Hope Circuits with Dr. Jessica Riddell

When Professor Jessica Riddell began writing Hope Circuits: Re-Wiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing on June 1, 2020, the world was only a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. As institutions scrambled to respond to an unprecedented period of uncertainty, she found herself asking a different set of questions. Rather than focusing on how individuals and organizations could simply endure increasingly fragile systems, she began wondering whether the moment called for something more transformative. If existing structures were no longer sustainable, what would it look like to redesign them in ways that foster human and ecological flourishing?

Those questions became the foundation of a research journey that has now spanned more than six years. What began as an exploration of disruption gradually evolved into a broader examination of hope—not as optimism or wishful thinking, but as strategic infrastructure capable of helping individuals, institutions, and communities navigate complexity with integrity, imagination, and care.

Over the next three years, Dr. Riddell worked alongside more than 250 thought partners from across higher education and beyond, including students, faculty, university presidents, trustees, artists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, Indigenous scholars, public servants, and community leaders. Rather than searching for simple solutions, these conversations explored how people make sense of uncertainty, sustain meaningful action, and imagine new possibilities during periods of profound change.

Together, these discussions shaped the conceptual framework that became Hope Circuits. At its core are ten conceptual tools designed to help individuals and organizations move beyond surviving disruption toward creating conditions where people and communities can flourish. However, publishing the book in March 2024 was not the conclusion of the project: it marked the beginning of a much larger conversation.

Almost immediately, invitations arrived from colleges and universities across North America interested in applying the Hope Circuits framework within their own institutions. Over the following two and a half years, she collaborated with more than seventy colleges and universities, over fifty professional associations and organizations, and more than 10,000 participants working across higher education, healthcare, philanthropy, public service, school boards, and community organizations.

These experiences transformed every keynote, workshop, and conversation into an extension of the research itself. Supported by her role as a Jarislowsky Chair, Dr. Riddell approached each gathering not simply as an opportunity to share ideas, but as a living research environment where concepts could be tested, refined, and expanded. Every institution introduced new perspectives, challenges, and examples of how organizations navigate periods of uncertainty, offering fresh insights into the conditions that allow people and systems to move from toxic continuity toward flourishing.

This collaborative process naturally expanded the original project into a trilogy.

Even before Hope Circuits reached readers, Dr. Riddell convened the inaugural Hope Summit, bringing together more than fifty remarkable thinkers from across disciplines and sectors, including students, scientists, artists, Indigenous Knowledge Holders, philanthropists, innovators, and university leaders. Rather than presenting isolated perspectives, the summit created space for dialogue, allowing diverse voices to explore common questions together. Those conversations became the foundation of Hope Circuits Illuminated: Conversations with Luminaries Amid Collapse, a polyvocal volume that weaves together perspectives from multiple disciplines and ways of knowing.

At the same time, another direction emerged through her travels. Working alongside institutions implementing the Hope Circuits framework revealed recurring patterns that extended beyond higher education. Organizations, she observed, often function less like machines and more like living ecosystems whose health depends upon relationships, diversity, reciprocity, adaptation, and care. These observations became the basis for the third volume, Hope Circuits Re-Wilded: An Ecosystemic Approach to Flourishing, which explores how organizations can cultivate the conditions necessary for long-term resilience and collective flourishing.

Although each book explores a different dimension of the work, they are connected by a common purpose. Hope Circuits introduces the conceptual framework and asks how individuals and institutions can make sense of disruption. Hope Circuits Illuminated broadens the conversation by bringing together voices from diverse fields and traditions to explore those ideas collaboratively. Hope Circuits Re-Wilded turns toward practice, examining how organizations can intentionally design cultures that support flourishing in an increasingly complex world.

Together, the trilogy moves from theory to dialogue to practice while advancing a central conviction that has remained constant throughout Professor Riddell’s research: hope is not simply something we feel. It is something we intentionally build—within ourselves, our institutions, and our communities.

What surprised Dr. Riddell most throughout this journey was not resistance to change, but an extraordinary willingness to embrace it.

