Our Story, Our Terms: Documenting Movement Building from the Inside Out (2021-2025)

Group photo of participants in the We Who Believe in Freedom Gathering, Duke University, 2023

Our Story, Our Terms: Documenting Movement Building from the Inside Out (OSOT), 2021-2025, was a project aimed to document how activists built their social and political movements. The multi-generational project team united under the Movement History Initiative, based in the Duke University Libraries, had two key objectives. The first was to convene conversations among different generations of activists and share the takeaways from these virtual and in-person gatherings with the wider public through “an activist playbook.” Those recordings can be found here.

The second objective of OSOT was to bring organizers and archivists together to use practical and digital tools to preserve the archive of movement organizations founded between the 2010s-2020s. This activity is critical as archivists and activists rarely work together in real-time; activists are often doing the work without pausing to save it, and archivists often don’t work with activists materials until the organizations are no longer extant. OSOT archivists were deployed for one year to work on archival projects, organizing the papers of the next wave of social justice activities.

This digital exhibit features selections from the archives of the organizations that participated in OSOT. It is their belief that understanding where you’ve been is the best way to understand where you are going.