Published by Triarchy Press in October 2023
Paperback List Price: £25 386pp. ~ 22.9 x 19.1cm ISBN: 978-1-913743-85-7 The book is available to pre-order.
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Combining​​Nora BatesonThis is the long-awaited second collection of essays, reflections, poems and artwork by Nora Bateson, the noted research designer, film-maker, writer and lecturer. She is president of the International Bateson Institute (IBI) and an adviser to numerous bodies at international and governmental level.
The book is an embodiment of her recent work on Warm Data and offers a radical ecological approach to many of the key issues of our time: climate change, political upheaval, education, health, food and relationships. In Combining, Nora Bateson invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.
Insisting on our collective responsibility to confront the looming threats to humanity‘s survival, she advocates change through interconnectedness and challenges us to rethink our perspectives on relationships, community, and the very essence of being human. A blend of intellectual inquiry, essays, emotional engagement, storytelling, poetry and graphic art, Combining is an invitation to nurture genuine connections and navigate a world brimming with “Warm Data” – the interrelationships that integrate elements of every complex system. The book calls on us to shed our linear thinking and embrace “Aphanipoiesis” – the unseen ways in which life comes together to foster vitality and propel evolution. In Combining, love, humor, curiosity, and vulnerability entwine amidst the trials of a world in flux. As we face the Polycrisis, Nora Bateson urges us to swerve from the traditional paths and to dismantle the illusions of fitting in. She beckons us to step into a world where learning, uncutness, and readiness converge, promising both revelation and revolution. “Nora Bateson writes like no other — her ‘ecology of communication’ is poetry, observation, wisdom and rage blended into a coherent narrative that sinks down deep and swirls. ... Nora takes risks to behave differently, in how she gives us pieces of herself; in how she speaks with clarity about the messiness of being on the edge of destruction, whilst embodying the prayers of our ancestors. In how she brings together that which systems of harm repetitively sever – logic and heart, ecology and psychology, trauma and oppression, science and art.
Prepare to go to the places we are not supposed to go, in order to be in the spaces we are truly meant to be.” Taiwo Afuape, Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist, Author of Power, Resisitance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma “Nora Bateson is doing with words what language has no capacity for. I fell in love with it right from the start.” Bayo Akomolafe, Author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, Global Senior Fellow of The Othering & Belonging Institute “A masterwork. Please avail yourself of this heartfelt, brilliant, yet entirely accessible guide to the lived experience of complexity. Bateson shows how to engage with our personal and collective challenges less as problems to be solved than as systems calling for understanding, compassion, and harmonious engagement. Continuing the inquiries of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and a couple of Batesons before her, Nora has defined a new and vital landscape in a book that will take its place alongside their best remembered works. There is still a way for us to flourish; here’s how.” Douglas Rushkoff, Author of Team Human and Survival of the Richest “ ... The imagery in Nora’s writing is an exquisite depiction of Living Systems. We all can grow from this brilliant work of art, poetry, stories and more woven together, magically.” Carol Sanford, Author and Podcaster, Executive Producer of The Regenerative Business Summit “This compilation is full of delicious insights that call us to witness the awe-inspiring breadth of possibilities that emerge from our entanglement. When we loosen our grip, and dive into the web of relationships we will begin to understand the abundance of potential pathways we have before us...” Vicki Saunders, Founder, Coralus (formerly SheEO) “Nora Bateson reminds us in this book — and in how she thinks, speaks, and inhabits this world — that our hope lives not in our cleverness, but in our vulnerability, in our wildness, in our feral creativity, and most of all among our relationships, in our animate communications with each other and all living beings. This book is an exercise in living ecologically.” Rex Weyler, Co-Founder, Greenpeace International
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