UCLA Initiative to Study Hate

End-of-Year Impact Symposium
2025-05-27 13:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.

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.

Symposium on Sound and Hate
2026-04-10 10:00 - 16:00 | Schoenberg Music Building, Lani Hall
This half-day symposium at UCLA will examine the intersection of sound and hate, highlighting how auditory experiences can propagate, resist, and reflect social animosities. Bringing together diverse perspectives from sound studies and related fields, the event will deepen understanding of how sound influences, challenges, and shapes the dynamics of hate in society. The keynote address, “Sectarian Reckonings: The Politics of Voice and Song in Post-Authoritarian Syria,” will be delivered by Shayna M. Silverstein, Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Her talk explores public reckonings with sectarian violence in Syria from the 2010s conflict to the precarious present, offering guided listening to sonic practices—from chant and song to rock and livestream audio culture—that respond to sectarianized hate, violence, and animosity. Additional speakers include UCLA School of Music Associate Professor Jenny Johnson, UCLA Initiative to Study Hate (ISH) Research Manager Dr. Amalia Mora, and the symposium’s curator Dr. Kathryn Huether (ISH and Leve Center for Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow-Antisemitism Studies).
