The Sovereignty of Hope: Scholarship, Precarity, and the Future of Academic Freedom

A recording of one of Leela Prasad's presidential plenaries, held at the 2025 AAR Annual Meeting in Boston. Leela Prasad, Brown University, presiding Speakers (in order of appearance): James Bowley Larissa Carneiro Koritha Mitchell, Boston University Laurie Louise Patton Summary In an era of faculty precarity, ideological polarization, and institutional histories of injustice, what does it mean to practice hope as an intellectual and political commitment? What strategies and choices make hope and freedom viable? This panel explores hope not as naïve optimism, but as a form of sovereignty—a declaration of intellectual and ethical autonomy as well as accountability—in the face of everyday structural constraints, implicit and explicit (and old and new) hierarchies, censorship and surveillance, and professional vulnerability.

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The Sovereignty of Hope: Scholarship, Precarity, and the Future of Academic Freedom is an episode from Religious Studies News by American Academy of Religion.

This episode is 01:00:56 long.

This episode was published on Dec 11, 2025.

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