About 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.

We are inspired and moved by, reaching out and called to, projects of study by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, The Night School Bar, Freedom Schools, Study & Struggle, and many other beautiful ways of being together.

We hope you will join us in this exploration of communal dreaming, and also that you will help us create spaces that attend and are responsive to the needs of our community. 

This is for all of us.

Accountability

As we come together in study–learning, sharing, building community, each of us, ourselves, emerging in ways new and old–we may make mistakes, we may use language, make choices, or in other ways inadvertently enact structures of oppression; we may depart from our values, we may cause hurt. We all have the capacity to cause harm, and at some point we all will.

We hope you will be patient and compassionate, yet firm, with us if and when we do; we will do the same in return. We will do what we can to acknowledge and learn, then do our best to make it right. This is an active process we are committed to as we grow to see ourselves and each other more clearly.

Bookshop Disclosure

Through We Reads, we are an affiliate of Bookshop.org. We earn a commission on purchases made through our title affiliate links, as well as through our Bookshop storefront (any purchases you make on the website after navigating there through one of these two links generates revenue for this project). This money is used exclusively to support study participants who need assistance with the purchase of reading materials for our studies.

We also choose to work with Bookshop.org because it is an online bookstore whose mission is to support local, independent bookstores. Many online marketplaces have been unwilling to protect their workers, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (but also long before these current circumstances), and have neither offered empathy for their workers (often obstructing unionization efforts or the enactment of labor protections more generally) nor meaningfully invested in the well-being of those they employ or the lands they occupy. We know online retailers are usually able to get you what you want/need very quickly (which not only puts workers in danger, but also negatively impacts the world around us), but we hope you’ll consider investing in your communities by purchasing locally and/or from BIPOC-owned business, whether through Bookshop or your own favorite bookshops.

Our Commitment

As stewards of Community Study, as well as coordinators, facilitators, and conveners of individual groups and comings together, we recognize that we have power to shape the spaces we cultivate and the experiences of our participants and collaborators. We hold this responsibility thoughtfully and with humility; we will do our best to foreground consent, curiosity, and care and ensure agency is collective and shared in all of the many connections and encounters that constitute this constellation of spaces.

Want to create your own study?

Community Study is for all of us, and we hope participants will contribute to this community by both helping us come up with new subjects to explore together and organizing new studies and reading groups. If you have an idea for a topic or text to engage with in community, and would like to talk about how to get that moving, reach out to us at communitystudying@gmail.com. We would love to work with and support you!