Radical Reading Room
Join the Radical Reading Room this
Winter 2026 term!
⏰ 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month 7:00 – 8:30pm
📅 upcoming dates: Jan 14, 28 | Feb 11, 25 | March 11, 25 | April 8, 22
📍various locations—check the @OPIRGyork Instagram
📍 Often gathering in room C449 First Student Center, Keele campus
🥘 Food will be provided.
The Radical Reading Room is a bi-weekly study collective dedicated to exploring the revolutionary tradition across various historical contexts.
Drawing inspiration from OPIRG’s library and the history of grassroots education, the group offers a space for participants to engage critically with texts that have shaped emancipatory movements from Marx’s early writings to contemporary struggles for liberation. Each session centers on collective reading and open discussion rather than formal lectures, encouraging participants to connect theory with practice and reflect on the meaning of revolution in the present.
The first series, Revolutionary Tradition, Part I, begins with a genealogy of Marx’s thought and its ongoing influence. We’ll dicuss Marx’s life beginning as his time as a student of Hegel and his break from the Young Hegelians in the midst of the 1848 Revolutionary Spring until his death.
Why this reading group?
The point of this group and specifically this series on Marx is to equip people with a holistic perspective of who Marx was. At York specifically, there is a long history of people using the “Marxist” position to justify what they see as an uncontestable appeal to authority, whereas Marx was an actual person who started as a student activist and whose political trajectory can be mapped into a biography that holds a lot of inspiration untapped in the shadow of dogma. The series begins with Marx but seeks to explore many other revolutionary thinkers such as Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Rodney, amongst others at the desires, discretions, and capacity of membership.
