About the Initiative
The UCLA Initiative is a three-year pilot project intended to foster cutting-edge research and high-level teaching to understand better and mitigate group-based hate. The Initiative is collaborative, bringing together university-based researchers (faculty and students), non-profit actors, government officials, and private sector actors who share a common desire to understand and combat hate; it is innovative and bold, seeking to explore previously unexplored questions and using new sets of methodological lenses; and it is multidisciplinary, bringing together a unique constellation of scholarly prowess.
Why do we exist?
Rising political and economic tensions and a global pandemic have led to new expressions of hate. Meanwhile, long standing structures of power perpetuate bias, stigma, and enmity. Our task at UCLA, as a public university, is to study these old and new forms and propose novel ways of addressing them.
What is our added value?
The UCLA Initiative to Study Hate draws on the strengths of a world-class research university bringing together outstanding researchers from a range of disciplines to create a rigorous and innovative multidisciplinary research platform.
What does this look like?
In its first year, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate will distribute nearly $600,000 in research funds to 23 research projects examining the phenomenon of hate. The Initiative will convene these teams in a monthly seminar to share their research, discuss their findings, and hear from other experts. The initiative will also host public programming and engage with practitioners combating hatred to forge connections between theory and praxis.
Who are we?
ISH Research Fellows hail from more than 20 disciplines across the UCLA campus. They include sociologists, psychologists, historians, education experts, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, legal scholars, public and community health experts, and others. The Initiative is housed in the UCLA Division of Social Sciences.
