Building Hope in Community

Whilst universities are in crisis, there is much hope in the organising of alternative possibilities. In this paper, we draw on the work of educator and theorist bell hooks on hope (1991; 1994; 1999; 2003) to frame community-building as an act of hoping, conducive to feminist transgression and resistance in the context of the neoliberal business school.

Through this conceptualisation of collective hope, we focus on the creation of community and solidarity by and for management and organisation studies doctoral and early career researchers. Specifically, we draw inspiration from our autoethnographic observations of two feminist community-building workshops, organised consecutively in 2024 and 2025, attended by over 50 doctoral and early career researchers, which were deemed by the participants to be instrumental in “building collective hope”.

Recent work in organisation and management studies has demonstrated the shortcomings of individualised career development strategies suggested for and often adopted by doctoral and early career researchers and has called for a configuration of more collective and structural solutions in support of the future development of the management and organisation academic community and the sustainability of the field. We will explore the ways in which our feminist community-building workshops created spaces to problematise social and organisational structures of inequality, including those prevalent in academic workplaces, and enable reimagining one’s academic career by focusing on agency and care, nurturing, and networks.