Arlie Hochschild is in Davos this week, attending the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. The theme of this year’s meeting is “creating a shared future in a fractured world,” and she will participate on several panels to discuss variations on this theme with a wide range of thinkers, including Atul Gawande, Yuval Noah Harari, and Yo-Yo Ma. Since the publication of Strangers in Their Own Land in September 2016 – the paperback will be published next month by The New Press – Hochschild has spoken with many groups working to heal the partisan divide in our country, as she explains in this piece she wrote last week for Time.com:
Signs of a desire to reach out extend far beyond my inbox and living room. Listed on the website of the Bridge Alliance, a non-profit non-partisan umbrella group, are over seventy-cross partisan groups based in towns scattered across the country with such names as Common Good, Better Angels, American Public Square, AllSides. Virtually all of these small groups rose from local efforts to restore a culture of respect while exploring potential points of agreement. Common ground is there to be explored.