How do we find connection in a disconnected world? Hello, Stranger (Led by Premise advisory board member Will Buckingham)
In this course, Premise students have the unique opportunity to participate in a discussion led by the author. Together, we will read Will Buckingham's Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World.
Will is a Premise Advisory Board Member. Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World. The author explores questions of connection, isolation, and what it means to feel alone.
The book is a timely, humane and uplifting exploration of how our history of welcoming strangers can offer a vital antidote to our increasingly atomised world.
We navigate our interactions with strangers according to a host of unwritten rules, rituals and (sometimes awkward) attempts at politeness. But what if the people we meet were not a problem, but a gift?
When philosopher and traveller Will Buckingham’s partner died, he sought solace in throwing open the door to new people. Now, as we reflect on our experiences of the pandemic and its enforced separations, and as global migration figures ever more prominently in our collective future, Buckingham brings together insights from philosophy, anthropology, history and literature to explore how our traditions of meeting the other can mitigate the issues of our time.
Taking in stories of loneliness, exile and friendship from classical times to the modern day, and alighting in adapting communities from Birmingham to Myanmar, Hello, Stranger asks: how do we set aside our instinctive xenophobia- fear of outsiders - and embrace our equally natural philoxenia- love of strangers and newness?
From The Guardian review of Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World.
Hello, Stranger is rooted in a long tradition of thinking about what it means to live in a world in which we are surrounded by strangers, yet also need the pleasures and comforts of home. Buckingham’s anthropological experiences as a sojourner inform this book, bolstered by his familiarity with ancient histories, literatures and mythologies. One constant presence in the book is Homer’s Odyssey, and Odysseus’s travails in returning home – and his often fraught dependence on strangers for hospitality along the way – are, in a sense, all our travails.