[CM-A Bookshelf] Tommy CheeMou Yang: On Tender Radicalism - To Hope, My Students, and Found Kin in Architecture

On Tender Radicalism - To Hope, My Students, and Found Kin in Architecture by Tommy CheeMou Yang, CM-A in otherwards Imprint’s inaugural editorial board member

The conversation, which will be had with Ryan Shen, Morris Mingqian Zhang, and Allen Chen, is framed through the theme of Tender Radicalism, following stories that consider how practices of care, repair, and attention to the everyday can transform how we read, write, and build as people(s). The readings span architectural manuals, Indigenous philosophies, abolitionist frameworks, and poetry. While at a glance, they do not sit neatly within “architecture”, they propose tools and practices of world-making where our bodies, materials, and relationships are inseparable.

Reading List: 

• Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) 
• Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of  Gladness (2025)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's As We Have Always Done (2017) 
• Mariame Kaba's We Do This Till We Free Us (2021) 
• Mariame Kaba's Hope is a Discipline (2018)
• bell hooks's All About Love (2000) 
• Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto's Made in Tokyo (2001) 
• Yoshiharu Tsukamoto et al.'s How Is Life? (2021) 
• John Lin and Sony Devabhaktuni's As Found Houses: Experiments from Self-Builders in Rural China (2021)
• Fuminori Nousaku's Urban Wild Ecology (2023) 
• Christina Soontornvat's A Wish in the Dark (2020) 
• Diane Taylor's ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence (2020)

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.