Social Movement History
topic
Social movement history — the study of how significant social changes have been achieved through organized collective action, from suffrage movements to civil rights movements to labor movements — provides the most relevant available case library for understanding how ideas become movements, how movements build power, how opposition is organized and overcome, and how the specific tactics and communication strategies that movements develop determine their success or failure.
Role
Social movement history is the creative input most directly applicable to any creative work concerned with social change — providing the empirical record of what has actually worked and what has actually failed in the full diversity of contexts where organized human effort has sought to change existing social arrangements. The creator working on communication for social change, organizational design for advocacy, or the narrative of transformation has access in social movement history to the most extensively documented case library available for understanding the dynamics of collective action.