Free Online Event to explore key themes from the bestseller The Dawn of Everything
The Prefigurative Education Project (PEP) is pleased to announce that it will host a conversation with David Wengrow – co-author of the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – on Saturday, May 14 at Noon EDT.
This event, a live Q&A with the author, will seek to contextualize the big ideas of The Dawn of Everything in a way that seeks to understand “how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.” We will also explore the ways in which we might use some of the concepts from The Dawn of Everything to become unstuck, and to both imagine and work toward a brighter and more liberatory future.
The event is free to attend but registration is required – space is limited.
The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious work that challenges the prevailing understandings of how history unfolds. Its authors, David Wengrow and David Graeber, sustain an argument that human history doesn’t march in a stepwise, linear fashion with an inexorable endpoint embodied by our current forms of economic and social relations. Rather, they argue, there is an incredible range of ways in which humans have chosen to organize themselves, and examination of this diversity shatters many foundational myths about how we got where we are and what types of relational potentialities exist for humanity.
Please join us on Saturday, May 14 for a lively conversation with the author of one of the most groundbreaking books of the past decade. Register Here.
David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is the author of three books and numerous academic articles on topics including the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the emergence of the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
His co-author, David Graeber, was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.