Before Hope Circuits was published, she anticipated skepticism. Instead, she encountered people across every sector who were eager to rethink long-standing assumptions and explore new ways of working together. Whether speaking with university presidents, students, physicians, faculty members, municipal leaders, public servants, or school administrators, she found that many were asking remarkably similar questions: How do we rebuild trust? How do we create institutions where people feel they belong? How do we honour diverse ways of knowing? And how do we design organizations that prioritize human dignity alongside effectiveness?

Rather than focusing on individual stories, Dr. Riddell says the most meaningful moments have emerged when people from different disciplines, generations, and lived experiences gather with curiosity rather than certainty. Throughout hundreds of workshops, keynote addresses, interviews, and Hope Summits, she has witnessed people move beyond defending positions to genuinely exploring possibilities together. These conversations reinforced her belief that meaningful change begins not with consensus, but with a willingness to listen deeply, hold assumptions lightly, and remain committed to one another’s dignity and self-determination.

Those experiences have profoundly shaped the direction of her research.

Originally trained as a Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Riddell now describes herself as an ethnographer of higher education and, increasingly, of transformative systems change. Her background in the humanities trained her to recognize the stories people tell about themselves and their institutions. Over time, those stories revealed recurring patterns that helped make visible the dynamics of complex systems and the conditions that enable transformative change to emerge.

Listening to people working at the edges of institutions has become one of the defining features of her research. Those perspectives, she argues, are often overlooked despite offering some of the clearest insights into where meaningful change is already taking place. This work has also strengthened her conviction that equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and decolonization are not separate initiatives, but essential characteristics of healthy, resilient organizations. Just as biodiversity strengthens ecosystems, institutions become more adaptive, innovative, and responsive when they intentionally cultivate diverse lived experiences, disciplines, and ways of knowing.

In many ways, this research has brought Dr. Riddell back to where her academic journey began. Shakespeare’s plays, she reflects, are themselves ecosystems populated by imperfect people navigating uncertainty together. They remind us that every individual, regardless of status or power, possesses dignity, agency, and the capacity to shape the communities they inhabit. For Professor Riddell, universities and other institutions are no different. They are living systems sustained through relationships, reciprocal responsibility, and the stories people choose to tell about one another and the futures they are willing to imagine together.

Perhaps the greatest insight to emerge from the Hope Circuits project is that hope is not an abstract ideal reserved for extraordinary moments. It is something that becomes most powerful when practiced locally—in everyday conversations, relationships, and acts of collaboration. At a time when many people feel overwhelmed by crises that seem too large to solve, Dr. Riddell believes hope begins with small, intentional actions rooted in collective responsibility.

She also argues that society has become saturated with what she calls “dashboards of doom”—metrics that diagnose decline with remarkable precision but offer little imagination for what comes next. While evidence remains essential, she believes it must be paired with curiosity, creativity, and civic imagination if people are to move beyond burnout and disengagement. The challenges facing society today, from democratic fragility and reconciliation to climate change and artificial intelligence, are too complex for individual expertise alone. They require collective sense-making, courageous listening, and a willingness to learn across differences.

If asked to describe her six-year research journey in three words, Dr. Riddell chooses Listening. (Re)imagining. Flourishing.

For her, listening is an act of courage that asks people to recognize the limits of their own understanding, question inherited assumptions, and remain open to perspectives different from their own. That openness creates the conditions for reimagining institutions and communities, reminding us that the way things are today is not necessarily the way they must remain.

These ideas have crystallized into three aspirations that now guide her work. She believes higher education can—and should—serve as a rehearsal space for creative futures, an incubator of civic imagination, and a playground for courageous becoming.

At a time of profound societal transformation, she believes the role of universities extends beyond the transmission of knowledge. They have the opportunity to cultivate democratic capacity, civic imagination, and the collective wisdom needed to address increasingly complex challenges. More than anything, however, her research has reinforced one enduring lesson: meaningful change is never accomplished alone. It is built conversation by conversation, relationship by relationship, and community by community. That spirit of shared inquiry continues to shape Professor Riddell’s work and her vision for institutions where both people and ideas can flourish.