Learning in the Dark: Exile and the Temporal Reordering of Hope

Abstract

This article explores how hope is lived and reshaped in Higher Education Projects (HEPs) established abroad by Russian scholars in exile following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It focuses on how the darkness of exile, marked by loss, disorientation, guilt and a sense of suspended or broken futures, changes teaching practices and futures thinking in these projects.

Using learning diaries and interviews, the study asks two questions. First (RQ1), how are key aspects of hope — such as looking to the future, feeling able to act, and wanting to change things — experienced and challenged in exile? Second (RQ2), how might the emotional pressures of exile and moments of hopelessness become productive forces that reorder what scholars prioritise, how they relate to others, and how they relate to time and the future?

Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s ideas on hope, the findings suggest a distinctive shift. Hope moves from planning and projecting better futures toward sustaining what is meaningful in the present; from individual, action-focused agency toward shared practices of care and support; and from a clear, linear sense of time toward intense, meaningful moments within an unstable present. The article argues that these distinctive shifts are signs of a temporal reordering of hope, and dark conditions may generate alternative, present-oriented ways of making futures in higher education.