Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fairchild, Emily

Area of Concentration

Sociology and Gender Studies

Abstract

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power is a social movement group that was most prominent from 1989-1995, during which it made substantial progress in the landscape of AIDS rights and research. Through examining the experiences of former ACT UP members, this thesis aimed to understand the connections between a social movement’s political goals and members’ sense of community. To do so, I performed secondary interview analysis on fifteen interview transcripts accessed through the ACT UP Oral History Project. Through this analysis, I found that political goals and sense of community for former ACT UP members were connected in three ways. First, community building strategies were utilized to enact the political goals of the movement inside the movement community. Second, sense of community, trust, and unity were necessary for the movement to function as intended. Third, the importance and centrality of sense of community for former members is further shown through their reactions and retellings of the end of ACT UP’s most active years. This thesis contributes to the literature on social movements and community building, illustrates the ways political goals and sense of community inform on another, and calls for further research to explore the role of community within a social movement context.

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