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.