UCLA Initiative to Study Hate

Compassion in Practice: Providing Water and Shelter in Gaza
2025-11-17 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
A Conversation with Seba Abudaqa and Tom Kellner, co-founders of Clean Shelter
This event will feature the work of Clean Shelter, a grassroots organization registered in Germany that delivers immediate relief to displaced communities in Gaza through essential sanitation and shelter solutions. Founded by Seba Abudaqa, a Palestinian from Gaza living between Munich and Cairo, and Tom Kellner, an Israeli based in Berlin, the organization focuses on concrete action on the ground, providing shelter, sanitation, and water. Since January 2024, Clean Shelter has established multiple IDP camps, installed water desalination units and constructed water infrastructure, and provided aid to more than 150,000 displaced people across Gaza.
Seba and Tom will speak about what brought them together and what motivates them in the midst of the overwhelming challenges of Gaza.
Register here.

Viral Harm, Contested Definitions: Antisemitism and the Politics of Listening
2025-11-12 11:00 - 12:00 | Royce Hall, 236
Hosted by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, ISH postdoctoral fellow Dr. Kathryn Huether will present her talk Viral Harm, Contested Definitions: Antisemitism and the Politics of Listening, on November 12th at Royce Hall.
Dr. Huether’s talk will examine how antisemitism is transmitted and amplified through sound on contemporary social media platforms, situating this analysis within today’s contested debates over how antisemitism itself is defined. Moving beyond text-based definitions to examine music, ambient audio, and meme-driven clips, she will show how these sonic practices blur parody and hate, evade moderation systems, and circulate antisemitic affect through the viral logics of digital culture.
This talk is being hosted by the Alan Dr. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. To register, click here.

End-of-Year Impact Symposium
2025-05-27 13:00 - 16:00 | James West Alumni Center Founder’s Room
Join us for our second Impact Symposium, which will highlight key findings from ISH’s projects over the last three years and will include three panel discussions: Extremist Recruitment: From Point of Entry to Point of Exit, Mitigating Hate in the Broad Media Landscape, and Studying Hate in Fraught Times.
Register HERE.
See below for panel details and link to program with panelist bios!

Panel Details:
Extremist Recruitment: From Point of Entry to Point of Exit
This panel will outline various recruitment strategies used by extremist organizations, including novel, disguised, or seemingly benign messaging strategies, focusing on how interventions might be designed to reflect the ever-changing landscape of recruitment and radicalization.
Panelists: Dr. Luwei Ying, Dr. Bethan Johnson, Dr. Aaron Panofsky
Moderated by Dr. Howard Padwa
Mitigating Hate in the Broad Media Landscape
This panel will explore how to design mitigation strategies most effectively for combating hate spread through various forms of media, taking into consideration the limitations of technologies as well as the challenges posed by big tech.
Panelists: Dr. Saadia Gabriel, Dr. Cesi Cruz, Dr. Tim Groeling
Moderated by Dr. Sara Wilf
Studying Hate in Fraught Times
In this panel, UCLA faculty, research scientists, and undergraduate students will join in conversation on the challenges and opportunities researchers, educators, and students are experiencing in the current political and campus climate. The panel will consider this climate and its impact on research on hate–as well as its contribution to identity-based hate experienced by students at UCLA and elsewhere.
Panelists: Dr. Christine Ong, Dr. Aliza Luft, Cecelia Fischer, Yarin Hagay-Nevel, Ryan Horio
Moderated by Dr. David Myers
Click HERE for full program with panelist bios.

Compassionate Conversation with Adam Phillips
2025-02-26 12:00 - 2025-02-27 21:30
On February 26th and 27th 2025, The UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, in partnership with the UCLA Department of English and the Hammer Museum, will be hosting internationally acclaimed psychoanalyst and author, Adam Phillips, for a three-event series, which will include a lecture and a seminar at UCLA, and a talk at the Hammer Museum (see below for event details) devoted to kindness and hate.
Phillips, who has been called “the best living essayist writing in English” and “Britain’s foremost contemporary psychoanalysis thinker” (The New Yorker), is one of the world’s most celebrated and wide-ranging intellectuals. He has authored many critically acclaimed works of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and commentary including On Kindness, Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Becoming Freud, and On Getting Better. Formerly a principal child psychotherapist, he is currently the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York.
February 26th at 4 pm: A Lecture, “On Resistance”
Description: In this lecture, Adam Phillips will explore the notion of resistance in psychoanalysis
Location: James West Alumni Center Collins Room; 325 Westwood Plaza, 90095
Register HERE

