[CM-A Bookshelf] Stefan Gruber: From Commoning to Cosmopolitics - Reading for a Shared Future
Stefan Gruber: CM-A's in otherwards Imprint's Inaugural Editorial Board Member
The conversation, which will be had with Kai Gutschow, unpacks a personal bookshelf that spans theory, fiction, and design, to trace evolving ideas of how we live, build and act together—from the ethics of the commons and community economics to planetary forms of interdependence and care. These ten deeply personal books have shaped Gruber's intellectual trajectory and illuminated how reading can serve as a critical practice for imagining other possible worlds.
Reading List:
- Vilem Flusser's The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism
- Richard Sennet's Building and Dwelling, Ethics of the City
- David Bollier and Silke Helfrich's Free, Fair and Alive, On the Insurgent Power of the Commons
- J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy's Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities
- Fred Moten and Stefan Harney's The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
- P.M.'s bolo'bolo
- Ursula LeGuinn's The Dispossessed
- Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future
- James Bridle's Ways of Being - Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence
- Chris Ware's Building Stories
- Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio's Flesh
CM-A Bookshelf is a new event series inviting Carnegie Mellon Architecture faculty to share the readings that shape their worlds. Each session offers a glimpse into their relationship with reading; understood broadly, from books and essays to folklore, films, songs or family archives. In conversation with a guest of their choice, they reflect on the texts that linger, unravel their imagination, anchor their sense of belonging, or spark their practice. From nursery rhymes to government documents, philosophy to fantasy, each Bookshelf becomes a portrait of reading as a living, evolving practice.