This Is an Uprising was made possible by a rich community of friends, family members, organizers, colleagues, and social movement thinkers who provided guidance and assistance in innumerable ways as this project developed over a period of more than a decade. The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to all those who helped make this book a reality.
We would like to give special thanks to our dedicated team of readers for thoughtful edits and suggestions that greatly improved our drafts of the manuscript: Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Rajiv Sicora, Joshua Joy Kamensky, Stephanie Greenwood, Eric Augenbraun, and Arthur Phillips. Additionally, Stephen Zunes, Ivan Marovic, Jeremy Varon, and Mladen Joksic provided expert review of chapter drafts, and their insights into social movements were invaluable.
Eric Stoner offered critical feedback at many stages, and we benefited from his editorial leadership at Waging Nonviolence, a flagship publication for thinking about civil resistance. Eric graciously provided housing for Paul on frequent trips to New York City, and these visits offered occasion for formative conversations about the theory and practice of strategic nonviolence. The authors would also like to thank the editors at Dissent, Yes! Magazine, and the New Internationalist for providing space for us to develop ideas about processes of social change that were later incorporated into the book.
Sam Pullen and the community at the Center for the Working Poor have been constant sources of support over many years. Paulina Gonzalez and Kai Newkirk served as a sort of brain trust at the center; they worked intensively both to develop ideas about integrating structure-based organizing and mass mobilization, and to apply these ideas in practice—first in the immigrant rights movement and later in 99Rise. Kai also provided essential input during the drafting and editing of the book. We are grateful for all of these contributions.
Carlos Saavedra, a true master of social movement pedagogy, helped to develop and clarify many of the concepts presented in this book, and he was a driving force behind the creation of the Momentum Training. Other members of the training’s founding team—including Belinda Rodriguez, Max Berger, Mirja Hitzemann, Kate Werning, and Guido Girgenti—made great contributions in thinking about how to most effectively teach different organizing models to a wide range of activists. In addition, Lissy Romanow and the Ayni crew have provided crucial assistance. We also thank Brooke Lehman, Gregg Osofsky, and the team at the Watershed Center for their support of these ideas and the training.
Kate Aronoff and Yessenia Gutierrez, the research assistants who worked on this book during the most intensive period of writing, each contributed in countless ways, and we thank them for their talent, creativity, and resourcefulness. Apinya Pokachaiyapat and Madeleine Resch provided additional assistance, for which we are grateful.
We thank Anna Ghosh for skillfully helping to guide this book from conception to publication, as well as Alessandra Bastagli and the team at Nation Books for their commitment to this project and their hard work in bringing it to life.
This book was a family project in more ways than one. We thank our mom, Joan, for all of her love and care, and our brother, Francis, for his consistent support and his many insights into organizing and political struggle. Without the generosity of Nan Beer, David Wuchinich, and Sarah Wuchinich, it would not have been possible to meet the final deadline for completion of the manuscript, and we thank them for their generosity and selflessness.
Finally, we owe a deep debt to Rebekah Berndt and Rosslyn Wuchinich, who, among many other contributions, provided resolute emotional support, steady encouragement, and insightful chapter readings. We are profoundly grateful for their belief in our work. This book is a better one as a result of their efforts.