There is hope for us yet: “Stevenson’s engaging commentary has the ability to restore your faith in human ingenuity in the face of adversity.” —Geographical magazine Our systems are failing. Old models—for education, healthcare and government, food production, energy supply—are creaking under the weight of modern challenges. As the world’s population heads towards 10 billion, it’s clear we need new approaches. In We Do Things Differently, historian and futurologist Mark Stevenson sets out to find them, across four continents. From Brazilian favelas to high-tech Boston, from rural India to a shed inventor in England’s home counties, Mark Stevenson travels the world to find the advance guard reimagining our future. At each stop, he meets innovators who have already succeeded in challenging the status quo, pioneering new ways to make our world more sustainable, equitable, and humane. Populated by extraordinary characters—including Detroit citizens who created new jobs and promoted healthy eating by building greenhouses; an Austrian mayor who built a new biomass plant using the by-product of a local flooring company; and an Indian doctor who crowdsourced his research and published his findings online—We Do Things Differently paints a riveting picture of what can be done to address the world’s most pressing dilemmas, offering a much-needed dose of down-to-earth optimism. It is a window on (and a roadmap to) a different and better future. “Stevenson writes with enormous warmth and humor.” —Cory Doctorow

Students and staff from KCL’s Social Sciences BA programme turn the research lens back on their own world and together explore the many challenges of ‘trying to do things differently’ in Higher Education. In doing so, they grapple with fundamental questions in education such as: how to meaningfully foreground democracy, partnership, and emotional care; the role and limits of free speech; and how to deconstruct enduring inequality and marginalisation. In a period of considerable change and challenge for education, there is surely no better time to be critically analysing the principles guiding our universities through the lens of real-life practice. "In a period when university arrangements are being rethought in the wake of COVID-19 and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, this compelling text is both timely and forward looking. ‘We’re trying to do things differently’ successfully brings together first year undergraduates and lecturers to research, analyse and document how students and staff co-create meaningful educational experiences. The authors offer a nuanced picture of the centrality of relationships and recognition to the degree course. It shows how the students foreground love, kindness and social justice, rather than curriculum and outcomes, while being alert to the politics of difference and absence in higher education classrooms. The book draws on well-worn and innovative writing styles to produce analyses and arguments that are eye-opening, persuasive and raise difficult questions for future educational practices. This book is a must for anyone interested in championing excellence and social justice in higher education." Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, UCL Institute of Education "This is a book with a difference. It is based on critical scholarship and draws on reflexive analysis but – and this is the important and unique part - it is a book written mainly by university students about how to enact meaningful relationships in the academy. It takes as its substantive focus one new undergraduate programme but the agenda is about change, social justice and the hard work of real inclusion. This book stands as a wake-up call to all of us who care deeply about socially just education and democracy in our institutions of higher education. It is also a wonderful example of how to write something that really matters!" - Meg Maguire, Professor of Sociology of Education, King’s College London

Discusses the experiences of sixty-five successful people in India whose business strategies have inspired the author, highlighting their dominant secret to success and describing their journeys using such behaviors.

"This book will help children understand what autism is and how it affects someone who has it."--Amazon.com.

Doing Things Differently celebrates the work of Donald Meltzer, who was such a lively force in the training of child psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic for many years. The book represents the harvest of Meltzer's thinking and teaching, and covers such topics as dimensionality in primitive states of mind, dreaming, supervision, and the claustrum.

Mark Stevenson has been to the future a few years ahead of the rest of us - and reckons it has a lot going for it. His voyage of discovery takes him to Oxford to meet Transhumanists (they intend to live forever), to Boston where he confronts a robot with mood swings, to an underwater cabinet meeting in the Indian Ocean, and Australia to question the Outback's smartest farmer. He clambers around space planes in the Mojave desert, gets to grips with the potential of nanotechnology, delves deep into the possibilities of biotech, sees an energy renaissance on a printer, a revolution in communications, has his genome profiled, and glimpses the next stage of human evolution ... and tries to make sense of what's in store. Insightful and often very funny, An Optimist's Tour of the Future is a book that tracks one curious man's journey to find out what's in store.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This joyful rhyming book encourages children to value the “different” in all people, leading the way to a kinder world in which the differences in all of us are celebrated and embraced. Macy is a girl who’s a lot like you and me, but she's also quite different, which is a great thing to be. With kindness, grace, and bravery, Macy finds her place in the world, bringing beauty and laughter wherever she goes and leading others to find delight in the unique design of every person. Children are naturally aware of the differences they encounter at school, in their neighborhood, and in other everyday relationships. They just need to be given tools to understand and appreciate what makes us “different,” permission to ask questions about it, and eyes to see and celebrate it in themselves as well as in those around them.