The 2022 issue of Sociology, Volume 56, features an article by Amal Jamal and Noah Aviai entitled “Creative Work and Hope in Conflict Zones: Theoretical Insights from Israel.”
In current research on the cultural industries, there is consensus that minority creative workers face greater challenges in integrating into audiovisual production. The article by Jamal and Aviai is an attempt to examine the Palestinian film and television industry workers in the Palestine-Israel conflict zone from the perspective of “sociology of hope”.
In theory, on the one hand, creative workers often encounter great uncertainty in their daily work, and the situation of minorities in this regard is even worse. Palestinian actors working in Israel, for example, find that they are often cast in roles that reflect “stereotypes” of Palestinians: terrorists or bad guys. Exploitation, but also encounter derogation of one’s own national identity, culture and language. On the other hand, with the help of “Sociology of Hope”, we will have a deeper understanding of this situation—specifically, “Sociology of Hope” is divided into three aspects: first, hope is relational, That is, it is socially distributed and characterized by deep inequality, which means that, as a scarce commodity, different groups receive different shares, and within the cultural industries, the “hope” of minority workers is to Structural constraints; the second is the timeliness of “hope”, that is, it is not only a spiritual resource centered on the present that can help creative workers resist challenges, but also a future-oriented desire for future life; third It is the relationship between “hope” and “activity”, that is, the future pointed to by hope does not have to have a clear outline and content. The key point is that there must be current actions and the ability to act now.
For Palestine and Israel, which have been in war for a long time, “hope” is indeed more practically entangled with people’s daily life. There, “hope” is not just a beautiful rhetoric, but also people’s belief in life. everyday understanding and practice.
