Making History: Fostering Democratic Imagination Through Community-Engaged Social Movement Scholarship

Abstract

The study of social movement history is rich terrain from which to examine the structures of inequities and the processes by which collective struggles dismantle them. The purpose of this chapter is to describe efforts to foster students’ democratic imagination through a course on the multiracial social movement history of the San Francisco Bay Area. The centerpiece of the course is a research assignment where students work collaboratively with local activists to document insufficiently known social histories of the Bay Area and publish them within the popular community history website FoundSF. The author compares two iterations of the course in order to reveal how different approaches to facilitating student-community collaborations result in different learning implications for all involved.