As I read “Freire and the Perseverance of Hope” (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2022), edited by Ana Suzina and Thomas Tufte, memories of a Brazilian grassroots film kept springing in me. One of the scenes in the documentary “Favela que me viu crescer”1 felt like a poetical metaphor to the book’s representation and enactment of Paulo Freire’s legacy across histories and generations, continents and borders, professions and disciplines. The scene shows Black matriarch and spiritual leader Tia Dorinha sitting under the mango tree in her yard. There, she softly explains the filmmakers - some of them born and raised in the same favela - the history of the tree. Long ago, Tia Dorinha says, an elder neighbour ate a mango and softly laid its seed into the ground. As she covered the seed with earth, the elder neighbour said: “you will eat the mangoes from this tree. I won’t.” Decades later, the mango tree still stands with its sweet fruits and majestic green leaves casting a fresh shadow like an oasis in a jungle of bricks and concrete in Jacarezinho, one of the thousands of overpopulated favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) lived a life long enough to see the pedagogical method he planted first in the Brazilian impoverished northeast to grow. Dialogue, empathy, respect and commitment to social justice made the Freirean method give fruits locally - with an almost immediate increase in literacy and political awareness among rural workers - and pollinate nationally and globally - through Freire’s own writing and the work of those who believed in the transformative power of education worldwide. Like the elderly community leader and the young filmmakers talking under the tree, this edited volume is a reunion of multiple generations of scholars and intellectuals from across the globe who describe their direct and indirect experiences with Freire’s legacy. As if they sat in the shadow of Freire’s tree and together reflected on their own takes on Freire’s method and philosophy to resist the persisting inequalities and oppressions in an increasingly unequal and environmentally frail world. The title of the book is very adequate: hope does persevere in dialogue, writing and action.

One of the most remarkable features of “Freire and the Perseverance of Hope” (146 p.) is its conception. Ana Suzina and Thomas Tufte appear as editors, but that does not do justice to all the complex organization and extensive coordination of activities surrounding the publication. For the occasion of Paulo Freire’s centenary, they - together with a broader team of scholars and assistants - led a series of seminars in London starting in the summer of 2019. As a participant in the first meeting, I saw first-hand their commitment to bringing people together - face-to-face and online - to share knowledge and experiences with Freire’s work. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, they persisted and a rich body of audio-visual and textual materials is now available. They share the documentation of all these activities in the book. I recommend readers to access the accompanying websites and publications in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English listed in the introduction of the book. The events and publications show the editors’ enactment of Freire’s legacy by fostering dialogue and mutual learning in multiple forms. For anyone interested in promoting cross-sector, international dialogue and collaboration, Suzina and Tufte provide a rich theoretical and practical database. The unconventional organization of “Freire and the Perseverance of Hope” is a fresh approach to creating dialogue in textual format. The book has three sections. The first - “Reflections on Freire’s Principles” - is a collection of transcriptions of lectures on the principles of “dialogue”, “love”, “empathy”, “hope” and “humility”. Due to their oral nature, the tone, flow and readability of each text feel more welcoming to untrained readers in academic writing than typical scholarly literature. The section brings together leading scholars in communication for social change who, combined, create a global mosaic of experiences reflecting about the principles from their own local and epistemological perspectives. If we are experiencing an “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities, as many scholars have argued (e.g. ^{Clough and Halley, 2007}; ^{Solana and Vacarezza, 2020}; ^{Zembylas, 2021}), these reflexive contributions shape an affect community (^{Paiva, 2012}) and provide important insights to how Paulo Freire was ahead of his time in overcoming the dichotomy between reason and emotions. In that respect, the homage by Frei Betto - Freire’s disciple, companheiro de luta (fellow in struggle) and friend - and the powerfully poetic prose of Ailton Krenak - one of the world’s leading indigenous intellectuals - will likely touch profoundly anyone who experiences education and collective knowledge construction as everlasting commitments to life and social justice.

Section 2 - “Debating Freire’s ideas” - tackles a problem typical of events meant for dialogue: while keynotes speeches and presentations have some kind of documentation, the often rich and insightful conversations that follow tend to remain faintly limited to collective memory of live conversations. As a solution, Suzina and Tufte brilliantly collected excerpts of audience commentary made in 2021 during one of the seminars in which participants discussed Freire’s work in and for the future. The section has three themes - “network society”, “social change” and “education” - and many more subthemes - including “digital gap”, “decolonizing technology”, “fake news”, “algorithms”, and “the objectives of education.” In my view, such arrangement of spontaneous reactions and unplanned dialogue contributes to disclosing the dynamic and often chaotic nature of collective knowledge production. It shows where our minds go when the carefully planned and articulated presentations touch the different minds and hearts in a virtual or physical room. This is also particularly important to students and early-career scholars who can see peers that are more experienced try to make sense of ideas on spot. As I read section 2, I felt transported to the conversation, as if I was there in the same shadow, feeling the same breeze, watching Freire’s ideas germinate right in front of my eyes.

Section 3 has the title “Freire from the perspective of young scholars.” To be clear, the adjective “young” here does not necessarily relate to age, but to the authors’ stages in their academic careers. I chose to highlight the meanings of “young” to make sure that readers do not assume the writings of the six authors lack maturity. Just the contrary, the section displays how what they listened in the 2021 event Paulo Freire Centennial: 7 Talks in Preparation for the next 100 Years resonated with their own experiences and knowledge. Each contributor has acted and/or pursued their education in different regions of the world: Mexico, India, Tanzania, USA, South Africa and Brazil. The remainder of the whole section - and the book - is how the principles in Freire’s work and legacy still provide new generations of scholars and civil society practitioners with the energy and motivation to keep learning, sharing and struggling for human rights and social justice. In the closing epilogue - “@PauloFreire, 100 Years and Beyond?” - Suzina and Tufte explain the process of organizing the celebratory activities of Paulo Freire’s centennial as well as the intellectual insights and the future of Freire’s praxis in times of increasing digital culture. They also provide an important reminder to all of us who occasionally experience heated confrontations and angry attacks about the legitimacy, relevance and a perceived anachronism of Paulo Freire’s work (see ^{Lima et al, 2021} and ^{Arruda and Nascimento, 2020} on the attacks on Freire’s legacy in the context of preand post-Bolsonaro Brazil, for example). For Suzina and Tufte,

The oppressed, as a category, are not the same people in all places where Freire’s thoughts are applied. Emancipation does not mean the same either. The strength of these notions, in Freire’s work, is that they push people to identify the forces of oppression and the resources available to face and fight it. Naming the dimension of polarization, identifying the actors involved in hate speech and understanding the dynamics through which people engage with digital networks in each context may bring the problem to a scale where action becomes possible and hope, reachable.(p. 141)

These closing words serve as an important invitation for all of us to reflect about how the nature of inequalities and structural oppressions has constantly changed in the decades following Freire’s life. The filmmakers of Cafuné na Laje, for example, had noticed that an important aspect of the oppression on Brazilian favelas relates to a subtle, yet deliberate effort to erase the local collective memory of the places in which they were born. That is why they used Freire’s critical pedagogy to share their technical expertise in photography and filmmaking with local children, to document the local heritages and restore memories squeezed under constant narratives of poverty and violence, and turned elderly storytelling into audio-visual poetry. Tia Dorinha’s tree is not a powerful metaphor to Freire’s work by coincidence. They made the film under Freire’s tree. Likewise, Suzina, Tufte and all contributors gathered and documented encounters under the tree. In both cases, the documentary and the book(s) make of words pollen, spreading into the air and carrying in themselves all the hope and love to keep the hopeful believing, living, writing, sharing and acting.