Hopeful Labour: Emotions, Affect and the Utopian Impulse in Research

Hopeful Labour: Emotions, Affect and the Utopian Impulse in Research & Practice

The University of Nottingham's Institute for Screen Industries Research Annual Symposium 2025

12.30-6.30pm, Monday 14th July, University of Nottingham, UK

Research is often framed through the language of rigour, critique, and productivity. The quieter energies that sustain it, such as care, hope and longing, can go unspoken. Hopeful Labour foregrounds these emotional and affective dimensions, inviting reflection on the frequently invisible or undervalued forces that animate scholarly and creative inquiry in the screen industries. This event considers how emotions such as passion, concern, and imagination shape our work, not only as emotional investments, but as orientations toward alternative or better futures.

Through dialogue across media, disciplines, and modes of research, our speakers explore how labour informed by care can resist extractivist models of knowledge production. From the role of hopeful imagination in sustaining communities of practice, to the environmental ethics embedded in creative industries, to the speculative affordances of emerging technologies, we ask: what happens when we take emotion and affect not as distortions of objectivity, but as generative forces for scholarly and creative transformation?

Bringing together critical and creative perspectives, Hopeful Labour offers space to consider the utopian impulse in research, not as naive idealism, but as a situated and often embodied mode of commitment to what could be otherwise. Whether through acts of environmental care, participatory creativity, or the critical reimagining of institutional structures, our contributors explore how hope can be an engine for research that is transformative, careful, and ethical.

Buffet lunch and refreshments will be provided with a wine reception to finish.

The ISIR 2025 symposium is free but places are limited. Please register to secure your place.

We have a small number of travel bursaries for unwaged/precarious colleagues offered on a first come first served basis. Please contact Jack Newsinger on jack.newsinger@nottingham.ac.uk to enquire or request one.

Please email ax-isir@exmail.nottingham.ac.uk with any questions.

Confirmed speakers include: Professor Helen Kennedy (Nottingham); Dr Jonathan Gross (Kings); Dr Nina Willment (York); Dr Leora Hadas (Nottingham); Amelia Knott (TV Industry Human Rights Forum); Usha Mahenthiralingam (Nottingham); Dr Richard Ramchurn (Nottingham); Dr Jack Newsinger (Nottingham); with more to follow.