In-Sight Collaborative Book Club
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Have you ever wanted to join a book club? Has your busy work schedule, kids, lack of motivation to put on real pants and leave your house, or a shortage of book clubs in your community posed as obstacles? Did the rigors of academic reading kill your motivation to read for fun? Are you looking for a way to meet like-minded people, expand your way of thinking, and engage in interesting contemporary issues? In-Sight Collaborative has just the opportunity for you.
Our book clubs are self-paced with asynchronous learning opportunities for readers, the perfect way for us to cultivate intentional connection in a divided world. We host our meetings via Zoom to keep it accessible for people of all abilities, geographic locations, and schedules.
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In 2026, we will read three different books that will expand our horizons on social justice issues. Readers will sign up for each session individually, but we encourage you to join us for all of them! Scroll to explore the titles we will dive into this year and sign up to participate below!
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2026 Book Club
This year, our book club selections will be exploring a theme of reimagining approaches to social change. We will start by examining languaging and challenging pathology narratives with the intriguing book Lovebug. We will then focus on examining paradoxes and holding contradictions through the lens of the global game of football/soccer in the buildup to the World Cup by diving into Beyond the Final Whistle. We will conclude our 2026 book club offerings with a loving but urgent practice in remembering and unforgetting as the way forward and tie together our new practice of critical thinking and radical imagination with Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin.
What do these topics have to do with humanitarian work and migration? In order to reimagine and build a better tomorrow, we must develop a practice of looking beyond the limitations of our scope in a specific sector. We must remember to seek lessons and wisdom from other thinkers and knowledge holders in the world around us. What new and remembered wisdom awaits you?
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Lovebug by Daisy Lafarge
"When was love first described as a sickness? When did the body in love begin to be likened to one battling an infection? The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
Being parasitised usually comes part and parcel with being a parasite yourself. Microbial cells in our bodies equal or even outnumber those that are 'human', while ancient viruses are inscribed in our DNA. So-called human life simply would not exist if the world were divided into binaries of self and other, good and bad, sickness and health."
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As an exploration into the poetics of infection and human vulnerability, Lovebug explores the horrors we feel when we recognize something that threatens our sense of self. This book is a fascinating insight into what it means to be human (and non-human), sick and in love, and into the ethically complex, multiple, and other ideas of “who am I”s that disease can bring into being.
It is deeply personal, moving between stories of past relationships, scientific anecdotes, art, literature, and psychoanalysis! We will be using ideas from Lovebug to think about the way we understand how our society pathologizes human experiences as an illness. How might we forge non-phobic relationships with our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.
In a time of divisive migration narratives (who’s foreign? Who doesn’t belong?), this is a space to fully unpack what these rhetorics and big ideas around infection and diseases can mean to us and for us. Just as pathogens do not treat the body as a closed text, we too exist in constant exchange with our environments and communities… a painful reminder of our openness to the world and each other.
Join our Lovebug book club sessions to grapple with what we are missing when we ignore lessons from more-than-human lives. Come marvel about germs, life, and love with us!
Our first book club session will be led by Saras, our Chief Operating Officer, who has never quite grown out of her childhood fascination with the tiny creatures most people try to avoid. A self-proclaimed big baby who will absolutely cry at any poem (you've been warned), Saras was overjoyed to stumble upon Lovebug – it felt like reuniting with that wide-eyed kid who once pressed her nose against microscope lenses.
No previous knowledge of microbiology or infectious diseases is necessary to join us! Just bring your curiosity and willingness to see the world through the eyes of the small, the overlooked, and the misunderstood.
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Dates: January 30th - March 1st
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Meeting and Discussion Date: Sunday, March 1st at 5pm UTC on Zoom
Beyond the Final Whistle: Soccer for a Better World by Vasilis Kostakis
“It’s time for a counterattack. For the big turn. To change the world with the ball requires defense, build-up, and offence; resistance, creation, emancipation.
We must resist all that divides us: racial, gender, class, and physical inequalities. Those involved in the art of football must stand for the oppressed. You might argue, ‘but art is expression, important, when honest and authentic, even if it doesn’t take a stand.’ Yet time is running out. We must take a stand at every opportunity, on and off the pitch.”
The FIFA World Cup kicks off this June, bringing people around the world together in a way that is unrivaled by any other global event. The game of football/soccer has a complex social, cultural, and geopolitical role historically and in our world today. Fierce rivalries have shaped entire cities, countries, and cultural practices. The game of soccer predates current nationstates and their borders; it has even started a war in Central America. Recent World Cups, massive transfer fees for players between corporations that were once beloved community-based clubs, and FIFA corruption scandals have pointed to the permeation of capitalist industrial complexes and exceptional inequities in modern football, but is there a way that the beautiful game can be used as a uniting force for good?
A diehard fan who can’t give up on the potential of the global passion for soccer, our Executive Director Madi Williamson will host our second book club session of the year in the buildup to the World Cup kickoff in our home city of Seattle. No previous soccer fandom or knowledge is necessary to dig into this great book and the dreams and ideas we have for the ways we can use the sport as a tool of radical reimagining and revision of our world today.
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Dates: May 1st - June 12th
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Meeting and Discussion Date: Friday, June 12th at 5pm UTC
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining our Future by Patty Krawec
“We’ve been here before. History is not a clean story of progress, no straight trajectory from barbarism to civilization, ever marching forward. We live in a constant state of tension between equity and inequity, with people or societies holding more or less power in different places and times.
We need to go back to the beginning - or, rather, to a story of new beginnings - in order to start again.”
2026 book club will conclude with a beautiful call to remembrance and rebuilding from Patty Krawec. Through storytelling and resharing creation stories and common cultural myths, Krawec points to the wisdom these ancient ancestral traditions carry and how they can help us reimagine and repair the world we live in today. They can help us see beyond the limitations of our current ways of thinking, feeling, and being. How do colonial narratives of our collective history sever us from the knowledge of our ancestors? What consequences does that have on the world we live in and the world that is yet to come?
This book will tap into a deep memory you were not consciously aware you had. This book will help call you back to yourself and to the people you are in community with.
We will tie together our practice of expansive thinking with a beautiful reminder that the answers to today’s biggest questions might be within all of us, waiting to be liberated.
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Dates: August 1st - September 11th
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Meeting and Discussion Date: Friday, September 11th at 5pm UTC