This thesis maps out the phenomenological and ontological contours of ‘hope’ in an attempt to challenge traditional individualistic, psychologized, and normative accounts, and to reconceptualise hope as a practice of control. Spinoza and Deleuze’s theory of affect is used to develop an understanding of the ‘hoping body’ as the effect of a symbiotic encounter with a conglomerate of forces. The spatio-temporal dynamics and relations of power at work in this larger conglomerate are also explored through Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. Ultimately, this thesis argues that hope inaugurates complex practices of mobility control by operating as a claim about the necessity of a particular pathway and vehicle in the present that is grounded on the possibility of a desirable destination in the future. / Graduate