{"title":"Perspectiva","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781999836825","title":"The Entangled Activist","description":"\"I’d been an activist for years. I’d marched, protested, blocked the road, been arrested. I’d exposed how banks and tax havens fuel corruption, poverty and environmental destruction. I’d launched a campaign that rewrote the laws on secret company ownership in dozens of countries. My research had contributed to the cluster munitions ban and a treaty to control the arms trade. But despite these efforts, my discomfort about activism was growing. Was I part of the problem too?\"The Entangled Activist is the story of how activism is entangled in the problems it seeks to solve, told by a hard-hitting campaigner who through personal experience –– as well as extensively researched psycho-social enquiry –– comes to look at activism very differently. After years of thinking that her task was to ‘get the bastards,’ campaigner, writer and reporter Anthea Lawson came to see that activism often emerges from the same troubles it is trying to fix, and that its demons, including hypocrisy, saviourism, burnout and treating other people badly, can be a gateway to understanding the depth of what really needs to change.   Drawing on her own experience, critical analysis and interviews with leading activists, Lawson looks under the surface of our attempts to change the world to offer a timely and eye-opening vision for transformative work. By considering how unexamined shadows and assumptions get in the way of well-intentioned activist goals, and how those at the forefront of sociopolitical change are often caught up in the very systems and ideologies they seek to change, Lawson dismantles hierarchies that have shaped the field for too long.   The Entangled Activist is a profound call to acknowledge our entanglement with the world. To those who are worried about the state of things but are skeptical of ‘activism’, it offers possibilities for action that go beyond righteousness and reactivity. And to activists who so want to help, it mindfully unearths a different starting place, one where transforming ourselves is unwaveringly part of transforming the world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309484945781,"sku":"9781999836825","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999836825_aa230237-0826-4186-9898-56339f64b1ca.jpg?v=1786031887"},{"product_id":"9781999836849","title":"The Politics of Waking Up","description":"Everyone thinks they know what it means to be 'woke' - whether they're proudly declaring it, or angrily attacking it. But writer, political entrepreneur and psychosocial therapist Indra Adnan has written a comprehensive and necessary account of 'waking up' - to the realities of climate crisis, social breakdown, and personal agency - which implicates us all. In the internet era, no one escapes the global revolution of learning, connecting and mobilising and its entangled consequences. This reality demands a political response.   But our current politics - led by squabbling parties and their exhausted ideologies - are clearly broken and dysfunctional. Only 2% of the UK electorate think it's worth the time or money to join a political party. How do we put the full spectrum of a consciously awakening humanity at the heart of society, economy and politics? As social bonds fray and the planet burns, a politics of 'waking up' is more urgently required than ever. Informed by decades of public advocacy, transformative work with both local and global communities, as well as her lifelong commitment to inner wisdom, The Politics of Waking Up lays out Adnan's practical, beautiful and urgent ways to redesign politics for an era of people power.   Drawing on her years of political entrepreneurship as co-initiator of The Alternative UK, Adnan shares a compelling vision of a 'fractal' politics with an emphasis on new patterns of behaviour and viable prototypes of social progress that can be copied and replicated everywhere. She presents a coherent and radical alternative to our current socio-political turbulence. One that is there for the taking.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309791719797,"sku":"9781999836849","price":14.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999836849_0155f507-aa44-4864-8ddb-cd6976aebe82.jpg?v=1786031888"},{"product_id":"9781999836818","title":"Collective Wisdom in the West","description":"This book contemplates current crises guided by a core Buddhist teaching: the roots of deepest suffering lie in what we grasp most tightly. Thus, tightly held ideas from 'the enlightenment' - rationality, individuality, equality and secularity - are considered as sources of suffering: technocracy, broken politics and 'moral acrimony'. Freedom lies not in accepting or rejecting these views, but in seeing where they've become dogmas, feeding cultural addiction to certainty and control.   Liam Kavanagh is an embodied cognitive scientist, deeply influenced by Zen, who directs research at Life Itself, a community of people for a wiser, weller world. Past work in development economics convinced him that recognising and unlearning ideology is the most important step towards imagining futures worth creating. He helps create opportunities for this by organising residential learning communities, dialogues between Science and Zen, and contemplative activist groups.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309864726901,"sku":"9781999836818","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781999836818_c4834f68-b790-4411-bb9d-b0652215ccb6.jpg?v=1786031886"},{"product_id":"9781914568060","title":"The Matter With Things","description":"In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today. Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognise the ‘signature’ of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.   Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful – and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom. It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313175638389,"sku":"9781914568060","price":89.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781914568060_37e46abb-500b-4574-88d6-a832ec6c9832.jpg?v=1786030585"},{"product_id":"learning-as-if-life-depended-on-it","title":"Learning as if Life Depended on It","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow can we ensure that future generations enjoy the miracle of life? \u003ci\u003eLearning as if Life Depended on It\u003c\/i\u003e is a work of planetary reckoning and educational leadership by the Director General of the International Baccalaureate and former State Secretary of Finland, Olli-Pekka Heinonen.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInformed by his statesmanship and deeply rooted in the practices, idioms and metaphors of his Finnish cultural heritage, Heinonen explains why the root cause of global crises is that we don’t adequately perceive the ideas we live and work with. Our worldview is out of tune with reality. Humanity is suffering from an identity crisis. We have become overtrained and undereducated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book has four main parts. Part One, about our predicament, details how we are challenged to survive and thrive as a species just as we are discovering that familiar solutions no longer work. Part Two highlights how our prevailing perceptions keep us stuck, through an analysis of ten pervasive illusions of the modern world. Part Three affirms multiple sources of our collective potential while identifying what must change in education systems and societal norms to unlock it. Part Four explores available pathways arising from the learning needed to reshape life at the personal, community, societal, and planetary levels.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe learning we need today begins when we dare to enter our new unfamiliar territory and admit our ignorance. It is time to embark on a collective journey into ourselves, in which learning is recast as an emergent property of purposive social action.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo have any chance of a successful global transition, education systems should offer new ways of sensing and interpreting the world, work to reconcile competing beliefs and values, rebuild meaning, and restore well-being. As change accelerates, uncertainty grows, making the struggle to perceive reality with open-minded clarity more important than ever.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492377239925,"sku":"9781914568077","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781914568077.jpg?v=1786529215"},{"product_id":"there-we-are-human-again","title":"There We Are Human Again","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn extraordinary and powerful story of disillusionment, despair and recovery, \u003ci\u003eThere We Are Human Again\u003c\/i\u003e vividly describes the journey of former British diplomat Carne Ross, a journey from commitment and service to the state and 'the system', the shattering of that belief, and the discovery of better way of organising our affairs, a philosophy often dismissed as violent and utopian but that is in fact the only true form of democracy - and it's possible now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe world is sliding towards one kind of anarchy: incessant conflict, environmental collapse, and a disturbing sense of insoluble crisis and hopelessness. But there is another kind of “anarchy” entirely – not chaos, but organizing ourselves, cooperating without domination or coercion, and therefore living – and loving – together in peace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this book, Carne Ross tells the story of how he went from negotiating conflict and terrorism for the British government and resigning in disgust over the Iraq war, to working with liberation and democracy movements around the world, and in the process discovering anarchism as an inspiring yet surprisingly plausible politics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis journey spans disillusionment, despair and psychological collapse, and finally the discovery of a new way of looking at life – and love – and with it a personal reconstruction and revival of hope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThere We Are Human Again\u003c\/i\u003e explains that we cannot be truly ourselves when controlled by the state, our lives dominated by the incessant demands of work and 'the boss'. We are told that the current 'system' is inevitable and indeed reflects the reality of human nature. But this is not so. If we instead put the highest of human needs and desires - our relationships, love itself - at the centre, we discover an entirely different way of organising ourselves, our politics, our economics - in fact, of how to live. And only there can we find what it is to be truly human, at last.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492378124661,"sku":"9781914568107","price":12.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781914568107.jpg?v=1786529216"},{"product_id":"the-matter-with-things","title":"The Matter With Things","description":"In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces - ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today. Who are we? What is the world? 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Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful - and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom. It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492378943861,"sku":"9781914568251","price":49.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781914568251.jpg?v=1786529218"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-perspectiva.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}