ABSTRACT
Grounded in an advocacy framework, this chapter illustrates ways that oral history and photography research methods can be used to collapse university and community borders while building mutually beneficial collaborations. Through his local history projects on working- and poverty-class populations in Atlanta—day laborers and affordable housing activists—the author presents voices, images, and reflections on moving across race, class, and national boundaries in a deep-South US city. Situated in the context of Atlanta’s growth into an international metropolis at the turn of the twenty-first century, the author reveals how day laborers and homeless people navigated factious economic and political terrain in urban and suburban landscapes. While foregrounding the lived experience of marginalized people and the work of their advocates, the author’s scholar-activist routes evince local examples of working-class theory and praxis accomplished through various forms of border crossing.
