Validation of the Everyday

How do we experience Validation of the Everyday?

About this event

This month’s conversation will consider how we experience Validation of the Everyday. Tom will facilitate a conversation with Chris Eldridge, who has spent many years thinking about the influences that impinge on us in our everyday lives and how these have been exacerbated, both by the key ‘influence amplifiers’ of the 21st Century, and by ‘influence capture’ by big corporations and special interest groups.

His work on ‘ThinkFluence’* seeks to make us more aware of what these everyday influences are, how imbalances in the way they are exercised (in particular, by big corporations and special interest groups) underlie the crises of the 21st century and the fracturing of social identities; and how we might understand them and rebalance them in order to promote the common good of societies and of the environment on which we all depend.

*(ThinkFluence refers to ‘thinking about, learning about, leveraging and linking influences on individuals, groups and organisations at different levels of society, for the common good’) .

About our conversation instigator

Chris Eldridge has worked in and undertaken research in the fields of development, humanitarian emergencies, climate change, the environment and human behaviour in Africa, Asia and Europe for around 40 years. For the first part of this period he worked successively as programme manager, country representative and regional representative for several NGOs in Africa and Asia.

Since 2004 he has worked independently, initially researching why people and organisations are influenced to perceive and respond to certain crises and not to others; and why, when they respond, they respond in certain ways and not in others. In recent years this research has broadened to investigate the influences that impinge on us in our everyday lives and how these influences, exercised in unbalanced ways by large corporations and special interest groups, underlie various crises.

A better understanding of these influences should help improve the ways in which individuals, organizations and governments address crises of various kinds in the different phases of their emergence and impacts.