Life in limbo: asylum detention and the environmental conditions of hope
Date
2026
Authors
Version
OA Version
Published version
Citation
TRAUTMANN M. Life in Limbo: Asylum Detention and the Environmental Conditions of Hope. Journal of the American Philosophical Association. Published online 2026:1-19. doi:10.1017/apa.2026.10024
Abstract
Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the circumstantial conditions that frustrate or accommodate hoping. In this article, I show how an individual’s spatial environment can constrain their capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future via an extended case study: long-term refugee detention. Taking seriously refugees’ claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, and drawing on recent work on the role of the imagination in hoping, I demonstrate how an individual’s spatial environment can limit imaginative access to the interim steps between their present circumstances and a desired future, making it difficult to see any way their hope could be realized.
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.