Political Theory of Organizing
Thursday, September 3, 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) George M. Shulman, New York University
- (Discussant) Nathan DuFord
Session Description:
What does it take to build and sustain a social movement? Do organizers lead, or do they facilitate leadership among those they organize? Through what kinds of practices does organizing educate and instill a sense of collective political agency? How does organizing operate on our interests and identities to make solidarity possible? The papers on this panel proceed from the shared insight that organizing is not only a subject, but itself a site of political theory. Organizers develop rich analytical and normative frameworks for understanding social structures and our power to change them through collective action. Proceeding from careful archival research, the panelists engage feminist, community, and labor organizers as their interlocutors in political theory.
Michaele Ferguson and Samuel Rosenblum’s papers take up questions about the nature of organizing as a practice. In “The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Feminist Political Theory of Organizing,” Ferguson foregrounds the urgent need for feminists to recover the movement’s tradition of political organizing amid today’s resurgence of antifeminist backlash. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union offers a distinctive model of organizing as a project of feminist empowerment, prioritizing the devolution of decision-making power to those most affected by intersecting systems of oppression. Rosenblum’s “Organizing at the Popular Front Labor College” elaborates the theme of organizing as a practice of empowerment in connection with organizing as a practice of pedagogy. Rosenblum examines how the Highlander Folk School’s innovative use of music in worker education served as a technique of working-class identity formation. Highlander’s founder Myles Horton, influenced by Christian socialism and theories of “the folk,” envisioned the practice of singing together as one that would bring the “we” that “will overcome” into being.
Mie Inouye and Philip Yaure’s papers elaborate this idea that organizing is a practice that brings a collective agent committed to its own liberation into being. Inouye’s “Self-Emancipation and the Leadership Problem” interrogates the vexed relationship between the roles of organizer and leader through the contrasting perspectives of Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, and Jane McAlevey. Organizers are pulled in two directions at once: between seeing themselves as facilitating the leadership of those who they organize and as leaders themselves in pursuit of social change. Alinsky, Baker, and McAlevey’s contrasting emphases on organizers as facilitators or as leaders, Inouye demonstrates, turn on whether they see the organizer as in pursuit of her own emancipation, or somebody else’s. Philip Yaure’s “‘Unite All These Masses’” traces the history of the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU), which sought to build an interracial labor movement in Reconstruction America. The CNLU wrestled with competing understandings interracial labor organizing as, on the one hand, a project of amplifying the harmonious interests of workers, and, on the other, a project of contesting the unjust exclusion of Black workers by white workers in pursuit of a racialized self-interest. The CNLU, Yaure argues, came to see the project of forging interracial working-class solidarity as the pursuit of a long-term harmony of interests through near-term contestation.
These papers present organizers embedded in the diverse traditions of American social movements as articulating visions of organizing as empowerment rooted in the sociality of political agency. Taken together, they offer an invitation for scholars to treat the archives of organizers as a genre of political theory.
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