UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines how organizers and care workers enact change to promote socially just futures (Tuck, 2009). By studying the praxis of transformative change, which aims to address the root causes of social issues (Kivell et al., 2022), we aim to promote knowledge from the grassroots by gathering insights into how change-makers function as a group and enact transformative change in their communities.

A praxis (i.e., embodied theory) of transformative change sheds light on grassroots processes that enact the social change many practitioners envision, starting within organizing settings. Learning from organizers’ change praxis offers insights into how people envision futures of ideal co-existence, co-create internal practices to reorganize their settings, and engage in external collective actions (Basso & Krpan, 2022; Kivell et al., 2022; Martín-Baró, 1994). This aim aligns with the goals of critical and decolonial movements in scholar-activist psychology, effectively bringing community knowledge into academia. Specifically, I asked: How do care workers, organizers, and (scholar) activists embody and enact transformative change? To explore this topic, I interviewed 25 care workers and organizers engaged in anti-racist and transformative organizing work. Guided by an information power sampling strategy, we selected 17 interviews most relevant to our study’s aims. Significantly, we noted that many of our participants identified their work as abolitionist, aiming to dismantle systems and ideologies of harm by advocating for redirecting funding, resources, and programming from logics of punishment rooted in carceral systems (i.e., police, prisons, justice system) to structures of care, mutual aid, and community support, We then conducted a critical reflexive thematic analysis with a student-activist research team (Braun & Clarke, 2022). We analyzed insights from change-makers’ expertise on how they: (1) envisioned ideal co-existence in society, (2) enacted those visions to co-create internal practices to ensure equity and unsettle power differentials in their organizing settings, and (3) engaged in collective action to promote justice and liberation in their communities.

Our research team discerned results highlighting transformative change internal organizational practices that shaped external community actions: (a) Participants were inspired by their collectives’ rebellious values of care, which shaped (b) the embodiment of care-centered values through relational practices, (c) democratizing decision-making processes aiming for heterarchy, and (d) instilling accountability mechanisms as a refusal to the systemic abandonment of people. This study contributes to understanding and promoting the psychology of social change, by learning directly from grassroots change-makers. Our research highlighted insights from the understory of the social change forest, illuminating clearings toward more just conditions of co-existence.