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Video for Social Change was a documentary film course taught by Bruce Orenstein at the Center for Documentary Studies in the spring of 2014. The collection includes eight interviews, with North Carolina social justice activists James Andrews, Rukiya Dillahunt, Anita Earls, Angaza Laughinghouse, Dani Moore, Allison Riggs, Melinda Wiggins, and Mel Williams. The materials in the collection include camera footage in AVCHD format, edited master videos in MP4 format, and transcripts for eight interviews.

Pauli Murray was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. The Pauli Murray Center is a non-profit organization located in Pauli Murray's childhood home in Durham, NC. The PMC organizes community projects, walking tours, exhibitions, film exhibitions, and outreach activities, regarding equity and justice.The Pauli Murray Center records collection include materials related to outreach activities, LGBT activism, community projects and oral history projects conducted at Duke University through the Center for Documentary Studies and the Franklin Humanities Institute. Acquired as part of the Human Rights Archive at Duke University.

The Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South project was undertaken by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies from 1990-2005. Its goal was to record and preserve African American experiences in the American South from the 1890s to the 1950s. Materials in the Behind the Veil project collection date from about 1864 to 2011, with the bulk dating from the 1990s; earlier dates represent original image content rather than the reproduction date. The collection comprises over 1200 oral history interviews with associated transcripts and administrative files, several thousand historic and contemporary photographs, and project records, which include paper and electronic administrative files and audiovisual recordings. Oral histories were conducted in 19 locations, chiefly in the South; topics represented in these recordings include childhood, religion, education, politics, celebrations and other events, family histories, work histories and military service, and details about segregation and the effects of racism in the South. Acquired as part of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African American History and Culture at Duke University.

The Durham Traditional Arts Survey was conducted in the early 2000s as part of the Document Durham project within the Community Programs department at the Center for Documentary Studies. Participants consisted of folklorists and photographers who traveled through Durham County, attempting to document the diversity of various communities by focusing on traditional artists within those communities. One outcome of the DTAS was the Home Made Visible: Durham 2002 exhibition, which highlighted Durham traditional arts and crafts. Includes fieldwork reports, interview tapes, slides, photographs, and other documentary material from the research and observations conducted by participants in the Durham Traditional Arts Survey Project. Durham communities and artists represented in the project include African American, African immigrants, Latino, Middle Eastern, Jewish, South Indian, and Asian, as well as occupational traditions and rural community traditions. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts.

The Neighborhoods Project was created as part of the Community Programs department within Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. According to the CDS website, it offered North Carolina elementary school teachers an innovative and effective way to meet social studies goals outlined in the state's standard course of study. The project provided a way to engage students in their own communities, focusing on their individual lives and stories through photographs, narrative writing, and storytelling. It provided a series of experiential learning activities that encouraged the use of photography, oral history, and narrative writing in an exploration of community and citizenship. Collection includes black-and-white photographs, negatives, and slides from projects created by students at Durham's E.K. Powe and W.G. Pearson elementary schools between 1997 and 2004. The images document the social life and the built environment in Durham, N.C., in city neighborhoods where the students live; they feature children, pets, houses and places of business, groups of adults, and other neighborhood scenes where whites, African Americans, and Spanish-seeking citizens live. Some materials are in Spanish. Also includes some student booklets and publications highlighting their projects as part of the program. Acquired as part of the Archive for Documentary Arts.

The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program (LHDFP) is administered by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to support documentary photographers who address humanitarian issues in the U.S. and abroad. The Lewis Hine Fellowship Photographs Collection represents a selection of images from the documentary projects of seven LHDFP fellows: Alex Fattal, Maital Guttman, Kate Joyce, Jonna McKone, Elena Rue, Amanda van Scoyoc, and Lucy Wilson. The photographic images and videos in the collection depict home and community life of disadvantaged families and children in several sub-Saharan African nations (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia), as well as Massachusetts and New Jersey. They show everyday life and activities, such as children playing and completing chores, mothers cooking meals, disabled children going to school, household living conditions, and impoverished orphans and HIV-positive children in their familial situations, as well as funerals and school presentations (among other community events). In addition to photographic prints, there are also some documents relating to the projects, DVDs of the photographers' documentary work, and an archived version of the LHDFP website. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

Collection consists of over 1100 black-and-white and color exhibit prints representing the work of over 50 South African photographers who documented conditions during and after apartheid, from about the 1940s to 2013, with most dating after 1960. Arranged in five series representing projects curated by documentary photographers Alex Harris, Paul Weinberg, and others: Beyond the Barricades, The Cordoned Heart, Then and Now, Underexposed, and The Other Camera. There is also a series of work by Jeeva Rajgopaul, and a series of Staffrider digital materials. Set in rural and urban South Africa, the images portray political rallies; protests; forced removals; funerals; social gatherings such as dances and concerts; work and domestic life; the life of the elderly, the migrants, and the impoverished; and labor organizing and strikes. There are many portraits of individuals of all races and classes, well-known activists and politicians, as well as countless ordinary South African citizens. Many of the photographers were members of Afrapix, a collective photography agency engaged in documenting the anti-apartheid struggle. There is a small amount of printed material, as well as a selection of digital image files and a digital audio file of an exhibit talk. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

Oral history interviews with Palestinian students and artists, created by Duke students for the course AMES 204FS, "Documenting the Middle East," taught by Nancy Kalow.

The Committee on African Studies formed in 1965 as part of the Center for International Studies at Duke University. The committee was composed of faculty from the departments of history, political science, anthropology, and economics. Its mission included supporting research in Africa, publishing articles and sponsoring lectures on African studies, and developing African studies curricula for middle school and high school students. Records date from 1967 to 1976 and consist of correspondence, papers and proposals, course materials, reprints, and sound recordings. The Committee's work focused on cultures including the Dan, Mbuti, Somali, and Zulu. The bulk of the material relates to the African Curriculum Development Project conducted in cooperation with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and publication of the series Africa Sketches. English.