February 27th at noon: A Seminar, “Exploring Christopher Bollas’s ‘The Transformational Object.”
Description: Adam Phillips will lead a seminar with UCLA students, faculty, and staff that explores the paper, “The Transformational Object” by Christopher Bollas. Bollas’s work will be distributed to registrants prior to the seminar. Lunch will be served.
Location: Young Research Library Main Conference Room; 280 Charles E Young Dr., 90095
Register HERE

February 27th at 7:30 pm: A Conversation: “On Kindness and Hate.”
Description: UCLA English Professors David Russell and Mona Simpson will join Adam Phillips in a conversation on Kindness, Hate, Missing Out, Wanting to Change, Getting Better, and Giving Up. Note that this is a Hammer Museum event that is being hosted at the Landmark Westwood.
Location: Landmark Westwood, 1045 Broxton Ave. 90024. View map here.
For more information and ticketing, click HERE
Seats will be assigned on a first come, first served basis.

The State of Hate - Part Three: Hate and the Internet/Social Media
2025-02-13 17:30 - 18:30 | Online (Zoom)
The State of Hate is a three-part series, jointly sponsored by UCLA’s Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA’s State of Hate Initiative, and the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors.
Hate and the Internet/Social Media – Part 3 in the series, will examine how the landscape of hate online has changed (or not) since the 2024 elections. The speakers will also discuss how young people are experiencing hate online, and what kinds of interventions should educators, content creators, and policymakers institute to fight online hate?
Speakers:
David Myers, PhD, Distinguished Professor, founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and the founding director of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate
Christine Ong, PhD, Research Scientist at CRESST
Saadia Gabriel PhD, Assistant Professor in UCLA Computer Science and affiliated with the Bunche Center for African American Studies
Register HERE.

The State of Hate - Part Two: Hate and Politics
2025-01-23 17:30 - 18:30 | Online (Zoom)
The State of Hate is a multi-part online series co-sponsored by the Friends of Semel Institute and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. The series brings together UCLA experts to share new ways of understanding and mitigating hate. The first installment in the series, Hate and Politics, will look at how hate is playing out in our national and international politics. Panelists will discuss what the dangers and dynamics of hateful rhetoric are to our political culture and well-being. They will also discuss what the role of the media is in both spreading and righting hate in our political environment.
Speakers:
Cesi Cruz, PhD – Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science
David Myers, PhD – Distinguished Professor, founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and the founding director of the UCLA Initiative to Study
Hate Lynn Vavreck, PhD – Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA
Register HERE.

Sound and Hate
2025-01-17 10:00 - 14:30 | Schoenberg Music Building
This half-day symposium at UCLA will explore the intersection of sound and hate, focusing on how auditory experiences can propagate, resist, and reflect social animosities. Through discussions and lectures, the event will present unique perspectives on various forms of hate from the lens of sound studies, drawing on diverse fields to examine a wide range of social animosities. The symposium aims to deepen the understanding of how sound influences, challenges, and shapes the dynamics of hate in society.
Read more about the event here.

The Empirical Studies of Conflict's 2024 Annual Meeting
2024-10-18 - 2024-10-19 | UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, 1500 Public Affairs Building, 337 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
ISH, along with Princeton University and Emory University, is cosponsoring the Empirical Studies of Conflict’s 2024 Annual Meeting. The meeting will be held at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs on October 18-19, 2024.
The program features cutting-edge research on inter-group hostility and nationalism, climate and migration, policing and peace-building. After registration, you will receive further logistical information. Should you have any questions before then or need assistance, please contact Camilo Lopez Delgado (cjlopezdelgado@princeton.edu).
Please register via this Google form

The State of Hate - Part One: Hate and the Brain (Three-Part Virtual Series)
2024-06-10 17:00 - 18:00
The State of Hate is a multi-part online series co-sponsored by the Friends of Semel Institute and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. The series brings together UCLA experts to share new ways of understanding and mitigating hate.
The first installment in the series, “The Brain and Hate” will examine what we know about how hate takes rise in the human brain. Professors Adriana Galván and Mario Mendez will join in the conversation to explore the opportunities and challenges of studying the neuroscience of hate. They will also discuss some of the cognitive processes that advance hateful behavior and how we can counter them.
Click HERE to register for the event.

