Ways of hoping: variegated hope among theatre freelancers during COVID-19

Hope has long been articulated as an intrinsic component of creative work, used to alleviate or justify the challenging precarity and narrow pathways to success in this sector. Two key articulations of hope have emerged: a deferred economy model in which present hardship is endured as a down-payment on specific future benefits, however ultimately unlikely; and a more dispersed understanding in which the hoped-for future is unspecified but affectively felt and mobilising in the present. In this article, we draw on qualitative data from an online survey and a policy event timeline developed as part of an 18-month research project with UK theatre freelancers during 2020 and 2021. Our qualitative analysis explores different ways of hoping among this group of creative workers at a time when futures and hopes were severely inhibited. Our findings propose that multiple forms of hope co-existed and intersected with practices of care, time and the self as mechanisms for navigating interrupted lives. The ‘variegated’ model of hope that we propose moves away from totalising theories of hope and helps in the understanding of hope as a force of resilience within cultural work, adding to existing calls to realise its political potential across cultural studies.