Barnumbia Disorientation 2025:
Community Reading List
"No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them." Assata ShakurDespite what academic hierarchies of authority and expertise tell us, we know that truly transformative education comes from below and beside. Find here a growing list of work that has informed the political education of the makers of the 2025 Barnumbia Disorientation Guide and our communities, may they support your learning and unlearning in our collective movements toward justice and liberation.
| Title / Author | How it moved me / Favorite Quote | Link (if applicable) |
|---|---|---|
| "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde | "The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines the human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love." | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmq9gw4Rq0 |
| blood in my eye / George Jackson | words from a true revolutionary, so very much tactical and emotional guidance for what this work must look like in some capacity | https://archive.org/details/BloodInMyEyeByGeorgeL.Jackson/mode/2up |
| Deaf President Now | This is a movie about students overthrowing the president and board of trustees, which seems kind of relevant to our situations! | https://gallaudet.edu/deaf-president-now/#film |
| STUART HALL "Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order" - Chapter 3: The Social Production of News (24 pgs) | What makes something news? Just because an event takes place doesn’t make it news. Media outlets regularly produce news, whereby events are identified within a social context to make sense. This is a social process made up of specific journalist practices which embody crucial assumptions about expertise and authority, for instance. One (false) assumption is about the consensual nature of society. The news typically represents particular class interests as if they were the common interests of all members of society. Stuart Hall urges us to inquire: "What, other than what has been said about this topic, could be said? What questions are omitted? Why do the questions - which always presuppose answers of a particular kind - so often recur in this form? Why do certain other questions never appear?" | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CtTc-djblcXV3VZOWPF9T1goxG-jVvtr/view |
| Thinking in Systems: A Primer / Donella Meadows | This book made me feel like Neo from the Matrix after I read it. It turns a mathematical framework, called dynamical systems, into a philosophy that makes understanding the complexities of the world we live in into child's play. And it does all this with clear descriptions and figures in place of equations. Plus the author is among some of the first people to sound the alarms about climate change and the limits to economic growth -- truly an unsung heroine of the 20th century. | |
| Columbia & Barnard Expansion: Growth at What Cost? [part of Undesign the Redline exhibit at Barnard College] | Really important info about Barnard's history in Harlem, with links to all the original research, some of which comes from the school's own archives. | https://undesign.dhcbarnard.org/cb_expansion/ |
| "Rooming at Barnard: On-Campus Housing and Conceptions of Safety, Relationship to the Neighborhood, and Student Action" by Maya Garfinkel | This multi-media project uses Barnard housing to examine the shifting relationship between the college and the neighborhood, as well as the administration's role in protecting the student body with regard to notions of femininity, the perceived threat of the changing city, and the outside’s perception of the college and its students. As the neighborhood and Barnard itself changed throughout the twentieth century, students challenged housing policy. They did this by developing alternative methods of living and protesting far-reaching parietal rules. Through the fight for their own living spaces, Black students addressed the administration’s lack of support and their need for autonomous spaces. This project addresses the lack of research on Barnard students' role in forming the college and neighborhood's identity. This project presents different historical moments in Barnard's history, which would each benefit from a more a complete inquiry. | https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c07f5829b4fe47ebb4ed180bfd1183ef |