In the Conclusion, we outline a series of methodological and ethical considerations for scholars interested in researching the intersections of language and hope, particularly as they are practiced and manifested among marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Faveladas/os reveal a great deal of awareness of the extractivist tendencies of field research and their critical stance in advancing an agenda for sociolinguistic scholarship that is reflexive to more responsible, sustainable, and dialogic practices vis-à-vis interlocutors’ agendas and ethical concerns. Further, because we attend to knowledge about language produced by everyday people, we emphasize the need to be mindful of alternative and unconventional forms of knowledge production toward an ongoing understanding of the ways in which language can lead to hopeful futures. In short, insofar that hope demands that we reorient our view of the future and temporality more broadly, an understanding of language as hope demands that we reorient our assumptions of what counts as producing legitimate knowledge about language.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

The Introduction describes the fundamental objective of the book, which is to discuss what language can teach us about the practice of hope into the 21st century. Hope has always been critical to human survival, but the surge of right-wing populism, racism and ethnocentrism around the world spells hopelessness for many communities, including those whose backgrounds are subject to increased discrimination and precarization. Meanwhile, those in periphery contexts have lived in perpetual conditions of seeming hopelessness. Yet, they have not merely succumbed to despair but found creative ways of surviving material inequities. One key resource that faveladas/os have relied upon to hope is imagining language, temporality, digital technologies, and cooperation toward challenging past inequities and establishing socially equitable futures. They have also been very critical about the dynamics of knowledge production, including extractivist practices of academic scholars. These instances point to the importance of subjects’ reflexivity and practical work in producing conditions of hope.

This chapter outlines a theorization of language as hope. We begin with an understanding of language not merely as a fixed language system to communicate reality as such, but as an inherently flexible and negotiable practice that can reconstitute realities, in the sense of “languaging” (see Li, 2018). We approach languaging in relation to various conceptualizations of hope, beginning with Ernst Bloch’s (1986) pioneering account of hope as both an affect and a principle of explanation. As an affect, “Hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (p. 3). Temporally, hope orients people to the “Not-Yet-Being,” towards expansion and potentiality. This view of hope is complemented with various treatments within the social sciences and in sociolinguistics more specifically. In so doing, we propose that those who must grapple with enveloping challenges predicated on regimes of violence and economic dispossession do not merely succumb to hopelessness but instead have found ways to recast temporality, engage in tactical cooperation, and reimagine sociolinguistic resources in and through their everyday languaging toward the production of hope.

When we finished writing this book, on October 31, 2022, Jair Bolsonaro had just lost the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a thin margin of 2 million votes. A story familiar to U.S. Americans of voter suppression tormented many Brazilians, as Bolsonaro had used institutions such as the Polícia Rodoviária Federal, or the Federal Highway Police, to prevent people in Brazil’s poor Northeast, who mostly voted for Lula, from reaching the voting booth. His administration also adopted measures such as using the public bank Caixa Econômica Federal to offer loans to people on low incomes – one of the segments which was mainly pro Lula – with hardly any guarantees of repayment. Many other extralegal means of keeping Bolsonaro in power were rehearsed by his administration and supporters.

This chapter focuses on how hope demands an ever-shifting reorientation to time. We engage more fully with the case of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian councilwoman from a favela who was brutally assassinated in 2018. Her spectral presence became an icon of hope for the dispossessed. We trace her “presence” in the range of protests and demonstrations that erupted following her death. We additionally analyze ethnographic accounts of women who were influenced by Marielle, online archives of their speeches, and news articles and social media material that circulated in the months following her murder. Additionally, we show how hope in Marielle’s communicative practice had an important pedagogic dimension in that she led others in the cultivation of adequate virtues, affects, and ideologies for surviving historical inequities and formations of violence. We thus illustrate how hope demands a reorientation to time–a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. Temporality, in this sense, is “metaleptic” in that the past may belatedly inform the present, thereby not necessarily relying on chronology, linearity, or progress.

The purpose of this chapter is to advance the introduction and provide sociohistorical context necessary to understand the complexities of language and hope in Brazil. While Brazil is one of the world’s wealthiest nations it is simultaneously notorious for having one of the largest and rapidly increasing rates of class and income inequality in the world (Loureiro, 2000). In addition, while it is known for having the largest population of peoples of the African diaspora (Parra et al., 2003), it is also known for its longstanding history of anti-Black violence (Afolabi, 2009; Butler, 1998; Twine, 1997). Nowhere are the stratifications along social, economic, and racial lines more concentrated than in the favelas across the state. While the favelas, from this perspective, are spaces of seeming hopelessness, they are also locations of intense cultural production, everyday creativity, and most crucially, survival and hope. Critically, as we will demonstrate, the ways in which faveladas/os practice language and enact hope offer important lessons on the feasibility of hope into the 21st century.

This chapter presents a treatment of hope via an engagement with the complex interrelationship between communicative resources and their emergent indexical values. Hope, in other words, as a language practice, is presented here as an entailment of sociolinguistic enregisterment. Though meanings and values associated with various registers are productions of language ideological stances, our empirical cases point to the importance of reflexive practices in calibrating language and semiosis as hope. We offer an extended discussion of the papo reto (straight talk) activist register, an emergent translational activist register from the favelas that has been instrumental in recasting convoluted bureaucratic language in a manner that is legible to those who have not had access to extensive formal education and acculturation to mainstream political communicative conventions. We outline some of the formal and discursive features that have come to be associated with papo reto and analyze instances in which Marielle and other favelada/o activists have located spaces for papo reto in their activist work, disrupting the exclusionary language ideologies and normative regimes in Brazil.