Coalition
“Coalition” is a critical keyword in modern political organizing, denoting the practice of connecting various political groups of differing cultural, social, and/or ideological identities through a common goal or struggle. In the U.S. and internationally, coalition work is now a staple tactic for rallying institutions—and sometimes electorates—for specific policy changes whose interests cut across various economic, cultural, and political lines. In the academy, organization theory, or social organization theory—a branch of sociology and sometimes psychology—became increasingly interested in coalition organizing as a dominant mode of politics in the wake of civil rights and feminist organizing in the 1960s and ’70s U.S., as well as global student, anticolonial / Third Worldist, and antiwar movements in the same time period. Coalition’s key historical emergence as what we might think of as a social justice practice was then born of and around the time that African American studies—as well as Chicano/a studies and the formation known as ethnic studies in the academy by the 1980s—emerged as an institutional critique of higher education’s politics around race and ethnicity.