This is a guest post by Edauri Navarro Pérez.

The struggle of hope

For a while, I have been struggling with the concept of hope. Our reality has been tackled so hard with tragic events (COVID-19, immigration irregularities and insecurity, climate change, discrimination, and more) that talking about hope felt ironic to me at some point. Moreover, I hardly find answers to the question “how to be hopeful without being naïve and misinformed?”. Although I comprehend that cynicism (1) could be a mechanism to defend ourselves from general misinformation and fears, I tend to criticize cynics most of the time because I do not feel that these postures help move us forward.  I also criticize naivety heavily and believing that things will work out just because, especially when it comes from people with easy access to information (2). Like Maria Popova said once: “…cynicism is both resignation’s symptom and a futile self-protection mechanism against it. Blindly believing that everything will work out just fine also produces resignation, for we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better.”

So…how can I be hopeful during one of the worst crises that we have faced as a world? How can we be hopeful if there is so much pain? How can we, with our science, provide more hope?

This is a guest post by Edauri Navarro Pérez.

During my years as an undergraduate student I noticed that different sciences have been moving forward to do more interdisciplinary work and because of this movement, I had the opportunity to work with amazing scientists that redirect the traditional scientific perspective and integrate it with other disciplines. I think this is amazing! My perspective on science is that science aims to understand the different components about life, but life does not only work in one direction. Because of this reason, we, as scientists, have been collaborating and developing new questions with different perspectives. As a result, we have been able to expand our knowledge on how to improve the way we address research questions.