Abstract

Historians concerned with social change have used historical products, as well as historical methodology with the goals of transforming knowledge, academic writing, community, and self. Doing transformative history, however, is a complex endeavor, full of ethical and practical dilemmas related to structural power dynamics that can be understood and dealt with by borrowing from community organizing practice. Community organizers have developed analyses and honed strategies and tools that, when put into practice, pre-figure transformative process and result in social change at many levels. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the application of community organizing principles to historical methodology can lead to social change. I begin the theoretical section with a rapid overview of how history can be about social change. Next, I describe the principles of feminist, anti-racist community organizing practice, and then apply these to historical methodology. Using the example of a community history project that aims to document neighborhood organizing history via the life stories of women activists, I describe how community organizing principles apply, and discuss the transformations that have transpired to date, and that may still emerge.