Organizing for New York - Incite at Columbia University

Completed Project

Organizing for New York

Trayvon Martin's father Tracy Martin and his mother Sabrina Fulton at the Union Square protest against Trayvon's shooting death. March 21, 2012. Photo by David Shankbone.
  • Timeframe 2015–2017
  • Project Team
    • Adam Reich Co-Principal Investigator
    • Terrell Frazier Co-Principal Investigator
  • Funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

In September 2015, Incite Institute launched Organizing for New York—the first comprehensive study of organizers across social justice struggles in New York City.

Using a respondent-driven sampling design, the goal of the project was to understand the sets of understandings and practices that make organizers most effective at social change work, and to see how these understandings and practices differ across different sub-networks of organizers.

"Die-in" in Manhattan on December 12, 2014. Photo by The All-Nite Images.

As a part of this project, researchers asked social change leaders to identify those leaders whose work they most respect. They then asked the same question, iteratively, to those to whom they were referred. Over the course of several iterations, they have been able to “map” the field of social change leaders in the city.

Network diagram in white, red, and black with many nodes.
Prestige Network of 546 Social Justice Organizers in New York City, 2013-2014

Subsequent projects related to organizing for New York included identifying and interviewing intersectional organizers to understand how their position impacts their ability to make social change.

Related Works

  • open website

    Adam Reich, "The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment: Occupy Wall Street and New York City’s Social Movement Field, 2004 to 2015", Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, March 22, 2017

More Projects

  • go to Radical Arab Poetics
    Radical Arab Poetics
    Gathering queer and feminist Arab artists for a sonic rebellion that bridges underground music, poetry, and protest across the SWANA region. Part of the Left Field Fund
  • go to Reclaiming Lost Data on American Racial Inequality
    Reclaiming Lost Data on American Racial Inequality
    Producing a big-data genealogy of the African-American past by combining algorithmic linking techniques with historical and genealogical methods. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation
  • go to The Promise and Paradox of Climate Change Litigation
    The Promise and Paradox of Climate Change Litigation
    Examining ambitious litigation pursued by South African Indigenous groups to oppose mining and protect their way of life. Part of the Breakdown/ (Re)generation Project
  • go to Making the X Multiple: “Y the X?”
    Making the X Multiple: “Y the X?”
    People behind the X in all their complexity, re/generating a spectrum of (gender)queer meanings while challenging gender markers’ essentialist meaning. Part of the Breakdown/ (Re)generation Project