or learn to walk again?
Disability communities have powerful wisdom to offer for thinking about living well, even when there’s no good prognosis on the horizon, or when there is no “cure.” These insights are really important to bring into our conversation about climate change, for example. It potentially gives us a way to recognize that there are some aspects of a climate-impacted future that will be hard and may not be what we desired for ourselves—but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the story. Disability wisdom shows us that you can live a beautiful, vibrant, disabled life, and at the same time recognize that some parts of disability experience are really tough.
What’s an interesting or important point that stuck out for you?
One of the most interesting jamboards was by the group who took a look at the January 6 insurrection, tracing some of the different ways that the insurrection mobilized people by evoking many different kinds of hope. This is a political movement I’m definitely not advocating for, but it’s an example that really underscores the importance of thinking about the ethics of hope. We have to evaluate ethically what kinds of hope we want to cultivate, and what sources of hope we want to strengthen.
What comes next for this work?
I’m in the exploratory phases of a new book project on disability wisdom and climate resilience, so this big collaborative brainstorming session was really rich.
The salon opened up so many unexpected connections and it’s gotten me excited about a whole bunch of new conversations. For example, Clare Brown talked about working on the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda—how the curators there recognized and grappled with the risk of creating a deep sense of despair in the viewers, and how they crafted the memorial in ways that would strength people’s capacity to empathize and tap into a sense of hope and possibility. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner also talked about the significance of indigenous futurity, and how powerful it is for marginalized communities to deliberately, intentionally ground their work into a sense of possibility–even as we also have to grapple with the haunting question of who among us gets to take “the future” for granted.
—
Read Belser’s 2020 article, “Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope.”
—
What’s something that’s inspiring you right now?
Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been diving into artistic practice myself–just being playful with my own art with no sense that it should be good or productive. It feels like an extraordinary act of joyful resistance to the idea that we should only spend our time doing things that count or contribute in some way to our CV or list of publications. That deliberate practice of playful creativity has been a great source of joy and inspiration.