EVERYDAY UTOPIA: WHAT 2,000 YEARS OF WILD EXPERIMENTS CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE GOOD LIFE
LLL PRESENTS KRISTEN GHODSEE & JOAN SCOTT
EVERYDAY UTOPIA: WHAT 2,000 YEARS OF WILD EXPERIMENTS CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE GOOD LIFE
Thursday 10/26 at 7:00pm
In person at the Princeton Public Library
Kristen Ghodsee takes us through 2,000 years of audacious utopian thinking and experiments, exploring better ways to arrange our daily lives, plus a globetrotting jaunt to the communities already putting these seemingly fanciful visions into practice today. The groundbreaking feminist historian and political thinker Joan Scott will help guide the journey. Please join us.
Ever since the days of Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, share our property, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while—but others carry on today.
Kristen Ghodsee takes the reader on a tour through history and around the world to explore those places that have boldly dared to reimagine how we might live our daily lives: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds to matriarchal Colombian eco-villages where residents grow all their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparents” to help raise children not their own, to China, where planned micro-districts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby.
One of those startlingly rare books that upends what you think is possible, Everyday Utopia offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Jacobin, among other outlets. Joan Scott’ is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is recognized as one of the foundational feminist historians. Her influential books include Gender and the Politics of History; The Politics of the Veil; The Fantasy of Feminist History; Sex and Secularism; Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom; and On the Judgement of History.
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Co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the Princeton Public Library and cosponsored by Labyrinth Books and Princeton University’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and SPIA in NJ.