In 2018, the Community Reading Group began as a general interest study group. Their first meeting was supported by the Liberation School of Los Angeles at CIELO Gallery in Boyle Heights, LA. In 2019, they moved to their permanent home at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) in Chinatown, LA.

In 2022, Aimee Bahng held a workshop at LACA called Protean Thinking: Toward a Relational Environmentalism. During this same year CRG hosted eight study group sessions on Beatriz da Costa's theory of tactical biopolitics.

In 2026 CRG's focus has shifted away from communitarianism and toward philosophies of freedom, the histories of emancipatory struggle, and theorizations of the commons (and its appositional under-).

This collection consists of collaborative annotations produced by the Community Reading Group (CRG), a weekly seminar hosted at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA). The documents compile commentary, citations, and interpretive notes generated through collective close readings of philosophical, political, and literary texts.

[Number] PDF files, [TBD digital file size]

The Community Reading Group Annotations are working documents created during CRG study sessions. Each file corresponds to a specific text discussed by the group and contains annotations generated collaboratively by participants. Rather than serving as a finalized scholarship these documents are made public for future learning purposes.

Files are arranged by month and year in which the text was discussed by CRG participants.

Additions are expected.

• 2026

  The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa
  Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber

• 2025

  Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI — Karen Hao
  Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson
  American Conservatism, Andrew J. Bacevich, ed
  

• 2024

  In the Break, Fred Moten
  City of Quartz — Mike Davis

• 2023

  Family Abolition ⟶ M. E. O'Brien
  Anarchist Education and the Modern School, Francisco Ferrer
  The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed
  The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

• 2022

  An Autobiography, Angela Davis
  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman
  Museums and Wealth, Nizan Shaked
  Protean Thinking, A Workshop with Aimee Bahng
  The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks

• 2021

  Neither Settler Nor Native ⟶ Mahmood Mamdani
  The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin
  Ch'ixinakax Utxisa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
  Black and Blur, Fred Moten
  Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici

• 2020

  The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, Alessandro Portelli
  The Social Life of Thing, Arjun Appadurai
  Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
  Against the Grain, James C. Scott
  Not Enough, Samuel Moyn
  Badges Without Borders, Stuart Schrader
  Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew
  The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
  Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe
  The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

• 2019

  The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz
  The Law is a White Dog, Colin Dayan
  The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
  The Need for Roots, Simone Weil
  Maurice Blanchot/Michel Foucault, The Thought from the Outside
  The Unavowable Community ⟶ Maurice Blanchot
  The Disavowed Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
  The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
  Curating Community, Stacy Douglas

• 2018

  Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts
  Aliens in America, Jodi Dean
  Before the Law, Cary Wolfe
  Crowds and Party, Jodi Dean
  The Origin of the Political, Roberto Esposito
  Communitas, Roberto Esposito