Do The Work: A guide to understanding power and creating change.

by Roxane Gay, Megan Pillow, Aurelia Durand (Illustrator)

Challenge your biases and broaden your understanding of power and how we wield it with this essential guide.
 
Power is complex. But Do The Work is a guide to navigating those complexities. From ancient theories of power to contemporary examples, from cultural patterns to personal insights, this guide provides a foundation for examining hierarchies and inequalities and establishes a framework for understanding power and how it shapes our lives and communities.
 
Between these pages, theory, commentary, and analysis create an engaging, creative, and mindful reading experience. This guide features approachable overviews of complex topics, thought-provoking questions, evocative illustrations, pages for your reflections, and steps we can all take to reframe our relationship to power and reinvigorate our desire to empower the people around us.
 
Thanks to the work of writer and scholar Megan Pillow, educator and New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay, and New York Times bestselling illustrator Aurélia Durand, Do The Work is a must-read for a more just future—and a more equitable now.

Do The Work
What can we learn about power from history and from our current moment?Who are the powerful, and who are the people denied power?Where are our own sources of power?How do we recognize our mistakes and become more self-aware?What does it mean to reclaim our power and to build community?

Do The Work 
How theorists from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt have shaped our understanding of powerWhy Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is at the heart of power discussionsWhat Laura Mulvey and Audre Lorde can teach us about power and genderHow poverty, redlining, and The Voting Rights Act all illustrate power imbalancesWhat the Stonewall Riots showed us about resistance and communityHow to train ourselves in collective thinking, and what it means to “choose the margins”

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 18, 2024

About the author

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. Her newsletter, The Audacity, where she also hosts The Audacious Book Club, can be found at audacity.substack.com.