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Emergent Strategy

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Emergent Strategy

By: adrienne maree brown
Narrated by: adrienne maree brown
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About this listen

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride!

adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

©2017 adrienne maree brown (P)2021 AK Press Future Studies Gender Studies Social Sciences
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Highly recommend for anyone looking to find direction, purpose and understanding of interpersonal relationshipping. Be it with oneself, family, or with wider community. adrienne marie brown has a beautiful voice, easy on the ear ☺️😌 and the pace is perfect. I just finished and I'm about to go straight back and start again. Oh and did i mention it's also a pretty good guide to not being a d!ck.

Revolutionary, exciting and as ancient as fractals.

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This book is just not for me and to be honest I gave up on it half way through. There were a number of issues, among them frequent inclusion of foot notes and the use of quotes from people I have never heard of that I found distracted from the narrative. In addition, my training is in science and I found the reliance on metaphors and quotes from people required a high level of trust that I was reluctant to give. There are limitations to all metaphors, but in this case, many of them seem to me to be cherry-picking rather than an aid to communication. As an example, murmuration (flocking of birds as per the cover) is used as a metaphor for collaboration. While it is true that flocking requires birds to observe the location of their neighbors in the flock, Adrienne oversells its relevance to human collaboration given that the flock has, at some level, agreed that flocking is something they all want to do. The issues are a pity as there are some interesting ideas such as the idea that the structure and processes used in small scale activism will come to be reflected in large scale policy or institutional reform through fractals. It would be interesting to see this idea explored more rigorously given the challenges associated with achieving large scale reform. The other idea, critical to the title, is that if the various components of the system do certain things that this will lead to emergent outcomes. The challenge here is that emergent properties are often difficult to predict and so it is not clear how groups would achieve a desired objective if it was actually an emergent property. The answer seems to be that there are some principles that should be followed, or maybe I should have finished the second half of the book.

strategy or principles

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