Kindling Radical Hope in Restrictive Times
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18357/otessaj.2025.5.2.109Keywords:
grand challenges, instructional design, arts-based practices, community of transformation, diversity equity inclusion and justiceAbstract
The persistent exclusion of historically marginalized groups in STEM remains one of higher education’s most pressing grand challenges aligned with UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals—Quality Education (Goal 4) and Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10). In a time when diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice work is increasingly restricted politically, institutionally, and culturally, faculty and educational developers are seeking ways to sustain meaningful, human-centered change. This paper describes arts-based practices—embedded in a Community of Transformation (CoT)—that cultivate radical hope and support members to envision liberatory futures. We detail how these arts-based practices—speculative design, remixing, and futurity—foster radical hope and support faculty to reflect critically. Activities such as protest art, narrative remixing with AI, quilt-making, and graphic storytelling function as both reflective and generative practices, surfacing emotional insights, social commitments, and emergent strategies often excluded from conventional faculty development. With members drawn from STEM fields, traditionally among the least equitable, we argue that these arts-based practices in CoTs can support resistant, hopeful infrastructures for change, enabling members to model practices like rest as resistance and radical hope in their local contexts
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Copyright (c) 2026 Kristen Ferris, Vanessa Svihla, Susannah Davis, Nadia Kellam, Earl Lee, Cinthia Rojas Palacio
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