PhD defence E. (Emma) Pleeging

Hope plays an important role in our personal lives and for society at large. It motivates us to take action, to trust others, to invest in our future and sometimes to simply ‘keep going’. All of us experience personal worries, and due to modern media, we are all increasingly aware of societal challenges such as climate change, inequality and automatization. Such worry can be paralyzing and hamper cooperation, as it often makes us feel defensive, scared and close-minded. Hope, most simply defined as uncertain desire for a future event, can be an important antidote against such worry or pessimism. Contrary to optimism, which refers to a tendency to expect good things to happen regardless of our actions, hope is based on the assumption that the future is uncertain. As such, hope is an important incentive for personal as well as societal progress; as long as there is hope, our actions can, and are necessary to, achieve what we want. Nonetheless, more hope is not always better, as false or disappointed hopes can erode trust and incite disappointment, meaning that it is important to combine hope with a realistic sense of our situation. While hope has become an increasingly popular topic for scientific research over the past decades, this research tends to stay within the confines of specific disciplines, meaning that the insights of one field do not easily translate to or enrich those of another. Hope has been studied most extensively in the fields of psychology, health science, philosophy, theology and sociology, and each of these fields defines hope differently, focusing for example on emotion, cognition, uncertainty, resilience, transcendence, history, or something else. However, reality does not adhere to these distinctions. Hope in practical contexts is about emotion as well as about cognition, social relations, trust, history and economic opportunity. In this dissertation, I therefore investigate how we can understand the meaning and role of hope from an interdisciplinary perspective, by combining and comparing insights from different scientific fields and by empirically studying how hope affects us.

The public defence will take place at the Senate Hall, 1st floor Erasmus Building, location campus Woudestein. The ceremony will begin exactly at 13.00 PM. In light of the solemn nature of the ceremony, we recommend that you do not take children under the age of 6 to the first part of the ceremony.