Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader

Description

Chris Wilbert is a Lecturer in Geography and Tourism at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge & Chelmsford, England. He writes on social and cultural geographies of tourism, human-animal relations, and environmentalism.

In February 2010, the world mourned the passing of Colin Ward-scholar, social theorist, educator, publisher, and, according to Anne Power of the London School of Economics, “Britain’s greatest living anarchist.” Ward was always attentive to the ways society already works cooperatively, and pushed us to understand these impulses and experiments as a latent potential for anarchism. Some of what passes for common-sense approaches to schooling, architecture, or social organization are themes Ward touched on in his work and have since been embedded in our popular consciousness. Many of us have been touched by Ward’s work over the years, sometimes without even realizing it.

Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility is a collection of some of Ward’s most enduring works from the fields of politics, educational theory, social theory, and beyond. A massive project, begun several years before Ward’s death with his involvement, Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility fills the need for a thorough and succinct introduction to Ward’s multi-faceted body of work.

“As every pundit and politician gestures towards a more congenial, more self-orÂganising nation, and so few have the slightest notion of how to get there without grandiose top-down schemes, we need a handy volume of the Selected Colin Ward in every bookshop, or on every screen.”—The Independent

Born in 1924, Colin Ward is widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s foremost anarchist writers. Editor of Freedom newspaper and then Anarchy magazine from 1947 to 1970, he authored or coauthored over thirty books, including Anarchy in Action, Cotters and Squatters, The Allotment, andArcadia for All. 

Damian F. White is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of History, Philosophy and Social Science at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (Pluto Press, 2008) and the co-editor (with Chris Wilbert) of Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces and Places in the Twenty First Century.