Will Buckingham's Blog, page 5

Guest Lecture at National Dong Hwa University

Whilst in Taiwan later in April, I’m delighted to be at National Dong Hwa University (國立東華大學) in Hualien, where Hannah Stevens and I will be giving a talk about writing, activism and social justice, and discussing our Wind&Bones project. For both of us, it will ... Read More

Remaking the World: Creativity, Writing and Activism

This evening I fly to Singapore and then to Taiwan. I’m looking forward to brushing off my rusty Chinese. But after the Thingyan festival in Myanmar is over, I’m going to be back in Yangon to continue my writing residency at the Parami Institute of ... Read More

Wind and Bones – New Website

The last few weeks have been busy with the Wind&Bones project that I co-run. We’re coming to the end of our current course as writers in residence at the Parami Institute in Yangon (the title is ‘Writing, Myth and Tradition’), and we’re also planning our ... Read More

Shrinking the Empire

As a job, it has been long overdue…. For years now, I have run multiple websites, a small online empire that over the years has mushroomed until it has reached unmanageable proportions. So after some server problems last week, I decided it was time to shrink the empire, to clean things out, and to make my various online projects simpler, more streamlined (and, incidentally, cheaper to run). It’s been a big job, but most of the heavy-lifting work is now done. So here are the major changes.

I’ve decided to close down my website dedicated to the Snorgh (the protagonist of my first picture book), but I’ve added the content to the Snorgh page.
I’ve closed down my dedicated domain Tanimbar.org.uk, and now the content is all hosted on a subdomain of this website. You can find all the content on tanimbar.willbuckingham.com.
My old thinkBuddha blog, not updated since 2010, still has some interesting content. So I’ve imported it fairly sketchily into WordPress, and I’m hosting it on another subdomain. So it is now found at thinkbuddha.willbuckingham.com.
I’ve migrated Elee Kirk’s website to a subdomain as well, so you can find it on eleekirk.willbuckingham.com.
I’ve retired my Wayward Philosophy blog and imported the content into this site. The imported posts are a bit patchy and need editing, so I’ll be going through them, removing the ones that are not worth keeping, and tidying up the ones that are.

That’s about it. I’m hoping that things will now be much easier to manage and that I can give more attention to actually writing stuff, and less to poking around the entrails of my server. During the transitional phase, there may be quite a few bugs and glitches, so do bear with me.

Image: ‘Electric Scrubbing’ from France in the XXI century. Wikimedia Commons.

Interview with Faisal Oddang for the British Council

Here in Yangon, our creative writing classes are in full swing, and it’s a lot of fun; but I’m also aware that back in the UK things are gearing up for the London Book Fair, and I’m also disappointed that I can’t be in two places at once. This year the LBF has an Indonesia focus, and as some Indonesian writer friends are going to be over in the UK, I’m sad not to be there with them.

As some compensation, the British Council asked me to do an online interview with the remarkably energetic and prolific Faisal Oddang, one of Indonesia’s most exciting young writers. The interview can be found on the British Council website. Faisal is a fascinating interviewee, and our brief exchange covers politics, violence, religion, traditional Bugis culture, gender and writing as a process of getting to grips with understanding the world. Go and have a read!

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Interview in Manusia Magazine

One of the biggest delights of being in Bali at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in 2018 was talking to Rudolf Gilmore Perez from Manusia Magazine. It was an enormously stimulating interview, and it’s great to see it now online. The interview ranges pretty widely over philosophy, anthropology, the relationship between power and creativity, the Moomins and the virtues of blandness.

You can read the whole interview on the Manusia magazine website, where you can also marvel at the wide array of facial expressions I pulled whilst Rudolf and I were talking. I had no idea I was that animated…

 

 

A Practical Guide to Happiness Audiobook

I’m very pleased to have just signed a contract on the audio rights for my little guide to philosophies of happiness, A Practical Guide to Happiness : Think Deeply and Flourish, published by Icon Books. The book is a slightly sceptical survey of philosophies from Thomas Aquinas to Zhuangzi, and from Buddhism to contemporary positive psychology.

I’m not sure when the audio version is due to be released, but I’ll be sure to update things here on my website here when it is.

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder: The Land of Cockaigne

“Hello, Stranger” to be published by Granta

I’m very pleased to announce that Granta have acquired my forthcoming non-fiction book, Hello, Stranger, an exploration of how welcoming strangers into our lives and worlds may make the world a better, richer place. The book is a response to two (real or imagined) crises: the deeply problematic claim that we are undergoing a “crisis of migration”; and the idea that we are living in the middle of a crisis of loneliness.

I’m interested in how cultivating the arts of hospitality and of welcoming others may help alleviate both of these, and may allow us to build a different kind of culture. So for much of the coming year, I’ll be working on researching and writing the book, which is due out in 2020.

Expect a cocktail of anthropology, history, philosophy, politics and travel-writing, stretching from the grasslands of Mongolia to the borders of contemporary Europe, from the small-scale to the large, the intimate to the global. Here’s a link to the announcement from this week’s Bookseller (who have, eagle-eyed readers will notice, mis-spelled my name in the title of their piece…)

Leadership and Deforestation-as-metaphor: Consulting for Mote Oo

Over the next few months, I’m going to be working on co-developing a module on ethical leadership for Mote Oo Education. I’ll be working alongside Dr. Hannah Stevens, under the banner of our Wind&Bones project. Our aim is to produce a practical, useful set of textbooks and learning materials about leadership and ethics, on that is tailored to the local (Myanmar) and regional (Southeast Asia) context.

I am particularly excited by this because I have often found the concept of leadership to be contentious and ethically problematic. All too frequently, it can be used as a means of self-aggrandisement for those in power, as a way of shoring-up existing power hierarchies, or as a way of  closing down or diverting important ethical questions.

Here is an example of the kind of thing that unsettles me about much of the discourse of leadership: in Stephen Covey’s gung-ho metaphor of a bunch of people cutting down a jungle, the workers are going at it with machetes, the managers are on the ground sharpening the machetes and generally managing the catastrophic deforestation, and the leaders are up a tree shouting “Wrong jungle!” All of this is fine, of course, if deforestation is your thing. But what we want to ask in this course (both metaphorically and actually) is whether cutting down jungles is the kind of thing that they ought to be doing at all.

There are a couple of things we’re interested in here: firstly, we are interested in thinking not only about the ethics of how organisations attain their ends, but about the ethics of these ends themselves; and secondly, we are interested in thinking about how the metaphors of leadership may play in a different cultural context (I know it is a metaphor, of course… but from a Myanmar perspective, organisational-success-as-deforestation feels close to the bone, and in remarkably poor taste).

In all this, we’re hoping to devise a course that takes ethical questions as foundational, and works from the ground up, rather than thinking through leadership concepts and then bolting-on ethical considerations. There’s no fixed time-scale for this, and we’re currently at the outlining stage; but I’m looking forward to applying some of that thinking about ethics that I’ve done over the years to real-world issues.

Image: Martin Johnson Heade, Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds