The UnBook Club: a club for everyone

In the summer of 2020, the C-SED team saw a need to create more virtual community spaces and opportunities for folks to learn more about and discuss the inequities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers. The result? A virtual book club inviting faculty, staff, students, and community members alike to join in reading one chapter of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes by Kat Holmes Design each week.

By providing a space to safely fail and celebrate success in their learning, readers developed a deeper understanding of other people’s lived experiences and how social identities shape both opportunity and oppression. Since then, C-SED has offered an annual book club providing discussion opportunities regarding the intersection of design and equity. In 2021, readers enjoyed All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, & Solutions for Climate Change by A. Johnson & K. Wilkinson. In 2022, the book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock was chosen. 

This year, our team was interested in redesigning our approach to book club to make the experience more inclusive and accessible to everyone from self-declared bookworms to bibliophobes. Born out of a desire to bring people together around a particular issue/topic without having participants feeling like the experience was ‘all or nothing’, the UnBook Club  centered around a weekly list of curated mixed media. By including a variety of shorter bodies of work, including podcast episodes, videos, and news articles, participants could engage in the material at their own pace. 

From race to immigration status, a total of seven identities were explored through the lens of design – specifically, how systems that were designed to serve others ended up doing the exact opposite. Check out this year’s reading schedule:

Week 1: Design & Race

• 📝  New York Times Article, “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm”: In what may be the first known case of its kind, a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit.
• 🔊 99% Invisible Podcast, Episode 469 “The Epic of Collier Heights”: A look into Collier Heights an Atlanta neighborhood once described as one of just a few “verdant neighborhoods that are the true pride and joy of the city’s Black citizenry” in the height of redlining and racial zoning.
• 📝  New York Times Article, “The Racial Bias Built Into Photography”: A review of the unconscious bias that was built into photography that, by categorizing light skin as the norm and other skin tones as needing special corrective care, has altered how we interact with each other without us realizing it.
• 🔊 NPR’s Code Switch Podcast. April 12, 2023: “WTF does race have to do with taxes?”: It turns out that your race plays a big role in whether or not you get audited and a lot more about your taxes, like how much you might owe the IRS, which tax breaks you can get, and even which benefits you can claim.
• 📝 Black Feminism Article, “The Matrix of Domination and Four Domains of Power”: An introduction to the four interrelated domains of power as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins coined in her book Black Feminist Thought. 

Week 2: Design & (Dis)ability

• 🔊 Contra* Podcast, Episode 2.10, “Contra* Maintenance with Leah Samples”: How are accessible spaces and designs maintained, and how can paying attention to maintenance challenge our ideas about design as always driven by innovation?
• 📝 Medium Article: “Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful”: 98 % of websites are completely inaccessible. You couldn’t possibly do any worse than they are. The starting point is giving a damn – starting with this article.
• 📝 Access*Ability Substack Article: “Should you describe yourself and your location in remote meetings?”: An exploration of the questions: How much of a visual description of panel members is necessary for an audience member with vision loss to participate equally? Is there a more efficient way to do land acknowledgments and visual descriptions without shortchanging or gutting them?
• 📚 Any excerpt from Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, by Alice Wong

Week 3: Design & Gender

• 🎥 TED Talk “What if Women Built the World They Want to See?”: Only four percent of construction workers are female — that’s totally unacceptable, but it’s also a huge opportunity both for women and for the trades.
• 📝 NPR Article, “Bills targeting trans youth are growing more common — and radically reshaping lives”: An NPR analysis of this fast-changing landscape found that over the past two years, state lawmakers introduced at least 306 bills targeting trans people, more than in any previous period. A majority of this legislation, 86%, focuses on trans youth.
• 📝 ProPublica Article,  “When Transgender Travelers Walk Into Scanners, Invasive Searches Sometimes Wait on the Other Side”: An intimate and horrifying look into the Trans experience while traveling, “TSA officers [asked them] to lift clothing to show private parts of their bodies or were pressured to expose their genitals so that TSA officers would allow them to pass through the security checkpoint”.
• 📝  Medium Article, “Design has a gender problem. What can we do about it?”: A compelling picture of the highly gendered inputs infiltrating the design process and the resulting outputs containing gender bias.