Impact Symposium
2024-06-03 14:00 - 18:00
UCLA Initiative to Study Hate Invites you to our Impact Symposium.
This Symposium will highlight the work of the Initiative to Study Hate (ISH), a community of multi-disciplinary researchers working to understand and mitigate hate.
Date: June 3, 2024
Time: 2PM – 5PM – Reception to follow at 5PM – 6PM
Click here to RSVP for the event.
Click here to view the flyer.

The Uses of Hatred: A Symposium
2024-03-30 09:45 - 17:00 | Royce Hall – Room 306
This event will propose that a range of disciplines across the humanities have shared and suggestive investments in questions of hatred. Speakers will explore hatred as a human emotion not as it is simply decried or enabled in particular works of art, but as it is in different ways put to use. In particular, they will explore the uses of hatred in criticism: of art, literature and culture. The day will bring together scholars and critics in literature and the visual arts, who are also invested in a range of disciplines including psychoanalysis, queer theory, philosophy and anthropology, in order to discuss hatred in, and the hatred of, a range of creative media.
Each presentation will be followed by discussion with the audience, and the day will end with a final roundtable reflection on hatred and the humanities.
Register here to attend the symposium.
For any questions, please direct these to David Russell (djrussell@ucla.edu) or Sarah Kareem (kareem@humnet.ucla.edu).
Schedule
9:45 am – Welcome and Introduction
10:00 am – 10:50 am – Sarah Kareem (English, UCLA): “The Art Lover and the Vandal”
11:00 am – 11:50 am – Wendy Lee (English, NYU): “Austen’s Hatred”
11:50 am – 12:10 pm – Break
12:10 pm – 1:00 pm – David Russell (English, UCLA): “The Hatred of Criticism”
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 2:50 pm – Jeremy Melius (Art History, University of York): “Deprivation and Delinquency in Ruskin’s History of Art”
3:00 pm – 3:50 pm – Jaś Elsner (Art History, Oxford University): “Image as Aggression in Courbet: about the polemical nature of L’Origine du Monde”
3:50 pm – 4:10 pm – Break
4:10 pm – 5:00 pm – Roundtable Discussion

Hate Crimes, Terrorism, and the Framing of White Supremacist Violence
2023-12-14 12:00 - 13:00 | Bunche Hall 6275
This talk with Professor Shirin Sinnar is based on an article in California Law Review that unpacks the historical roots and contemporary implications of the hate crimes and terrorism frames. First, it explains how the “hate crimes” and “terrorism” frames took hold in our law and culture, such that they now provide alternative frames for interpreting and responding to White supremacist violence. Sinnar then argues that neither the hate crimes nor terrorism frame adequately conceptualizes the problem or solutions. In particular, the move to reframe White supremacist violence as terrorism comes with grave risks: it shifts institutional power towards a national security apparatus and experts detached from affected communities; it entrenches preemptive law enforcement practices that investigate and imprison people on suspicion of future threats; and it risks the greater targeting of subordinated communities and groups appearing to challenge the dominant racial and socioeconomic order. The response to White supremacist violence should begin with a critical reexamination of both frames.
RSVP here.

“What is Hate?” Part 2
2022-06-13
This two-part series of symposia offered terminological, conceptual and speculative reflections on the question of “What is Hate?” from UCLA faculty members.
Part 2 is going to feature remarks from Robin Kelley, Aaron Panofsky, and Karen Umemoto on “Hate and Race,” and from Norma Mendoza-Denton on “Hate and Language.”
Watch recording here.

“What is Hate?” Part 1
2022-05-17
This two-part series of symposia offered terminological, conceptual and speculative reflections on the question of “What is Hate?” from UCLA faculty members.
Part 1 is going to feature remarks from Anna Spain Bradley and Tendayi Achiume on “Hate and the Law,” Adriana Galván on “Hate and the Brain,” and Safiya Noble on “Hate and the Internet.”
Watch recording here.
