Publications
The Institute for Liberatory Innovation is proud to support these publications from across our ILI network:
Bumbling Humans: Reflections on Liberatory Change
by Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
If one thing is true about humans, it's that we are complex creatures. Our thoughts, histories, and experiences create unique perspectives about the world and how we interact with each other. Yet, time and again, we reveal our collective tendency to react from a place of fear. Across the socio-political spectrum, our responses to troubling questions, differences and missteps are severe, causing us to dehumanize one another and deny each other our inherent complexity.
With both thoughtful personal anecdotes and careful thinking about current historical events, Lucinda J. Garthwaite dives into the exercise of unashamed curiosity. The essays in Bumbling Humans return again and again to themes of compassion, restorative practice, and steady determination. Here readers will find hope, inspiration, and an invitation to align their day-to-day lives more closely with an increasingly thriving, just, and peaceful future.
Onion River Press | 2023
Transforming Online Teaching in Higher Education: Essential Practices for Engagement, Equity, and Inquiry
by Steven Goss, Robin E. Hummel (ILI Board Secretary), Laura Zadoff
Drawing on their years of experience leading transformative online classrooms in higher education, the authors present an approach for teaching online that is both engaging and effective. This practical book provides an overview of essential approaches, bolstered by examples from various instructors who are teaching online courses. The authors examine how progressive practices are useful for instructors new to the online classroom as well as for experienced online educators seeking to enhance their existing practices. The topics discussed include engagement, equity, presence, and community—all relevant areas for today’s college and university classrooms. Each chapter introduces and defines a specific topic and then provides stories based on interviews with members of the authors’ online teaching network. The end result is a narrative guide that will help faculty strengthen their students’ online experience by creating an atmosphere that is connected and robust.
Teachers College Press | 2023
The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking
by Elizabeth Minnich (Advisor to the ILI)
How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil – to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers | 2016