Hope in a Collapsing World


Book Description

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle across difference to create something together with common purpose. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public. A collaboration between a social scientist and a playwright and using both ethnographic study and playwriting, Hope in a Collapsing World represents a groundbreaking hybrid format of research text and original script – titled Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope – for reading, experimentation, and performance.




Hope in a Collapsing World


Book Description

This ethnographic study explores notions of hope and care by examining how theatre-making with young people might cultivate practices, relationships, and values that support them in engaged, creative, and ethical forms of citizenship.




Hitching for Hope


Book Description

#1 Irish Times Bestseller! A modern travel tale—part personal pilgrimage, part political quest—that captures the power of human resilience "McKiernan sticks his thumb out, and somehow a healthy dose of humanity manages to roll up alongside him. . . . This book is a paean to nuance, decency and possibility."—Colum McCann, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon. Following the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, social activist Ruairí McKiernan questions whether he should join the mounting number of emigrants searching for greater opportunity elsewhere. McKiernan embarks on a hitchhiking odyssey with no money, no itinerary and no idea where he might end up each night. His mission: to give voice to those emerging from one of the most painful periods of economic and social turmoil in Ireland’s history. Engaging, provocative and sincere, Hitching for Hope is a testimony to the spirit of Ireland. It is an inspirational manifesto for hope and healing in troubled times.




Beyond Hope


Book Description

We have reached the point no return on planet Earth, where the collective intent for biosphere collapse is manifesting at dizzying speed. From widespread social unrest to aggressive threats of nuclear war, to pollution soiling every inch of the planet (and beyond), to mass animal and plant extinction, global overpopulation, and runaway biosphere decay. Many powerful forces are converging to create unprecedented chaos and breakdown. In her outspoken way, Deb Ozarko exposes the madness of the cultural conditioning that has separated humanity from the web of life that sustains existence. In raw, yet eloquent detail, she makes it impossible for the reader to dismiss this truth for themselves. The question we are now faced with is, "How do we choose to live in a dying world?" Many people consider "hope" to be the fuel of possibility. If one doesn't have hope, possibility dies. Beyond Hope debunks this long-standing myth and liberates the reader to choose a more powerful way. Beyond Hope is a profound act of love. Beyond a simple litany of all that is in collapse, Deb's perspective compels us to awaken to something beyond our abilities to tell stories about what is happening "out there" and begin to turn the formidable power of our attention to what is happening "in here" ... inside, where we live. Inside, where we are already whole, unique and essential to our world. This is where our deepest power lies. Beyond Hope is not a book of science, philosophy or reason to appease the oppressive intellect. It's a book about letting go. Letting go of the fear of uncertainty. Letting go of false hope for an illusory future. Letting go of the dream for a collective awakening. Letting go of the stories of what may or may not be. Letting go of what once defined meaning. Letting go of the fear of mortality. Letting go of what we've been conditioned to believe ourselves to be. Letting go of our broken, dysfunctional world. We no longer have the luxury of time to lie to ourselves or each other anymore. We can no longer defer or delay taking a long, hard look at what we have allowed ourselves to become. We can no longer rationalize the irrational, or deny the undeniable. The greatest gift that runaway biosphere decay offers lies in the density and intensity of its press for us to notice how personal it all is. It can be a profound propellant to move us into our own evolution in a non-incremental, non-linear way. Beyond Hope is written from the Soul, for the Soul. As such, it is profoundly intimate-both in its writing and in its reading. Those who dare to read it, engage it, and act on it, will be transformed.




Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope


Book Description

This book explores the affective and relational lives of young people in diverse urban spaces. By following the trajectories of diverse young people as they creatively work through multiple and unfolding global crises, it asks how arts-based methodologies might answer the question: How do we stand in relation to others, those nearby and those at great distances? The research draws on knowledges, research traditions, and artistic practices that span the Global North and Global South, including Athens (Greece), Coventry (England), Lucknow (India), Tainan (Taiwan), and Toronto (Canada) and curates a way of thinking about global research that departs from the comparative model and moves towards a new analytic model of thinking multiple research sites alongside one another as an approach to sustaining dialogue between local contexts and wider global concerns.




Global Climate Education and Its Discontents


Book Description

This innovative and practical book offers pedagogical tools to show how drama can be used in educational settings to advance a relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional effects of the climate emergency. Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation – can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? – the book explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical ‘discontents’ of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being. The book is divided into two sections. The first part of the book, Local engagements and encounters, consists of chapters that conduct an in-depth appraisal of the local artistic work from each site, examining how matters of socio-ecological justice are given fresh urgency and complexity through the application of performance as pedagogy. The second part of the book, Pedagogical and artistic innovations, offers substantive praxis chapters on the drama-based pedagogical methods employed in the research. In these chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique. Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is valuable reading for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the following fields: drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and children/childhood and youth studies. The book also invites a readership of teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.




Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope


Book Description

This book explores the affective and relational lives of young people in diverse urban spaces. By following the trajectories of diverse young people as they creatively work through multiple and unfolding global crises, it asks how arts-based methodologies might answer the question: How do we stand in relation to others, those nearby and those at great distances? The research draws on knowledges, research traditions, and artistic practices that span the Global North and Global South, including Athens (Greece), Coventry (England), Lucknow (India), Tainan (Taiwan), and Toronto (Canada) and curates a way of thinking about global research that departs from the comparative model and moves towards a new analytic model of thinking multiple research sites alongside one another as an approach to sustaining dialogue between local contexts and wider global concerns.




The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene


Book Description

The so-called anthropocene is one of the most widely discussed concepts in philosophy and critical theory at the moment. This volume takes a broad historical view of the topic, bringing together high profile theorists, including Luce Irigaray and Adrian Parr, providing a platform for highly original work in this important and timely field.




Radical Hope


Book Description

Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.




The Politics of Hope


Book Description

The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage brings together two important books that bracket the tempestuous politics of 1960s America. In The Politics of Hope, which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published in 1963 while serving as a special assistant to President Kennedy, Schlesinger defines the liberalism that characterized the Kennedy administration and the optimistic early Sixties. In lively and incisive essays, most of them written between 1956 and 1960, on topics such as the basic differences underlying liberal and conservative politics, the writing of history, and the experience of Communist countries, Schlesinger emphasizes the liberal thinker's responsibility to abide by goals rather than dogma, to learn from history, and to look to the future. Four years later, following Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of America's involvement in Vietnam, Schlesinger's tone changes. In The Bitter Heritage, a brief but penetrating appraisal of the "war that nobody wanted," he recounts America's entry into Vietnam, the history of the war, and its policy implications. The Bitter Heritage concludes with an eloquent and sobering assessment of the war's threat to American democracy and a reflection on the lessons or legacies of the Vietman conflict. With a new foreword by Sean Wilentz, the James Madison Library edition of The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage situates liberalism in the convulsive 1960s--and illuminates the challenges that still face liberalism today.