Department Head Catherine Corrigall-Brown discusses her new book “Keeping the March Alive”



Dr. Corrigall-Brown’s latest book, Keeping the March Alive – How Grassroots Activism Survived Trump’s America, explores how activist groups mobilize and survive over time by following groups that were founded right after the first Women’s March in 2017.

We spoke to Dr. Corrigall-Brown about her project, and where her research is headed now.


1. How did you come to this project? What inspired you to dedicate an entire book to the subject of grassroots activism in Trump’s America?

Dr. Corrigall-Brown

For my dissertation, I studied what kept people involved in activism. We know a lot about why you might become an activist and someone else might not, but we do not know very much about what happens over time. I studied people that were activists in the ’70s and ’80s, found them when I was doing my PhD 30 years later, and followed their trajectories of engagement from when they started until then. What I found is that most people don’t become die-hard lifelong activists or just drop out: most people engage in what I called abeyance patterns of engagement – waves of participation. This project helped me to understand why people get involved in activism and what kept them in over time.

But, you don’t just need individual people to keep going, you need organizations to keep going. I started this project when Trump was inaugurated. This was a difficult time for people who were progressives and those who were more center or left. Right after he was inaugurated, there was a massive Women’s March, which was awesome. There were 450 of them, all across different cities and towns in the United States. And, I thought, that’s awesome: one great march, more coordinated than ever before. But the problem is that Trump is going to be in office for four years no matter what. You have to sustain the action until at least two years, which is the midterm elections, and hopefully four, the next election. How do you do that? That’s the question.

So I decided: in all of these cities there’s this group called Indivisible, which is a website in which you could input your ZIP code and get a list of progressive groups in your area. I picked ten American cities, and all the indivisible groups in those cities, 35 groups in all. I followed them for two years, all the way from the first Women’s March to the midterm elections, and I tried to predict which groups were going to make it those two years, which groups were going to survive, and which groups were going to be super active. That’s the puzzle of the whole book.

2. “Keeping the march alive” has been described as “an impressive model of multi-method research.” How did you go about combining different research methodologies to achieve a thorough analysis of the phenomena you were studying?

If we think about each method as a tool in our toolbox, it’s silly to have an argument about which tool is the best, because it depends on what it is we want to do. I wanted to know a lot of things about these groups. Some were quantitative: like how many events did they have a day, a month, a year; how many people were at the events; and how much discussion was there online. This form of quantitative data analysis allowed me to understand which groups survived and were really active on a macro level. But, at the end of the day, this doesn’t tell me why groups were more or less active. If a lot of people post on their page, that’s important but what are they saying? To find this out, I qualitatively coded all the comments online and interviewed the activists.

One of the big things I found was that the context really mattered. Imagine you’re an activist and you have a choice between two cities, Portland, Oregon, and Salt Lake City. Before I wrote this book, I would have wanted to be an activist in Portland: we know it’s a leftist city, they had massive numbers at their first Women’s March and had seven Indivisible groups. Salt Lake City is a smaller city, in a Republican and Mormon area, that only had a couple thousand people at their first march and three Indivisible groups. That appears to be a much harder place to be an activist. But, at the end of the day, only two of the Portland groups survived versus all of the groups in Salt Lake City. Just counting the numbers wouldn’t have told me why that happened. When I talked to activists in Salt Lake City, they said it was a really hard place to organize. You couldn’t have a big protest because people didn’t like that, so they had to spend time getting to know each other and becoming friends. There was a lot of pressure to keep going to events because the groups were smaller. They had to do smaller things like registering voters, which seems nonpolitical but made a huge difference. In Portland, there were so many people involved that there was a sense that individuals didn’t need to be involved because so many other people could replace them at events, and everyone just stopped participating. Again, you can count the numbers to get a comparison across groups but you won’t know what kept the group alive unless you talk to people too.

3. What do you hope readers take away from reading your book?

What I hope people will take away is that no matter what your context is, no matter where you live, activism can always work. You can always mobilize people and you can always create social change. Times have been very hard for activists in the recent past. But, the fact of the matter is, the activists in this book, even in very hard contexts, in very conservative areas, where they thought there was no way to make a difference, were smart and strategic and they were able to make social change. In fact, the midterm elections that came two years after these groups were founded and the Democrats did historically well.

4. What was the biggest challenge you faced in completing this book?

One of the biggest hurdles was using data from Facebook. While one of the wonderful things about social media is that there is so much data available, it is also a challenge. I had a group of undergraduate students who were fantastic and helped me code the data. We also had to develop ways to electronically code the data automatically because there was just so much data to work with.

Another challenge was that talking to real people through Facebook pages is very difficult because the only way to contact them is through Facebook messenger. It’s quite challenging to recruit people to engage when you take the human part of it out and you are now just a message on a screen.

5. Where is your research headed now?

I have a number of other projects that are sort of coming from this book. There are parts of the book that I didn’t have as much time to focus on, such as looking more deeply into the role of online activism and continuing to follow the groups over a longer period. Obviously, it is different in the US now because now they have a president who is more progressive. Does that encourage groups to stay active? Does it lead to disengagement? That’s a question I’m looking at as well.

6. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Sociology as a discipline is so critically important because it helps us understand all the inequality that exists in society and the role of social institutions in perpetuating this inequality. All of that can be a bit depressing. It’s so important to understand that, but it can leave us feeling overwhelmed by the number of social issues and problems. I like to study social movements because it gives us a lens on how knowledge is power, and how we can use that information to try to change society, be it through social movements or other means.