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Topic

The Sermons of the Refuter: A Social Symphony in Three Movements Or… A Treatise on the Nature of Hope and The Actor-State Constructed Social Reality

Department of Sociology

Date & location

• Thursday, November 6, 2025

• 9:30 A.M.

• Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology, ӣ��Ӱ�� (Supervisor)

• Dr. Martha McMahon, Department of Sociology, UVic (Member)

• Dr. Emile Fromet de Rosnay, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. John Holloway, Department of Sociology, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Alexandra Branzan Albu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UVic

   

Abstract

Hope has long been a staple of academic study in the fields of psychology and philosophy, with the former experimentally endeavoring to determine the “power” of hope, while the latter has made great strides in determining a working body of theoretical work pertaining to the “nature” of hope. However, the field of sociology has largely siloed hope into singular conversations in niche subfields, and often as an operational point of investigation, rather than the subject itself. Secondarily, the sociological study of hope has itself remained fairly focused in micro analyses to date. This present work aims to present a sociological examination on the nature, sociality, and power of hope not as emotion, but as socially composed fantastical reality. In doing so, hope is examined as a means by which the individual social actor, and larger more complex social institutions such as the state can modify the fabric of their own social realities with the fantastical and imagined faux realities of hopeful existence.

          What emerges is a narrative theoretical consideration of the social processes by which the individual is inclined to compose their own social realities contrary to the materiality of their being; which in turn presents a discourse on the nature of being in the social, with a clearly defined delineation between the capacities for material and immaterial social reality, and the socially symbolic meanings of various states of being in temporal sociality. To more completely evolve the narrative, an examination of hopeful existence as propagated by the neoliberal state is presented in the context of a sociohistorical archival study of the Soviet Union. The history of the Soviet Union is presented in the context as a state constructor of fantastical reality. In sum, a dualism of hope emerges in this discussion, demonstrating methodologies of the state and the subject to order their own realities and that of others for either liberation or oppression.

          This dissertation blends a traditional dramaturgical symbolic interactionist approach with traditional (Kierkegaardian) existentialism, metaphysics, sociohistory and a newly proposed methodology of clandestine sociology. The latter incorporating elements of post-war tradecraft philosophy and method into a theoretical basis for sociohistorical examination of lived social experience. Which allows for a clear source critique situated in the theoretical assertion that reality as reported is reported for a reason, and it then falls to the theorist to examine such realities in careful environments to determine the lived symbolic impact of social experience in material and immaterial states of being. In addition, meditations toward a metaphysic of social being are present, exploring the means by which social meaning and significance is symbolically socially constructed, and the means by which individual social actors compose their realities in a temporal sense. A meditation on the social nature of time is presented, as is a reordering of traditional existential meditations on the nature of hope in a more gnostic sense.