Catalyzing imagination through embodiment.
The “hope gap” describes the measurable distance between support for something and belief in its achievability. Within transformative social movements, including reparations, LandBack, and climate change, researchers have documented a persistent disparity: individuals may endorse reparative policies in principle, yet doubt that they are possible to achieve.
Doubt and disbelief in achievable futures cripple our imagination, affecting both individual psychology and our collective capacity for change. When we can’t believe transformation is possible, we’re less likely to invest energy, take risks, or persist through challenges. Disbelief makes us susceptible to decision paralysis: how does that actually work? precedes a commitment to resolving the issue.
Disbelief also increases cognitive load, civic disengagement and confirmation bias - where individuals notice and affirm evidence that confirms doubt, while dismissing what’s contrary.
Imagination is our resistance - the seed of every creative act, and we are in a battle for our minds.
But we are bombarded with over 20,000 forms of content per day, confronted with the speed and persistence of fascism, and living within societies with some of the highest rates of loneliness and some of the worst rates of reading comprehension levels, we naturally become susceptible to disbelief.
But what if disbelief is partly rooted in our ability to feel or perceive alternative futures as real? Might art through immersion bypass some of the cognitive barriers that keep us stuck?
The Hope Gap XR builds upon research and public discourse across the U.S. reparations movement, as well as psychology, economics and public health fields globally. We root in the U.S. reparations movement due largely to the extent of narrative research initially available on the issue; however, while restorative justice grounds the experience, other pillars of resistance expand to regenerative economies and community land trusts at scale.
Research from Liberation Ventures and the BLIS Collective has explored the hope gap within the context of the U.S. Reparations and Indigenous LandBack movements. Findings suggest that limited awareness of successful precedents contributes to diminished confidence in feasibility, which, in turn, weakens long-term engagement, mobilization, and cross-movement solidarity.
However, concrete examples of repair can shift perception. For example, when Asian American respondents learned about the 1988 Civil Liberties Act - providing apology and payments to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II - support for Black reparations increased. These “braided narratives,” or story structures that connect struggles across communities, have also been shown to strengthen solidarity between movements.
What remains less understood is how we might meaningfully shift belief in possibility, expand our creative thinking and how immersive, multi-modal storytelling can impact psychological, social, and civic outcomes.
The Hope Gap XR is designed as a multi-modal research platform, and we welcome interdisciplinary research collaborations across psychology, media studies, political science, and contemplative practice.
Narrative Cosmology
We engage with notions of time, labor, and land to consider who guides us, how we mend, and where repair embeds.
Afro-Futurism + Ancestral Guidance
Temporal liberation as method.
The Hope Gap XR refuses linear time. Rooted in Afro-futurist tradition, the experience collapses past, present and future in to a single field of possibility. A guiding presence - embodying the intellectual, spiritual, and organizing labor of pioneering women in the abolition and reparations movement - serves as narrator, witness and compass. Her character is lineage.
Stitches of Hope
Repair as Practice, Not Policy.
In African American history, quilts encoded escape routes along the Underground Railroad and preserved stories that formal archives refused to preserve. Across Indigenous traditions, textiles carry memory, governance and cosmology. Fabric is our archive.
Deep Maps
Geography as Moral Instrument
Deep Maps move beyond static cartography. They layer geospatial data with lived testimony, archival fragments, policy outcomes, and emotional resonance. Progress is visualized not as an abstraction but as a spatial transformation.
These maps expand over time, archiving community artifacts through 3D models.
Frequently Asked Questions
Immersive technology carries unethical risks.
How do you safeguard against this?
A major critique positions VR as an “empathy machine” that commodifies suffering without proper context.
To prevent “false empathy,” our narrative centers wins - not harms or the trauma endured as part of the diasporic colonial experience. We explain the structural and political history that created the situation without placing the user in a scene of suffering.
Additionally, VR is just one component of a multi-modal experience, incorporating haptic technology within headsets and 2D environments, as well as accompanying curriculum.
How have communities been consulted in developing this experience?
Regional cultural advisors and movement leaders provide critique and approval of the script, including the use of references and cultural motifs.
Our commitment to participatory design includes partnerships with organizations like Shorefront Legacy Center and The Other Side of Time, to ensure permissions and compensation for the use of individual images and likeness.
In addition to advisors, community screenings inform product iterations. For more information, see Milestones.
Who owns the Intellectual Property?
The script and assets are owned by a U.S.-based non-profit organization, Due Goodies Foundation.
The experience will never be sold for profit and is for educational purposes only.