CORD

Co-Learning Library

CORD grows from many ways of knowing. Books sit alongside the everyday wisdom of neighbors, helpers, and community members. These ten texts are foundational to CORD's ongoing process of learning and building together.

Together, these sources weave mutual aid, design justice, ecology, and community data sovereignty into real networks of care. They ground CORD's approach to civic technology: tools rooted in solidarity, codeveloped with communities, and accountable to the people and places they serve.

  1. Cover of Braiding Sweetgrass
    01

    Braiding Sweetgrass

    Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

    Robin Wall Kimmerer · 2013

    An invitation to reciprocity, ecological kinship, and gift economies.

  2. Cover of Design Justice
    02

    Design Justice

    Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

    Sasha Costanza-Chock · 2020

    How technology and design can center marginalized communities and honor lived experience as expertise.

  3. Cover of Designs for the Pluriverse
    03

    Designs for the Pluriverse

    Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

    Arturo Escobar · 2018

    World-making grounded in interdependence and local autonomy, in favor of many interconnected worlds.

  4. Cover of Emergent Strategy
    04

    Emergent Strategy

    Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

    adrienne maree brown · 2017

    Organizing rooted in biomimicry and relational trust: small, adaptive patterns of care shape whole ecosystems.

  5. Cover of Methods in Community-Based Participatory Research for Health
    05

    Methods in Community-Based Participatory Research for Health

    Barbara A. Israel et al. · 2005

    Community data and research must be co-governed by, accountable to, and owned by the communities they describe.

  6. Cover of Mutual Aid
    06

    Mutual Aid

    Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

    Dean Spade · 2020

    A practical handbook distinguishing solidarity from charity, outlining how neighbors coordinate survival and shared power in real crises.

  7. Cover of Mutual Aid
    07

    Mutual Aid

    A Factor of Evolution

    Peter Kropotkin · 1902

    The evolutionary foundation: voluntary cooperation and collective support, not cutthroat competition, are nature's primary drivers of survival.

  8. Cover of Network Sovereignty
    08

    Network Sovereignty

    Building the Internet Across Indian Country

    Marisa Elena Duarte · 2017

    Digital infrastructure seen through tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and community control.

  9. Cover of Pedagogy of the Oppressed
    09

    Pedagogy of the Oppressed

    Paulo Freire · 1968

    The blueprint for horizontal learning: transformation arises when knowledge is generated with communities, not handed down.

  10. Cover of Staying with the Trouble
    10

    Staying with the Trouble

    Making Kin in the Chthulucene

    Donna J. Haraway · 2016

    A call to reject technological solutionism and stay present to the messy work of building reciprocal kinship.