2026 Theses Doctoral

A More Just City

Frazier, Terrell D.

This dissertation examines the processes and consequences of community organizing as a driver of social transformation in New York City between 2008 and 2014. While much scholarship on social movements focuses on individual organizations, charismatic leaders, or discrete campaigns, this study contends that change is best understood through a field-level perspective that attends to the ongoing relationships, power dynamics, and mutual influences among advocacy groups, government agencies, philanthropic foundations, and other institutional actors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with seventy-one organizers active between 2008 and 2014, I argue that transformative outcomes—defined here as profound shifts in policy, power relations, and community capacity emerge from sustained collaboration, negotiation, and contestation across organizational boundaries. I conceptualize this ongoing process as the “field of social transformation.”

This dissertation makes significant theoretical, substantive, and methodological contributions to the study of community organizing and social transformation. Theoretically, it reconceptualizes community organizing as a field-level process, highlighting how organizers operate within structured environments shaped by both competition and cooperation among diverse actors. By identifying brokerage—the building of bridges across organizations—and attribution—the framing of political context—as central mechanisms to this process, the research clarifies how coalitions adapt to changing conditions while sustaining momentum for transformative change.

Substantively, the dissertation reveals that enduring transformation is grounded in everyday practices such as negotiation, trust-building, experimentation with new forms of mobilization, and learning from setbacks. These practices are shown to be essential for coalition resilience and effectiveness. Bringing these insights together, the study illuminates how community power is built through cycles of collaboration across difference, while also demonstrating that lasting social change emerges from the ongoing relational labor and adaptive strategy embedded in daily organizing practice. Methodologically, I show how oral history techniques can be wedded with analytical sociology to identify the micro and meso-level mechanisms undergirding social change.