Recent otheringandbelonging_rw items

Asia-Pacific Just Transitions: Assessing the Activities, Strategies, and Needs of Asia-Pacific Climate, Agri-food, and Environmental Organizations

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For decades, communities across Asia–Pacific have been at the forefront of environmental transformation and climate vulnerability. The region encompasses immense ecological diversity and deep histories of colonial extraction, uneven development, and labor exploitation. Today, as the global race toward decarbonization and “green growth” accelerates, Asia–Pacific peoples face both the intensification of climate impacts and the reconfiguration of extractive economies under new forms of climate colonialism.

Climate Refugees: Facts, Findings, and Strategies for ‘Loss and Damage’

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This research brief holds Global North countries, institutions, and industries as culpable for the climate crisis and asserts that action on their part is essential to mitigating the crisis of climate-induced displacement by ensuring the safe resettlement of climate refugees, and fostering diversified climate-resilient economies and just transitions across the Global South and Global North alike.

Community-based Insulin: An Urgent Response to Systemic Failures in the US Pharmaceutical Regime

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At the center of this research brief is the Open Insulin Project (OIP), a group of activist scientists in a community biology lab in Oakland, California. Founded by a type 1 diabetic and driven by volunteers, OIP has responded to the insulin crisis by attempting to produce an open source version of insulin.

Puerto Rico's Public School Closures: Community Effects and Future Paths

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Puerto Rico Department of Education has closed nearly half of the public schools in Puerto Rico since 2007. Puerto Rico is not alone; there is a broader trend of school closures in districts across the US, from Philadelphia to Oakland to Washington DC. But Puerto Rico shuttered an unprecedented 673 of its public schools (44%) in 11 years, far outpacing the rate of change and the number of closures in Chicago (the US school district with the second largest number of school closures). The impact of Puerto Rico’s closures on students, families, and surrounding neighborhoods is profound, yet it has largely been regarded as collateral damage of a necessary restructuring. This report, published by the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and the Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat, analyzes the human impact of the closures, the current state of the schools that have been closed, the response by affected communities, and strategies for a pathway forward.

On Bridging: Evidence and Guidance from Real-World Cases

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper looks at an array of case studies around bridging as a response to the profound othering we witness today. Through the examples explored in this memo, we seek to understand what is required, from an individual to an institutional level, to strengthen practices and principles that offer a path forward toward a world where all belong.

Technology and the COVID-19 Era: How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Futures of Othering & Belonging in an Era of Pandemic and Protest

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This report provides an overview of the current public conversation as it relates to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and algorithm-based artificial intelligence used in three interrelated domains that impact public health and social equity: the use of automated decision systems, surveillance, and social media.

Consequences of Islamophobia on Civil Liberties and Rights in the United States

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This publication is part of the Global Justice Program’s Human Rights Agenda report series. In this series, we collaborate with other human rights, civil rights, and civil society organizations under the umbrella of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN) to advance the utility of the rights-based framework as a meaningful organizing tool for impacted communities and social movements to articulate claims of social, cultural, and political rights, and belonging. Our reports are reviewed by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and the Human Rights Council, and inform the UN’s recommendations to hold the US Government and legislative bodies accountable to their obligations as related to the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Engineering For Perfection: The False Promises of Gene Editing in Assisted Reproduction

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

CRISPR and other methods of gene editing have captured the public imagination, spurring countless lectures, articles, and think pieces about how this technology can shape humanity. Many of these conversations are concerned primarily with the seemingly boundless “potential” of human gene editing to both treat diseases in existing patients and alter the genes of future children and generations. The ethical implications of using technology to permanently alter the human genome are evident and often mentioned. But many discussions downplay the serious societal and ethical implications of human gene editing when they fail to assess it within the context of existing assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the fertility industry. This brief extends public and policy discussions that contextualize human gene editing as an ART with scientific limitations and grave and irreversible social and political consequences.

This brief argues that the implications of human germline...

Islamophobia Through the Eyes of Muslims: Assessing Perceptions, Experiences, and Impacts

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Othering & Belonging Institute developed and administered this national survey between October 14 and November 2, 2020, among the US Muslim population (citizens and noncitizen residents who live and/or work in the US) to understand the prevalence of Islamophobia in the US. In so doing, we intentionally set the survey to assess Islamophobia’s prevalence from the perspectives of those who bear the brunt of its effects on their daily lives. Additionally, the study sought to account for the diversity of US Muslims and sought to assess their societal engagement, worldviews, and belonging as they navigate their lives in the US.

