Ok so this book has no references?!? Obviously for the personal accounts and stuff that's not an issue, but the sections explaining the whole XR rationale and claiming to be founded on rigorous academic theory.... You don't get to do that. Aside from one or two instances of 'This is based on research by X', there were basically no attempts to back up some incredibly strong claims. Disappointing because there were some interesting ideas it would have been nice to be able to follow up easily.

Very variable quality of contributions - some absolute gems from Vandana Shiva, JS Rafaeli, Caroline Lucas & Kate Raworth - but mostly they were pretty dull, surface-level descriptive writing. Maybe I'm not really the target audience idk. I was mainly reading this for my thesis and actually some of the descriptive stuff will be useful in terms of understanding XR strategy, but it really doesn't make for gripping reading.

I was a little taken aback by the religiosity of it all. So much of it has spiritual undertones and there are quite a few direct references to 'sacred duty'. I remember being surprised by that a few years ago when I went to a panel discussion where someone from XR spoke - I guess I thought that was more about the individual speaker rather than being quite so embedded in the XR ethos. In fact, the final word of the whole book is 'sacred'!