Solidarity Building and Education Justice Movements: A Methodology of Praxis

• In Event: 50464 - Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology Roundtables

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a participatory action research project designed to build knowledge about how community organizers experience and understand intersectional organizing in ways that promote solidarity across issue-based movements and communities often separated by race or other identities. We are a research team of organizers and scholars, members of a grassroots think tank composed of forty community-organizing groups in the educational justice movement. Data come from in-depth interviews with thirty community organizers whom we invite to build relationships with members of our think tank; we conduct a self-study of these real-time solidarity-building efforts. Our findings challenge traditional academic understandings of intersectionality, open new ways of thinking about solidarity, and identify key processes and strategies that build solidarity. In this paper, we highlight the “methodology of praxis” we developed to conduct community engaged and action research at a national level.

Authors

• Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Bianca Ortiz-Wythe, University of Massachusetts-Boston

• Vajra Watson, California State University Sacramento

• Shaun deVera