(be)coming together in study
Community Study
Community Study is an ongoing constellation of study groups, immersions, community learning spaces, and reading groups centered around BIPOC being and (be)coming together in study. We believe that learning and exploring together is a joyous and generative form of community (and community building) that facilitates curiosity, intimacy, and care–all of which are deeply needed now.
Current Study: Glitched Out: Intersections of Race & Technology
Current study flyer
Readings
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble (2018)
More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, Meredith Broussard (2023)
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin (2019)
Please purchase, borrow, or in some way find your way to these texts, as we will be reading them in full. We will provide electronic access to selections from any other titles.
Disclosure: As a Bookshop affiliate, Community Study earns a commission from purchases made through these affiliate links. This money funds scholarships in support of purchasing materials for study participants. To learn more, check out our About page.
About This Study
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding
(dial-up modem noises)
Securing connection…program loading….now running…
Searching for new study protocol…… search complete.
Engaging study….
The internet is oppressive, algorithms are racist, automation deepens white supremacy.
In an effort to break the internet, decipher the code, or crash the system, this study interrogates the relationships between race and various technologies, and their intersections (and allegiances) with systems of oppression.
By no means a system-error—in fact the opposite—and in order to short circuit the system and offer redesigns and new algorithms, we’ll come together to engage Safiya Umoja Noble’s ground-breaking work, Algorithms of Oppression, then move to Meredith Broussard’s innovative, More than a Glitch, and close by tending to Ruha Benjamin’s foundational, Race After Technology.
Community Study + We Reads
Summer Reading Collective
Dark Academia Summer
School is almost out but with this first-ever We Reads + Community Study special collab, it’s setting up to be a real, hot Dark Academia Summer.
As such this reading experience finds us exploring the underside and unpleasant, the unlit and malevolent, the cruel and rude—the sides of academia, which are reality and nightmare, and also a continuous, historically present haunting. BOO.
Still, together, we babel and read, study and rebel. And with a mixture of forms and formats, we’ll make our way through R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel and then, Community as Rebellion by Lorgia García Peña. Bringing the gathering to its conclusion will be the viewing of the movie, Master.
With this reading collective offering a range of modalities, different writing styles and points of entry, folks are encouraged to join in when they can and participate with the materials that draw their interests.
*Content notice* Although this experience is intended to be playful and light, the subject matter and themes are familiar, personal, and lived by many members of the We Here community, and we want to be incredibly mindful and sensitive to the traumatic experiences many of us have experienced, and are experiencing, in academia. The materials bring forward intense, hostile, violent and toxic aspects of higher education, and in particular the horror movie, Master, participants could find triggering and cause harm.
Want to learn more about our work?
Love.
Study.
Struggle.
— R. D. G. Kelley