“I Hope That You Will Make Room for Our Voices”: Enacting Critical Hope to Sustain a Community's Resistance to a State Takeover of an Urban School District

This study uses a critical hope lens to examine how a community sustained its advocacy and resistance through narrated counterstories in response to the 2023 state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, one of the largest and most diverse urban school districts in the southern United States. Findings reveal that the community advocated using emotion-oriented tenets of critical hope, such as anger and love, as resources to sustain grassroots resistance to top-down reform by calling out officials, maintaining unity and solidarity, drawing on community knowledge and history, and taking pride in their community schools.