2020 Inclusiveness Index: Measuring Global Inclusion and Marginality

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Vermont, Alaska, and Maine were the three most effective states in responding to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, according to this new analysis by UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. The institute created this index to measure the performance of all 50 states and 172 countries primarily based on three factors: rates of infection, death, and testing.

Margins in Movement: Toward Belonging in the Inland Empire of Southern California

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This report chronicles the most significant findings from more than two years of research with the people of the Inland Empire — the two-county region of Southern California consisting of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, often identified as a periphery “at the margins” in relation to Los Angeles. This research seeks to understand prevailing beliefs, opinions, and narratives across different demographic subgroups in the region on topics including intergroup relations, the idea of community, economic opportunity and inequality, the role of government, and civic participation.

Policing Students Online: The Increasing Threat of School-Sanctioned Digital Surveillance

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article provides an overview of how the surveillance systems that are being increasingly deployed against K–12 public school students and their families operate, highlighting the ways in whic they function as a covert form of school policing. In doing so, we ground our analysis in the decades-long work of organizers and activists to reimagine the learning environment, or “school climate,” and heed the warnings of organizers in the broader movement for prison-industrial complex abolition to reject systems of racial and social control and surveillance, including those that purport to promote safety and well-being but “manifest as punishment for those experiencing them.” Next, we discuss the civil rights and civil liberties concerns these surveillance systems illuminate, with a focus on the unique and disproportionate harms they inflict on marginalized students, including students of color and LGBTQ students. We conclude by highlighting the legal conflicts that arise when public...

Housing Affordability in the Wake of COVID-19: Regional Solutions for Southern California

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper begins by describing current housing affordability dynamics across Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Although rent burden metrics help identify households vulnerable to instability, it is the underlying housing and work conditions that shape residents’ lives and produce this indicator—particularly as people cope by working more and living in more crowded households. By comparing conditions driving the affordability crisis, we show that housing pressures found in the Inland Empire are a continuation or extension of Los Angeles dynamics. In response, we emphasize the need to simultaneously examine interrelated housing, labor, and social conditions and their underlying drivers across Southern California.

African Just Transitions: Assessing the Activities, Strategies, and Needs of African Climate, Agri-food, and Environmental Organizations

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For decades, activists, organizers, and scientists across the Global South have warned about the pronounced impacts of the climate crisis on their countries, communities, and ecosystems, and have done so while working tirelessly to develop resilience against such impacts. This is especially true for the African continent, which has contributed the least to the climate crisis, is among the most impacted by the climate crisis, and has given rise to demonstrably robust and far-reaching strategies for climate resilience.

In our research for this paper, we focus on how African climate, agri-food, and environmental organizations are combating the drivers of the climate crisis, managing the impacts of the climate crisis, and forging strategies to build climate resilience. We do so to help ensure that efforts to support climate justice in Africa are accountable to the objectives, strategies, and activities of African organizations and African peoples themselves, and to build...

On Bridging: Evidence and Guidance from Real-World Cases

Wed, 3 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This report discerns between actions that can instigate more suffering through breaking, and those that can lead to compassion, cohesion, and inclusion through bridging. Breaking causes fractures; bridging creates solidarity. Through the lens of bridging and the examples explored in this paper, we can understand what is required, from an individual to an institutional level, to strengthen practices and principles that offer a path forward to help us realize a world where all belong.

Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice, written by the Abolishing Biological Race in Medicine Working Group of the Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice, bridges existing research by critical theory scholar-activists and researchers to guide clinicians and student learners in medicine, public health, and beyond on why the use of biological race must be abolished in medicine and clinical research, education, and practice. We begin with how medicine is rooted in a violent history of racism and has scientifically codified race as a biological construct throughout history. From this foundation, this report draws on current examples of the use of biological race in medicine to highlight the urgent need to transform these outdated practices and center patient care. Throughout the paper, the authors intersperse quotes and anecdotes that have been shared with them by their medical student peers.

Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied

Tue, 7 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This report argues that a comprehensive framework for climate-induced displaced persons forced to cross international borders to be considered “climate refugees” is necessary. This report advances the notion that “persecution” is built into our global dependence on fossil fuels and the global investment patterns behind this dependence, and that this notion of “persecution” needs to serve as the basis for a normative framing of international recognition and protection of those who are displaced as climate refugees.

Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice