Our Inspirations

These three books are like lodestars for me. They each express profound, yet completely intuitive ideas and in highly accessible fashion. Cottam reaffirms the power of people, particularly when connected, to address their own problems.

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Recommended by: Neil Howard

Wright points to the structures that need overhauling in building a better future and calls for strategic thinking in leveraging change.

 

Recommended by: Neil Howard

Kashtan offers both a vision and a spiritual-practical framework for radically re-shaping the way we live day to day and as political beings.

 

Recommended by: Neil Howard

Petr Kropotkin provides an evolutionary theory that challenges Darwinian emphasis on competition in favour of the primacy of mutual aid at the heart of evolution, opening the door to imagine ourselves, our societies and our species in radically different ways - what WorkFREE is all about!

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Recommended by: Joel Lazarus

By grounding conflict in the context of unmet needs, Marshall Rosenberg offers us a language to understand ourselves and each other, to resolve conflict, and mutually meet our needs - We seek to share this language of needs with our partners in Hyderabad.

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Recommended by: Joel Lazarus

W.E.B. Du Bois' writing is some of the most exquisite and, at times, both heart-breaking and inspiring words I have ever encountered. Reading this book cultivated within me such empathy, compassion, and determination - again, qualities I hope that can be central to WorkFREE and all we do.

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Recommended by: Joel Lazarus

This book provides a great counter to the dominant, but flawed, narratives on development. It explains how the divide between the rich and poor was created and how our economic systems maintain this divide today. I think it’s an important book for understanding how the world works, and what the real changes we need to focus on are.

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Recommended by: Nick Langridge

An accessible, short introduction to the arguments behind the degrowth movement, including practical steps for a post-growth societal transition. Essential for anyone interested in how we create just and sustainable societies.

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Recommended by: Nick Langridge

This book detaches ideas of wealth and happiness from continued economic expansion. It’s an important book for reimagining happiness without the insatiable drive for material things.

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Recommended by: Nick Langridge

This book introduced me to how the powerful set the terms for understanding reality, to the cynicism of international aid, and to the interrelatedness of world events. It blew my mind.

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Recommended by: Cameron Thibos

Some of us don't grow up questioning the nationalism and patriotism that our schools are selling us. Luckily there's a book for that.

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Recommended by: Cameron Thibos

Many of my close friends signed up to the military just before 9/11. All Quiet, along with ‘Catch-22’ and ‘Jonny Got His Gun’, played a crucial role in convincing me not to join them.

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Recommended by: Cameron Thibos

In the process of elucidating on scaling laws that are seen across different systems, this book does a phenomenal job of introducing Complex Adaptive Systems. Our societies, especially urban metropolises, as increasingly evident, function not as linear systems, but rather show characteristics of complex systems. Both in spatial and temporal terms, even the key socio-economic phenomenon like income inequality and crime, vary in linear proportion to spatial expansion but follow one or the other forms of power laws.

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Recommended by: Parushya Parushya

This collection of stories and essays on Delhi give a sneak-peek into how the communities in Delhi, the National Capital of India, changed over time. It goes on to elucidate how economic growth and urban expansion, change the nature of relations in communities. This reading is perhaps true for all urbanising areas but especially true for cities that have dynamically changing sets of vulnerable communities, either due to a shock like the partition, change in the housing patterns, or simply a disruption like a health pandemic.

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Recommended by: Parushya Parushya

This book inspires me because it provides evidence that decentralised, egalitarian and yet large-scale and well-organised societies are possible. They have existed for centuries at a time in the past, and they can be chosen again.

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Recommended by: Kimberly Walters

Very much related to the hypothesis of the Dawn of Everything is this article by Avery Gordon. It is both relevant to WorkFREE and inspiring. Among its many wonderful sentences is this: “There are no guarantees of coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms or abstract principles, only our complicated selves together and a reliable reality principle in which the history and presence of the instinct for freedom, however fugitive or extreme, is the evidence of the utopia's possibility because we've already begun to realise it.”

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Recommended by: Kimberly Walters

I found Octavia Butler’s Parable Series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) to be highly inspiring. The Earthseed verses hold deep wisdom. They’ve been collected from the novels and archived in scriptural form here. The first of these reads:

 

‘All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.’

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Recommended by: Kimberly Walters

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Recommended by: Tanushree Bhan