In the face of larger forces, what brings people to organize themselves and their communities? How do participants in social movements organize others? How do we understand community organizing as a field, or the study of organizing itself? These questions are at the heart of understanding community organizing, or the community focused and locally rooted ways that people fight for power and control over aspects of their lives. By examining place-based and community-based organizations and organizing, we consider the relationships among space, place, scale, and movements for social change. This course also examines community organizing from the lens of methodology, defined as the ways we gather knowledge to inform our actions and our analysis. We look at methodology in terms of the strategies and tactics that community organizers employ in order to organize themselves and their own communities. We also explore the set of qualitative approaches that researchers who study social change use for understanding peoples’ sense of the world and their efforts to transform it. Through these two approaches, we see the relationship between organizing for social change and the role of research and knowledge production in building community power. We also encounter the ethical and political questions that inform the methodologies of both organizing and of research. Examples draw from feminist, labor, abolition, anti-colonial, radical Black, internationalist movements, among others. In groups, students will engage extensively in their own methodological research projects on community organizing.