This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
When Eboo Patel gave his provocative Shasha Seminar talk on Nov. 14, one of the most important points he raised was the warning that if we overemphasize systemic injustice and oppression, we may be inadvertently victimizing the groups we seek to defend, undermining their agency. His model of pluralism and emphasis on agency and empowerment seemed in many ways meant to be a message of hope and pragmatism. Yet something didn’t sit quite right with me with that understanding of hope. Maybe I’m too much of a cynic, or maybe it’s because I was born under a totalitarian regime, but for me the first step to claiming agency is recognizing the obstacles.
Growing up in communist Romania, we were raised from a very young age to be acutely aware of the ever present possibility of repression. It was a matter of life and death to make sure your kids understood that the phones could be tapped, the neighbors could be spies, and that you could not utter anything negative about Ceausescu or communism. Understanding the structures of oppression was a matter of survival. Yet even in this incredibly repressive system, we found and expressed agency in other ways. We couldn’t speak freely, so we developed a wicked dark
sense of humor. We did what many others do when the state turns violent: We turned to poetry and art and symbolism. Because the reality is that the human spirit can be incredibly resilient under duress. And that alone gives me hope.
But coming back to Patel—I think he was right about something else too: First you identify the problem, and then you find a solution. So the first step for cultivating practical hope is to understand “the problem,” but also the obstacles in your way when you try to solve this problem. I can’t think of a better place and better time to do so than in college, especially when you have the privilege of attending an institution like Wesleyan. Use your courses to help you better understand the world, better understand the problems we are facing, to understand the present moment in its historical context, to learn about human creativity and ingenuity and resilience, to learn about ideas you’ve never thought about. Use this time to truly understand the limits and the possibilities of agency.
College is also the optimal time for the second step to cultivating practical hope: Build the skills, the creativity and the community you need to take on the challenges ahead. Whether you want to change the world or just maintain your sanity when the world around seems like a dumpster fire, you need a community. Yes, it takes a village to change the world. It honestly also takes a village to be a good parent or a good writer. This is the time to start growing your village (and I say that as a hard-core introvert!). And ideally you want that village to be a kind village, and you want to be a responsible and contributing member to that village. So foster kindness, and don’t be afraid to praise and empower others. Learn to have difficult conversations in the classroom, and disagree with others in a respectful and constructive manner. Start building the skills you will need to exert agency after college too, whether that agency will be about being a fierce voice for the oppressed, a responsible lawyer or banker, a skilled musician, or an activist who tries to gradually chip away at the walls of oppression or solve the climate crisis.
Last but not least, I am also convinced that practical hope actually requires radical hope. I learned this from a dear friend of mine over a decade ago. Raghda was making jokes about the blackouts turning her fridge into a useful storage shelf, and getting used to the sound of drones becoming Gaza’s soundtrack at night. This may seem crude, but I don’t think she was making light of her situation, I think she was just trying to stay sane. And sometimes, the only thing left is to laugh at the absurdity of the world around us. What I admired most about Raghda was her ability to hold on to hope and to her principles under the most dire circumstance (the last time I was able to confirm her safety was in 2024, when her last message was an expression of gratitude for still being alive..). She never stopped believing in the good of people, and never stopped hoping for peaceful coexistence. The structural violence took away many of her choices, but not her humanity, and not her radical commitment to hope and to peace. I cannot think about a more powerful way of resistance.
Ioana Emy Matesan is an Associate Professor of Government and a Tutor in the College of Social Studies. She can be reached at imatesan@wesleyan.edu.
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