ABSTRACT
Meetings are used to understand exactly how a reform coalition as Coalition for Local Initiatives (CLI) sutures elite power to local democratic processes. This chapter explores the coalition as an interesting site through which to think about how meetings operate not only to circulate knowledge and structure work, but, ultimately, to make the core knowledge practices that underlie the coalition itself. A broad-based social reform organization's key challenge, then, is to hold itself and all of its diverse parties together, chiefly across positionality and ideology. The chapter then describes two kinds of meetings that build, make cohesive, and ultimately propel a major civic reform coalition, the CLI. The meeting is not simply a lens, not methodologically akin to a fungus or nucleotide; at least in meeting-saturated forms of activism like the reform coalition, the meeting is always something more than an actant. Ethnographers of social change activism often study critically how marginalities are produced and reinscribed through political projects.
