Political philosophy & theory
The Ecology of Freedom
Murray Bookchin
Libertarian municipalism, social ecology, and the argument that the domination of nature flows from the domination of people.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Pyotr Kropotkin
The foundational argument that cooperation, not competition, is the primary driver of social evolution. Kropotkin's documentation of mutual aid networks is the intellectual ancestor of this project.
The Conquest of Bread
Pyotr Kropotkin
On what a post-revolutionary anarchist-communist society might actually look like in practice.
Property is Theft!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The mutualist foundations. Proudhon's critique of property and his vision of reciprocal exchange.
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Murray Bookchin
On technology, decentralization, and what abundance makes possible for anarchist organization.
Anarchism and Other Essays
Emma Goldman
Goldman's essays on anarchism, feminism, and the relationship between personal liberation and political change.
Ecosystems of Revolt
Peter Gelderloos
Contemporary eco-anarchism. Territorial struggle, heterogeneity, and the revolutionary potential of place-based organizing.
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott
How states make societies legible for control — and why legibility is a technology of power. Central to thinking about what mapping communities means and for whom.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
Graeber on debt, morality, and the long history of mutual obligation that predates markets.
Networks, methods & tools
Network Science
Albert-László Barabási
The standard text. Freely available online. Covers degree distribution, centrality, clustering, and resilience — the vocabulary for analyzing what Invisible Hand Athens is mapping.
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Duncan Watts
Accessible entry point to small-world networks and what social connectivity actually looks like.
The Philadelphia Negro
W.E.B. Du Bois
1899. The original civic network mapping project — a sociological study of Black community institutions in Philadelphia. Du Bois was doing participatory community research before the vocabulary existed.
Research Methods in Community Practice
Various
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology. How to collect data with communities rather than about them.
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Anna Tsing
On precarity, collaboration, and what thrives in the ruins of capitalism. Useful framework for thinking about informal mutual aid.
A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit
What happens when disasters strip away institutional infrastructure — and how communities self-organize in the gap. Essentially empirical Kropotkin.
Emergent Strategy
adrienne maree brown
Organizing, adaptation, and the politics of small-scale change that scales. Useful bridge between theory and practice.