Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

“A word/heart sojourn through the hard questions.” Makani Themba, facilitator for the Movement for Black Lives

"...brown’s book is a revelation. It is a manual for facing the most urgent crises of our time — environmental collapse, late capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy — without drowning in the enormity of the task." Public Books

“brown not only inspires me to resist, but to do in the most beautiful, joyful, creative, sustainable, collective and effective ways.” Andrea, J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

adrienne maree brown, the Co-Editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, doula and pleasure activist living in Detroit. She is a student of emergence, somatics, transformation and science fiction. She is part of the training body of generative somatics, and coodinating the Just Films Narrative Shift Program for Allied Media Projects. She is the 2015-2016 Ursula le Guin Fellowship, the Knight Arts Challenge for 2013 and 2015, a Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for 2013, in the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop at Voices of Our Nation 2014, and a graduate of the Clarion Sci-Fi and Fantasy Workshop in 2015.