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
Riane Eisler
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide.
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. Her newest work, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on Partnership rather than Domination.
Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Systems (CPS), dedicated to research and education, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work, keynotes conferences nationally and internationally, has addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, has spoken at corporations and universities worldwide on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work, and is Distinguished Professor at Meridian University, which offers PhDs and Master’s degrees based on Eisler’s Partnership-Domination social scale.
She is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 27 foreign editions and 57 U.S. printings. Her book on economics, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, was hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking” and by Jane Goodall as “a call to action.” Her Transforming Interprofessional Partnerships, co-authored with Teddie Potter, won national and international awards, and her Equal Rights Handbook was the only mass paperback on the Equal Rights Amendment.Other books drawing from Eisler’s research include her award-winning Tomorrow’s Children, Sacred Pleasure, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, statistically documenting the key role of women’s status in a nation’s quality of life. Her work has inspired the development of new metrics demonstrating the economic value of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and of caring for nature, which are now being updated into a Social Wealth Index by a team of economists.
She has written over 500 articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, The Christian Science Monitor, Challenge, and UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Women’s Studies, Quartz, Ms.Magazine, and World Encyclopedia of Peace, as well as chapters for books published by trade and university presses (e.g., Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford University).
Dr. Eisler continues to be interviewed and featured in U.S. and international media, including Forbes Magazine, El País, and innumerable podcasts. She currently also teaches online through the Center for Partnership Systems, the Omega Institute, Meridian University, and other organizations.
Dr. Eisler pioneered the expansion of human rights theory and action to include the majority of humanity: women and children. Her research provides a new perspective on our past, present, and possibilities for the future, including a new social and political agenda for building a more humane and environmentally sustainable world.
She is the only woman among 20 major thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary PhDs, the Nuclear Age Peace Leadership Award, the Feminist Pioneer award, and inclusion in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of twenty leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
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Reimagining Women & Power
How can we reclaim and reimagine power to create new cultures grounded in interdependence and liberation?
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A Journey Home
A unique learning journey with leading hearts and minds of our time. Learn new and adaptive ways of being that allow us to navigate these times of transition with resilience and creativity.
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Bodyfulness
What if we were able to get to the root of cultural crises? What if we were able to transform cultures by transforming the ways in which we inhabited our bodies? When we understand that lying at the root of behaviours that cause harm is often embedded trauma we can start to relate to each other a lot more compassionately and understand that ideas/actions don't arise out of a vacuum. Somatics and physical self-awareness is essential to breaking free from oppressive systems and stories that are either internal or external to ourselves.
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Relationships: from domination to partnership
A clip of Riane Eisler sharing what 'Relating & Relationships' means to her during a discussion with Pat McCabe & Merlin Sheldrake for 'A Journey Home', a 9 month online course in personal and collective transformation.
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Transcending the power-over paradigm
Ahead of advaya’s online course Women and Power: Reclaiming & Reimagining Power in the World Today, host Anwulika Okonjo speaks with Riane Eisler, a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist and attorney whose research, writing and speaking has transformed millions. Known for her work in advancing for partnership-based societies, and diagnosing our crises as a result of a power-over paradigm, Riane will lead the opening session of our course. In this conversation with Riane, we explored her academic approach, the key findings of her famous book The Chalice and the Blade, the myth of war as human nature, transcending binary thinking and understanding the power-over paradigm and how we transform it, and more.
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Understanding power and alienation, and reclaiming memory
In this opening session, we will explore how power operates within the dominant cultural paradigm along lines of domination, or power-over. We will look at the roots of that in ancient history, and how it became synonymous with a masculine power, patriarchy, and therefore men. We will explore how this form of power has permeated human relationship and society, and how it enables oppressive hierarchies and colonial relationships to continue. We will also look at other forms of power: forms based around partnership, power-with rather than power-over; the roots of these in ancient land based and indigenous societies; and how these forms of power became synonymous with feminine power, and therefore women. We will interrogate how women (and non-men) have been alienated from power and erased from collective memory historically, and what reclamation/restoration looks like. In this session we will discuss the politics of memory, restoring narrative justice, rewriting history, and how we can begin building cultural power.