Space 4
113-115 Fonthill Rd, Finsbury Park
London N4 3HH
Date and Time:
22/01/2020 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location
Space 4
Political Mindfulness and the Crisis of the Left
PUBLIC DISCUSSION AND BOOK LAUNCH
To examine the current state of our political culture, the challenges and the opportunities this presents for the broad democratic Left, eyeglass books have brought together a panel of leading political and cultural commentators whose work digs beneath the clichés of conjunctural analysis on the Left and seeks to examine some of the deeper underlying causes of the multiple crises we face.
They will be in conversation with Phil Cohen, whose book ‘Waypoints: towards an ecology of political mindfulness’ published by eyeglass books.
Panel: Andrew Calcutt, T.J Clark, Baroness Ruth Lister**, Dick Pountain, Lynne Segal and Valerie Walkerdine
“We are living through disturbed and disturbing times in which the political landscape is changing under our feet and the maps drawn by most public commentators no longer make sense of what is happening on the ground.
“Against this backdrop we are urged to cultivate ‘resilience’ and ‘mindfulness’ as a way of seizing and surviving the present moment. Mindfulness in particular has been popularised as a way of promoting well-being by enabling people suffering from anxiety or depression to become more aware of internal mental states and their relation to external circumstances. But what if this concept is applied not just to the adaptive strategies of an individual psyche but to the state of health of the body politic? Might it then help us focus more precisely on how the stresses and strains of our everyday lives are connected to the social structures of inequality we inhabit. That in turn might enable us to devise a strategy to connect with popular feelings of insecurity and injustice which Boris Johnson and the Alt-Right have so successfully exploited and linked to nativist and xenophobic narratives under the banner of ‘Get Brexit Done’. We also urgently need to move beyond the current round of mutual recrimination, disavowal and special pleading which perhaps inevitably, is being generated by the debate on who is to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.”
**Ruth Lister hopes to join us subject to what’s happening in Parliament as it’s the day of the EU Withdrawal Bill.
Tickets £5.00 (includes refreshments and a special launch discount of 20% on ‘Waypoints’). BOOK ONLINE NOW: