This collection of papers traces the ‘labours of hope’ which are both enabling and challenging the reproduction of capitalist relations in the contemporary moment.

In this paper, I present an ethnographically grounded argument that the people experiencing homelessness I accompanied over the course of two years experienced begging as labour which involved constructing and supporting emotional narratives of neediness, deservingness and personal connections in scripts, stories and hustles.

Drawing on an ethnography of life in a Ghanaian weaving workshop, this article traces the intersections between young rural weavers’ affective labour, hope and their experiences of immobility.

Based on conversations with irregular migrants, this paper explores the relationship between time and power, focusing on the political economy of waiting. It suggests that making people wait has become a key technique of governmentality used by the migration industry actors to control aspiring migrants’ movement, exploit their desires and hopes, and extract surplus value, turning the migration industry in Nepal into a major system of profiteering.

This article traces the labours of hope embedded in the everyday social reproductive practices of urban poor homeowner association members in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. It explores how aspirations for housing and land tenure security and the (failed) promises of opportunity bound in the urban materialise in the narratives and activities of women and men living in informal settlements.

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace.

This special issue on the Labour of Hope constitutes a most welcome milestone in the ongoing debates around hope and capitalism.

This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize “the spirit” in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement.

Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier.

This paper examines two space science infrastructures in Hawai'i, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). It considers how scientific observation and colonial occupation are co-constituted through the production of apparatuses – extensive material practices and arrangements that iteratively produce subject–object relations.