Tempered Radicals
I've been active in social movements for more than half a century and studied them as an academic for almost as long. Here's how my thinking about them has changed. Belatedly.
My Second Mountain
I've done a lot of thinking about aging, milestones, and accomplishments lately. I just sent off what may well be my last book. I'm helping plan my fiftieth college reunion. I used to be the youngest person in the room when I started teaching; now, I'm often the oldest one when I'm in a meeting.At the same time, I'm no where near ready to retire. I have too much energy and the world has too many problems for me to hang it up and go play shuffleboard and go on cruises. So, here are some thoughts
Writing an Unusual, Interesting, Challenging, and Empowering Book
Doug Irvin-Erickson and I are in the home stretch of writing our peace and conflict studies textbook. That means that we have two challenges. Finishing the few topics we haven’t fully covered yet. Pulling the whole thing together so that in a way that grabs the attention of its readers. Although we had planned to focus on the former for the next few weeks, our bosses (aka our editors) asked us to do the latter. In the end, we realized we have been writing an unusual book because we felt the need to make it interesting, challenging, and empowering. Unusual, interesting, challenging, and empowering are rarely words one associates with textbook, so I thought it would be useful to spell out why we are doing so in a blog post that will, in turn, help us polish the final draft of the all-important first chapter.
Nepal
For the book Doug Irvin-Erickson and I are writing, I was looking for an example of a state of the art peacebuilding project we could build a chapter around. It didn't take us long to settle on a decade-long project that John Paul Lederach helped lead for the McConnell Foundation in Nepal.