Hope as a local practice

Abstract This article discusses communicative strategies enacted by participants of Faveladoc, a documentary-making workshop that the first author attended in 2021. It examines how the participants, who are residents from Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemão favelas, grappled with a shootout that broke out during a meeting. Based on textual analysis and our ongoing dialogue with participants, we unpack their semiotic and rhetorical work of avoiding despair by reorienting knowledge, building socialites, and pursuing resources. They mobilized generic resources (i.e. discursive and listening genres), pragmatic strategies (e.g. collective singling out of the area of risk), and metapragmatic moves (e.g. contextual recourse to humor) to assess security. Through further enacting a distributed embodiment—collective commitments beyond a bounded body—participants facilitated hope as a modality of action. Finally, their recourse to humor in spite of potential danger reflected an enactment of communal care that we call a poetics of hope. (Sociolinguistics of hope, favelas, distributed embodiment, generic resources, humor).