What I'm Reading

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

This one changed how I understand reciprocity. Kimmerer weaves Indigenous plant knowledge with Western botany in a way that makes you rethink what it means to be in relationship with a place. For someone studying belonging and space, this is foundational. The chapter on the grammar of animacy alone is worth the whole book.

As We Have Always Done

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Simpson writes about Indigenous resurgence not as a political project but as a living practice rooted in land, body, and community. Her framework for what she calls "grounded normativity" keeps showing up in my thinking about how communities create belonging outside colonial structures. Dense and worth every minute.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The history we were never taught, told plainly and without apology. Dunbar-Ortiz reframes US history through Indigenous sovereignty and resistance. I keep coming back to it when I need to remember that the spaces we design and inhabit are never neutral.

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde

I return to Lorde constantly. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" is a sentence I think about almost every week in my work. This collection of essays and speeches is a manual for anyone trying to do justice work without losing themselves in the process. Required reading, full stop.

Teaching to Transgress

bell hooks

As someone who teaches and facilitates workshops, this book hits different. hooks argues that the classroom should be a place of liberation, not just information transfer. Her idea of education as the practice of freedom is baked into how I show up for students and clients alike. I dog-eared half the pages.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson gives us a framework that cuts through a lot of noise. By looking at race in America through the lens of caste, she makes visible the infrastructure of hierarchy that most of us have just accepted as normal. It is meticulous, heartbreaking, and necessary. I find myself recommending it to almost everyone.

Journal Article — GLQ, Vol. 14 (2008)

Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

This essay by Tinsley is one of those pieces I came across in my research and couldn't shake. She asks what it would mean to read the Black Atlantic as always already queer, and the answer she builds is gorgeous and devastating. It sits at the intersection of diaspora studies, queer theory, and Black feminism in a way that feels genuinely new. Available through most academic libraries.

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

C. Riley Snorton

Snorton traces the entanglement of Blackness and transness across US history in a way that refuses easy answers. This book does not let you separate race and gender, and it shouldn't. It's rigorous, archival, and it changed how I read the spaces and systems I study. One of the most important books in trans studies, period.

Quare Studies / Sweet Tea

E. Patrick Johnson

Johnson's concept of "quare" — rooted in Black Southern vernacular — is a direct response to queer theory's tendency to erase race and class. His work, whether the theoretical essays or the oral histories in Sweet Tea, insists that lived experience and community are the real archives. This is the kind of scholarship that feels like it was written by someone who actually knows people.

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

Dean Spade

Spade is one of the clearest thinkers I know on why legal reform alone will never get us to liberation. His framework for understanding administrative violence, and his deep commitment to mutual aid as a political practice, shows up directly in the work I do with PatchWork. If you're building anything that touches systems, read this first.

Threshold Spaces: Transitions in Architecture

Till Boettger

Boettger does something rare: he makes you pay attention to the spaces between spaces. Thresholds, corridors, vestibules, landings. These transitional moments are where a lot of belonging actually happens, and this book gives them serious architectural attention. For my research on how spaces shape trans experience, this one is directly useful and genuinely beautiful to look at.

Trauma-Informed Design: A Framework for Designers, Architects, and Other Practitioners

Cowart, Roche, Erdman & Harte — TiD Society

Full disclosure: I'm completing my TiD certification, so I'm not a neutral reader here. But this book genuinely delivers. It translates trauma-informed care principles into actionable design guidance, and it does it without talking down to practitioners. It's the kind of manual the field has needed for a long time. Worth having on your desk if you work in any environment that serves people who have been through hard things, which is most of them.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs

Jacobs wrote this in 1961 and it still holds up. Her argument for mixed use, eyes on the street, and organic neighborhood life maps directly onto what I study about community belonging. She observed her way to her conclusions, which is the kind of scholarship I respect most. Old school but indispensable.

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gilmore's definition of racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" is one of the most precise things I've read. Her abolition geography framework asks us to think about space and place not just as context but as active participants in how power works. This one lives on my desk.

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Sara Ahmed

Ahmed takes phenomenology, which is already a framework about how bodies move through space, and asks what happens when those bodies are queer. What does it mean to be oriented, or disoriented, in a world built for someone else? This book is directly in conversation with my dissertation work. It's dense but it rewards slow reading. The way Ahmed writes about tables is genuinely one of the more interesting things I've encountered in academia.

Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

Megan Asaka

I live and study in Seattle, and this book made me see the city differently. Asaka digs into the Indigenous and Asian migrant labor that built Seattle and then got systematically erased from its history. She works from labor camps, lodging houses, and so-called slums, the kinds of spaces that don't usually show up in official histories. It's a book about erasure, but it's also about the stubborn persistence of people and community in places that were never meant for them.

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton

Yes, I am a PhD student who reads Jurassic Park for fun and I will not apologize. Crichton writes chaos theory and systems thinking into a thriller in a way that is genuinely thrilling. The book is way better than the movie. If you haven't read it since you were a kid, go back. It holds up.

Dawn (Xenogenesis, Book 1)

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler asks harder questions than most scholars do, and she asks them in a story about alien abduction and survival. Dawn sits with consent, embodiment, and what community means when everything you knew is gone. It's speculative fiction that does more for how I think about space and belonging than a lot of things I've read in academic journals. Butler is just different.