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

Sound and Hate
2025-01-17 10:00 - 14:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Compassion in Practice: Providing Water and Shelter in Gaza
2025-11-17 18:00 - 20:00
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.

Symposium on Sound and Hate
2026-04-10 13:00 - 17:00 | Schoenberg Music Building, Lani Hall
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/symposium-on-sound-and-hate-tickets-1984826445328
UCLA School of Music: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/event/symposium-on-sound-and-hate-studies/
Join us Friday, April 10th for a half-day symposium on sound and hate, presented in collaboration with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. This symposium explores what hate sounds like—how we hear it in everyday life. From TikTok audio trends and pop music to online subcultures and global conflict, sound plays a powerful role in shaping how hostility is expressed, shared, and felt. This symposium brings together scholars working across music, media, and cultural studies to explore how sound doesn’t just reflect hate—it helps produce, circulate, and sometimes challenge it.
The program opens with a series of short presentations that spotlight how sound operates in very different contexts:

Amalia Mora (UCLA Initiative to Study Hate/Bedari Kindness Institute): examines the soundtracks of online incel communities, asking how music and shared listening cultures reinforce narratives of male victimhood and normalize misogyny. Her work connects these digital soundscapes to longer histories of gendered violence and cultural ideas about masculinity.
Allie Kelly (UCLA Graduate Student, Musicology): explores how music circulates across digital platforms, focusing on how familiar songs—often detached from their original meaning—are reused in online spaces to signal identity, build community, or subtly reinforce harmful stereotypes. Her work highlights how even seemingly benign or popular audio can take on new meanings in platform culture.
Kathryn Agnes Huether (UCLA Initiative to Study Hate and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate-Antisemitism Studies): turns to social media platforms, where short audio clips—songs, chants, and viral sounds (think trending TikTok audio or repurposed pop tracks)—circulate rapidly and often lose their original context. Her work examines how these sounds carry affect, signal belonging, and sometimes normalize antisemitism and other forms of hate. She also asks whether practices like “radical listening” are even possible in today’s algorithm-driven media environments.
Shayna M. Silverstein (Northwestern University-Associate Professor, Performance Studies): challenges familiar assumptions about hate by looking beyond Euro-American frameworks. Drawing on her work in the Middle East, she asks what hate sounds like in contexts where race is not the primary organizing category, and how everyday sonic practices—voice, music, and public sound—can generate and sustain forms of social division such as sectarianism.

The symposium continues with an open conversation among participants, followed by a keynote address from Shayna Silverstein, and concludes with a reception.
Together, the event invites audiences to think differently about listening—not as passive, but as something deeply tied to how hate is produced, experienced, and potentially challenged.
RSVP here.

Undergraduate Research Roundtable Exploring Human Connection, Conflict, and Community
2026-05-20 15:30 - 17:00 | Luskin School of Public Affairs Rm. 4317
On May 20th, the Bedari Kindness Institute and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate will be hosting an Undergraduate Research Week roundtable featuring undergraduates who are conducting or interested in research that redefines human connection, conflict, and community.
Food will be provided.
RSVP HERE.

UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute and Initiative to Study Hate Impact Symposium
2026-06-03 13:00 - 17:00
Join the BKI community for an afternoon devoted to sharing research findings drawn from the study of hate and kindness—and to thinking of ways in which we can make a real difference in the world. The BKI Impact Symposium will explore some of the most critical issues in the world today, including navigating AI technologies, reducing political and social polarization, and building practices of compassion and community. The symposium will feature the following three panels, along with research project posters:
Toward a Better AI? Can It Combat Hate with Kindness?
The danger AI poses to society is becoming clearer by the day. AI technologies have already been explicitly implicated in the spread of mis- and dis-information, risk developing lethal means of destruction, and perpetuate sexual violence against women and girls. This panel will consider the very real social, economic, and political threat that artificial intelligence poses and how we can insist on accountability from big tech,while also considering how AI might be used as a tool to combat hate and encourage compassion.
Replacing Polarization and Hate with Compassion
Polarization is a ubiquitous and toxic presence in politics, media, and popular culture in the U.S. It discourages meaningful interactions and connections across social, political, and ideological divides. This panel will consider compassion-guided and prosocial-driven initiatives to reduce polarization and increase people’s sense of shared reality and community across differences.
Fortifying Practices of Compassion and Community
A growing trend in research suggests that practices informed by altruism, prosocial behavior, and acts of compassion and kindness have a significantly positive impact on our mental and physical well being. This panel will discuss the effects of such acts and initiatives on both the individual and community level, ultimately exploring how they might benefit our collective humanity.
***At the culmination of 4 years of research, the Initiative to Study Hate, a community of almost 130 multi-disciplinary researchers, has supported 107 projects to understand and mitigate hate. During the 2025-2026 academic year, BKI has welcomed over 40 researchers on 18 projects seeking to create a more kind and compassionate world.
Date and Time: Wednesday, June 3rd from 1-4pm
A reception will follow from 4-5pm
RSVP HERE
Location details will be sent upon rsvp.
