facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to overcome political polarisation and unlock systemic social and political change. Until March 2018, he was a Campaign Director at Avaaz, the 47 million member global citizens’ movement, where he spent most of his time running its Brexit campaign and also ran work on tax havens, and human rights.
Alex Evans is the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to overcome political polarisation and unlock systemic social and political change. Until March 2018, he was a Campaign Director at Avaaz, the 47 million member global citizens’ movement, where he spent most of his time running its Brexit campaign and also ran work on tax havens, and human rights.
He’s previously been a special adviser to two UK Cabinet ministers, a policy expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and a research fellow for organisations from the Brookings Institution to the US National Intelligence Council.
Alex lives in North Yorkshire with his wife, two kids, and one dog, and likes meditating, running, and repairing old mechanical watches.
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Politics, meet psychology: the places our inner and outer worlds collide
Talk by Alex Evans and The Collective Psychology Project at an advaya event. If we want to fix the outer crises, we need to attend to the inner ones. We need to see the crises burning around us – accelerating climate change, extreme inequality, hyper polarised politics – for what they are: outward symptoms of our inner worlds. Status anxiety. Loneliness. Threat perception. Grief. Shame. Lack of self-worth. The loss of our old stories without new ones to replace them.
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The myth gap: finding new myths for renewal and restoration
Once upon a time our society was rich in stories. They united us and helped us to understand the world and ourselves. We called them myths. Today, we have a myth gap. Does that matter? Alex Evans, campaigns director at Avaaz, argues persuasively that it does. In this time of global crisis and transition – of mass migration, inequality, resource scarcity and climate change – it is only by finding new myths, those that speak to us of renewal and restoration, that we will navigate our way to a better future. It is stories, rather than facts and pie-charts, that have the power to animate us and bring us together to change the world. Drawing on his first-hand experience as a political adviser within British government and at the United Nations, and examining the history of climate-change campaigning and recent contests such as Brexit and the US presidential election, Alex Evans explores how tomorrow’s activists are using narratives for change, how modern stories have been used and abused, and where we might find the right myths to take us forward.