Week 4: Design & Body Type/Size 

• 📝 BuzzFeed.News Article, “Fat People Usually Have To Buy A Second Plane Seat. That Has To Change.”: A jarring look into the thin privilege and fat-phobia that plagues the travel industry creating a bizarre dynamic: one in which the fate of fat passengers rests with the discomfort and bias of whoever happens to sit next to us.
• 🔊 Work Appropriate Podcast. Dec. 21, 2022 episode, “When diet culture comes to work with Virginia Sole-Smith”: An insightful discussion about how the work place is not immune to diet culture and body talk.
• 🔊  Maintenance Phase Podcast. Aug. 17, 2021 episode, “The obesity epidemic”: Over the last 30 years, fatness has been defined as a risk factor for disease, then a disease in itself, then a global epidemic. What caused this rapid shift?

Week 5: Design & Socio Economic Status

• 🔊 NPR’s Invisibilia Podcast, Season 7, Episode 1, “Eat the Rich”: An exploration of the question: What happens when you demand white people give up their wealth?
• 🎥 TED Talk “How America’s public schools keep kids in poverty”: A look into schools in low-income neighborhoods across the US, specifically in communities of color, that lack resources that are standard at wealthier schools and the impact on the potential of students.
• 📝 NPR article, “Why the racial wealth gap is so hard to close”: Diving into the history of land and wealth distribution in the United States. 
• 📝Michigan Journal of Economics article, “The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Literacy: How Literacy is Influenced by and Influences SES”: A research article evaluating literature regarding one’s level of literacy and socioeconomic status (SES) to find how literacy influences SES and how SES influences literacy.

Week 6: Design & Immigration Status

• 📝 The San-Diego Union-Tribune article, “Lisa Deaderick: No two immigrant stories are the same”: San Diego authors share immigration journeys from Nigeria and Venezuela.
• 📝  New York Times Article, “The Immigrant Experience in a Danish Butter Cookie Tin”: A look into the culture and meaning surrounding a cookie tin that may be ubiquitous in immigrant households. 
• 🔊 Resettled Podcast: “Episode 1: Resettled?”: A look into what it means to be ‘resettled’ in a new country and if that is even possible.
• 🔊 My Immigrant Life Podcast: “I am a Dreamer, I am Human”: A story of a DACA recipient in the United States. 

Week 7: Design & Immigration Status

• 📝 The San-Diego Union-Tribune article, “Lisa Deaderick: No two immigrant stories are the same”: San Diego authors share immigration journeys from Nigeria and Venezuela.
• 🔊 Resettled Podcast: “Episode 1: Resettled?”: A look into what it means to be ‘resettled’ in a new country and if that is even possible.
• 🔊 My Immigrant Life Podcast: “I am a Dreamer, I am Human”: A story of a DACA recipient in the United States. 
• 📝  New York Times Article, “The Immigrant Experience in a Danish Butter Cookie Tin”: A look into the culture and meaning surrounding a cookie tin that may be ubiquitous in immigrant households. 

Week 8: The Intersectionality of Design 

• 🎥 Kimberlè Crenshaw’s TED Talk “The urgency of intersectionality”: If you’re new to intersectionality, this video serves as an excellent introduction to intersectionality in relation to race and gender bias. (19 minute watch)
• 📄🔊NPR article “Tens Of Thousands Of Black Women Vanish Each Year. This Website Tells Their Stories”: An exploration into the ‘Our Black Girls’ website that follows the often-untold stories of black girls and women who have gone missing or have been murdered. (15 minute read)
• 📄Chicago Tribune article “Most of us live at the intersection of multiple identities. They offer us chances to connect”: An op-ed piece looking into intersectionality as a tool for accepting and embracing diversity. 
• 📄The Jerusalem Post article “Alternative Chicago Pride event ‘inclusive’ to all, except Jews”: A look into the events of the 21st annual Chicago Dyke March that left the community fractured. 

If you are interested in joining C-SED’s next UnBook Club or similar programming, subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop!