Liberation Is Other People

By Alexis Shotwell

A compelling call to transform isolation into solidarity and turn shared action into lasting change

Liberation Is Other People offers a bold and timely exploration of how we confront the immense, interconnected challenges of our time. It begins with the truth that many of the crises we face--climate collapse, war, systemic inequality--are human-made and therefore humanly transformable. Yet such "wicked problems" cannot be solved by individuals alone. Every attempt to repair exposes how deeply our lives are entangled across histories of power, privilege, and vulnerability.

Rejecting the idea that personal virtue or guilt can solve the world's problems, Alexis Shotwell offers a philosophy and practice of collective freedom through collective struggle. Drawing on thinkers such as Angela Davis and Ursula K. Le Guin, she argues that freedom is not the power to act alone but the capacity to shape the world with others. Through sustained engagement with climate politics, white settler responsibility, and the reimagining of sexuality and gender, Liberation Is Other People shows how embracing complicity and acknowledging that none of us stand outside the systems we wish to change can open new possibilities for solidarity and transformation.

Rather than a call to purity or perfection, Liberation Is Other People is a vision of politics as a shared, necessarily imperfect process of creation. Shotwell builds a compelling case that solidarity can be a source of joy, inspiration, and political power. In an age of division and isolation, Shotwell insists that our greatest possibility lies not in fixing the world by our individual selves but in remaking it--together.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 151792166X
• ISBN13: 9781517921668
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 264 Pages