Transforming Resistance into a Social Movement

How to go from resisting to creating lasting change: Saru Jayaraman uses her long history fighting for bold, lasting social change goals for low-income workers and her experience teaching social movement theory as a university professor to inspire and engage us in our opening session. This session helps people and groups situate their individual work within broader social movement theory, and think about how to make transformative change by building coalitions across organizations, issues, and sectors. Saru covers how patterns of political opportunities and constraints can lead to necessary cycles of contention that, when paired with strong networks and sustained interactions, can lead to a social movement moment. Key to creating that social movement moment are how the actions of organizers and activists create intersectional coalitions and collective identities.