Categories
Writings

Deschooling Revisited

Writing about Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) for Issue 25 of STIR magazine.

Categories
Essays Writings

The Friendly Society: On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship & the Commons

In which I sketch out a set of ideas about the logic of the commons, prompted by conversations in a seminar at the Gothenburg School of Design & Crafts.

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Conversations Writings

The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

On the history of grand projects to categorise the world – and how we end up with the Internet of Toilets.

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Reviews Writings

When Promises of Progress Fail Us

A review of two books that grew out of conversations among the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich: Grassroots Postmodernism by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, and The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto by Gustavo Esteva, Salvatore Babones and Philipp Babcicky.

Categories
Reviews Writings

Excavating Buried Assumptions

The radical thought of Ivan Illich speaks more clearly than ever to our times, I argue, in this review of a new selection of his essays.

Categories
Reviews Writings

The Capacity for Second Thoughts: Ivan Illich

From his rise to prominence in the late 1960s to the last conversations with David Cayley, published as The Rivers North of the Future, Ivan Illich sought to uncover the hidden assumptions on which modern industrial societies had been built.

Categories
Essays Writings

Commoning in the City

Two days of conversations about ‘the commons’ on an island in the heart of Stockholm set me thinking about what it means to reclaim ‘subsistence’ in the 21st century.

Categories
Conversations Writings

Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

In the fourth issue of Dark Mountain, I published this conversation with the Mexican activist and intellectual Gustavo Esteva.

Categories
Writings

Words Which Matter to People

It is the second day of my journey around Europe, a journey in search of resilience, and I am in a park near the centre of Helsinki, asking the locals whether they can help me understand the meaning of sisu, a word that is said to be central to Finnish culture and impossible to translate.

Categories
Conversations

Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

Talking with Ivan Illich’s friend and pupil about his concept of the vernacular.