EVENTS IN THE AGE OF HEIGTENED VULNERABILITIES: TOWARDS PRAGMATIC HOPING

Abstract

This paper seeks to address the following question: How can we respond to the challenges and opportunities in contemporary eventscapes in meaningful, ethically rich, and enduring ways? By considering the intersections of risk, crisis, resilience, and creativity, the notion of ‘pragmatic hope’ emerges as the capacity to navigate the ever-changing risk environment and the ability to act in ethical, imaginative, creative, and practical ways through the medium of events. The paper highlights that considerations around risk and resilience have surfaced to the forefront of event decision-making processes and argues that creativity is increasingly bound up with wider societal, moral, ecological, and socio-economic conundrums. An agency-based view of events phenomena is suggested, with events contemplated as the extension and expression of ‘we’.