Who Are We?

JEDI Book Club is a project made by students for students.

This club was created so students could have a hand in determining their education, growing out of the white + colonized design status quo, and bringing in a new era of innovation.

JEDI Book Club is a branch of the LA+ED JEDI student council. Our combined purpose is to bring Justice+Equality+Diversity+Inclusion to our educational spaces and to hold our current system accountable when it fails to make a JEDI-framed learning environment feasible.

JEDI Book Club is a resource-sharing platform in which students can learn about important topics within the design + planning fields.

We hope to disperse our info accessibly in Podcast format, coming 2023. On the podcast, we will be summarizing a book every episode so that you can get all the important bits you need.

On our Instagram account, we will be posting our monthly reads. So if you were itching for a good book, you can read along with us and be extra prepared when the podcast episode is released.

More digestible media like tv episodes, movies, articles, and documentaries will be released periodically through Instagram's Story function. If you ever felt like you missed a recommendation, check here for updates.

Hi guys! I'm your host, Abbi, and I am a queer white person working towards a SED (Sustainable Environmental Design) degree from UC Davis.

I started this book club after realizing how many students like me wished to know more about the design world than what we are taught in school. I learned about Olmsted and Central Park too many times to count, but I was unable to recall any non-white architects other than the failed Pruitt Igoe project of Minoru Yamasaki. It was becoming very apparent that we had a white/male/upper-class/western-centered teaching style of the major. In a department that boasts one of the most diverse and first-gen representative programs in the nation, it's disappointing to see a lack of that representation in its education.

This project is a way to augment my own education as well as offer any help I can to you as we learn together what it means to be a great designer.

Thank you for looking into the club!