A Radical Reading Cohort for Lovers & Fighters
Study Club is a grassroots book club that virtually gathers to discuss interdependent community building. It’s a space for critical thinking, shared learning, and collective growth, where participants explore ideas that challenge conventional systems and envision more just and interconnected futures for us all.
This space is for all folks to share, very similar to any socratic seminar. We read the book, and discuss important themes, passages, and lessons together. This is a safe space for folks to ask questions, explore new parts of their identities and political consciousness, and read texts that speak to community building, authenticity, and connection.
How can we be better fighters for all those we love and better lovers for all those we fight for?
Current Clubs
Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan
Liberatory Harm Reduction is one of the most important interventions of the 20th century, and yet a compilation of its critical stories and voices was, until now, seemingly nowhere to be found. Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, fills this gap by telling the stories of how sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are – and have been - building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan
We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.
Love in a Fucked Up World by Dean Spade
Lifelong trans activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age.
Your Hosts
Eli Zain
Eli (they/them) is a gender fluid, transgender, first generation Syrian-American community organizer, artist, author and activist. Their work has ranged from providing radical sex education, to supporting people in starting up community based mutual aid networks, to now working toward housing justice in the state of Colorado. Eli’s work focuses on how community members can come together to build new systems of care outside of oppressive institutions, and finding creative solutions to systemic problems.
Sidney Rose
Sid (they/them) is a Pittsburgh-based disabled and trans-non-binary artist, activist, and community organizer, as well as, the designer, illustrator, and shopkeeper of Houndstooth USA. Their work is rooted in intimacy justice and building communities of care and belonging through dismantling the barriers for connection. Their work seeks to challenge and deconstruct the capitalist mindset of hyper independence and replace it with tender and interdependent networks of mutuality and care.
Sarah Tyson
Sarah Tyson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliated faculty with Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver, which is on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne land. Her research focuses on questions of authority, history, and exclusion with a particular interest in voices that have been marginalized in the history of thinking. She is the author of Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Lexington Books, 2014). She is co-host (with Robert Talisse, Carrie Figdor, and Malcolm Keating) of New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network.
We are honored to have Sarah Tyson as a guest speaker for our third Study Club: Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan
Community Guidelines
Be kind to one another, this is a space for learning & growth
Racism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, fatphobia is not welcome here
Respect the space; make sure you have you microphone off while others are speaking
One mic at a time; be patient and don’t interrupt one another
Be mindful of how much space you take up and make sure you make room for others to share
