Reading recommendations from the Glitch team
We’re away this week on our team retreat, so in the spirit of taking time to learn and reflect, we are sharing some of our favourite thought-provoking reads. We hope you enjoy!
tèmítópé lasade-anderson
Recommending a favourite book is so difficult for me because I love reading and ‘favourite’ ends up having many meanings! I’ll tackle it by recommending a book that I often recommend to others - Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villareal. From the blurb, “a brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by the forces of migration and colonialism.” The book explores how the intersections of pop culture, music, fantasy media, and memory are experienced by marginalised communities, especially drawing on Villareal’s familial background and culture/heritage of mestizo in the US. It’s a deeply moving and profound memoir that is underpinned by sharp cultural analysis and theory. Villareal uses the genre/framework of ‘magical realism’, critiquing its stereotypical application in contemporary media, and uses it to analyse everything from fragmented memory and Kurt Cobain to Game of Thrones. When I read it I thought “now that’s how you write,” because it’s such an excellent example of cultural critique, academic research and creative non-fiction. Delicious.
Emmanuelle Andrews
I’m a big social/political theory nerd so: Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? by Leah Cowan. Writing accessibly and honestly, Cowan beautifully presents what society could (and can) look like if (when) a liberatory-minded feminism and abolitionist politics of care prevail, and unpacks the systemic barriers, State interventions and “tangled history of resistance and complicity” by the VAWG sector that have made that path so challenging to bring into fruition. Cowan invites us to be introspective, questioning the uncomfortable decisions we make in the ‘charity’ sector today, and the ways in which these continue to uphold carceral politics. I’ll be cheeky and suggest something else that this book has to be read alongside: Speak Out! The Brixton Black Women's Group. This is a collection of pamphlets and writings from one of the UK’s first Black radical feminist groups - edited by Milo Miller, with a gorgeous introduction by Jade Bentil. It felt a privilege to be able to read the primary sources from the thinkers that have laid the groundwork for much of what we have today in social justice, feminist and frontline services/spaces. And to witness them grapple with some of the same questions we are still struggling with was both humbling and grounding. These texts will inspire you to go analog, and to remain committed to the discipline of building just worlds for us all.
Ellen Judson
I’ve chosen one of my favourite investigative research reports: ‘Drag queens and Artificial Intelligence: should computers decide what is ‘toxic’ on the internet?’, by Alessandra Gomes, Dennys Antonialli and Thiago Oliva at InternetLab, published in 2019. I read it when I was first starting out in tech policy and research (and was watching a lot of Drag Race, of course) and it has stuck with me ever since. The article interrogates the idea of ‘toxic’ online content and industry attempts to use AI and natural language processing to identify this sort of harmful content. It discusses the methods and findings of research they undertook: they collected tweets from drag queens, white supremacists and political figures and compared what ‘toxicity’ score a commonly used Google-built toxicity classifier gave them. Spoiler alert: they found that the tool would classify posts from drag queens that used the word ‘gay’ as highly toxic, while posts from white supremacists about racial superiority were rated much lower. In some ways, the article is dated now: Google is shutting down Perspective API, and Twitter is no longer Twitter, let alone do researchers still have access to the Twitter API. But in a political environment where politicians increasingly trust ‘the algorithm’ to make the best decisions, it’s still a clear, concise and accessible article - with a catchy title - that can help demonstrate to a non-technical audience how algorithmic bias happens, the limitations of algorithmic content moderation, and the very real impacts on marginalised people, both from what speech is deemed harmful, and what speech is deemed acceptable.
Danielle Soskin
My recommendation is Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. As someone who works in advocacy and activism, I spend a lot of time in spaces where questioning capitalism, power, institutions and dominant political narratives is part of the work. But I have always felt like I lacked an education in the fundamentals of economics. My goal for 2026 was to read books that expanded my economic knowledge and vocabulary so that I could better engage in debate with a wider audience (and hopefully win some hearts and minds!). Graeber’s book traces debt across history and explores its relationship to morality, violence, state power and money. He breaks down the fundamental assumptions in economic systems and questions how and why these ideas have become viewed as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’. He writes in an accessible way for someone with no understanding of economics (like me) and loads of interesting facts on history, anthropology and the psychology of money to help keep you engaged! As the AI boom threatens to explode and a handful of AI companies continue to borrow billions in pursuit of artificial general intelligence - understanding the power, promise and myths of debt is more important than ever!