Everyday Utopia
  • Published: 10 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529925487
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.99
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Everyday Utopia

In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home

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An uplifting look at communal living from a trail-blazing anthropologist

Throughout history and around the world today, forward-thinking communities have pioneered alternative ways of living together, sharing property and raising children. In Everyday Utopia, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee explores what we can learn from these experiments – from the ancient Greek commune founded by Pythagoras to the trail-blazing feminists of the French Revolution, from the cohousing movement in contemporary Denmark to the flourishing ecovillages of Colombia and Portugal. She shows why utopian thinking is essential to making a fairer world and that many of the best ways of getting there begin at home.
  • Published: 10 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529925487
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Kristen Ghodsee

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe, and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc. The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary people’s lives – and women’s particularly – changed when state socialism gave way to capitalism. For the last two decades, she has visited the region regularly and lived for over three years in Bulgaria and the Eastern parts of reunified Germany. Now a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she has won many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has written six books on gender, socialism, and postsocialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the region to this day. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Aeon, Dissent, Foreign Affairs and The New York Times.

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Praise for Everyday Utopia

History is made by the dreamers ... A must-read

THOMAS PIKETTY, author of A Brief History of Equality

Kristen Ghodsee is back with another splendid insight: utopia can and ought to be an everyday thing. In every home. Invigorating writing for a cheerless era

YANIS VAROUFAKIS, author of Technofeudalism

Liberating and inspirational ... Kristen Ghodsee's sweeping feminist history of society at its most creative

ADA CALHOUN, author of Why We Can't Sleep

Compelling ... spirited and inspiring

Jacobin

A vision of what could be our future if we dare to dream

SUSAN NEIMAN, author of Left Is Not Woke

Just wonderful

ANGELA SAINI, author of The Patriarchs

This warm, intelligent and lucid book takes us on a deep dive into how people have created better systems for living – systems that actually work

ROBERT WALDINGER, author of The Good Life and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development

Exhilarating. A powerful reminder that dreaming of better worlds is not just some fantastical project but also a very serious political one

REBECCA TRAISTER, author of Good and Mad
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