Othering & Belonging Conference: Berlin 2023

Set by DJ Sarah Farina

Emcee Monika Jiang will open the day and introduce performers Jumoke Adeyanju & Darius Mick.

Christiana Bukalo will make opening remarks and introduce john a. powell.

Introducing Othering & Belonging Berlin and inaugurating our first conference in Europe

Speakers: john a. powell (USA)

Speakers: john a. powell (USA) and Ece Temelkuran (Turkey)

Belonging in its truest sense means that people in any system or container have the right to not only be included within it, but to make demands on that system and even change the structure of that system itself. In an ideal form, democracy grants everyone the opportunity to change the nature of how our system functions—a critical component of belonging at the structural level.

And yet, democratic systems have so often generated the opposite of belonging– prioritizing majority interests over minority needs, reinforcing structural racism and economic inequality, and facilitating the election of “democratic” leaders opposed to the ideal of democracy itself. In the Global South, democracy has also been wielded as a colonial weapon, offered as a system made “for the people” but never truly “by the people.”
In this opening conversation, OBI Director john a. powell and Ece Temelkuran will grapple with the real failures of democracy—including the ways that its imperfections have contributed to deeply unjust power structures and toxic “us vs. them” binarism—but also the promise and necessity of democratic systems in sharing power and resources in pursuit of belonging. They will further grapple with the sometimes-competing demands of de-fragmentation and bridging—necessary for functioning diverse democracies—and the demands of social justice, which sometimes requires breaking with power structures and other groups to enact critical change. They will ultimately seek to envision what democracy would look like if it were rooted in radical belonging, which includes all people and the earth itself, and chart the collective path that would take us towards that vision—one built through bridging, solidarity across identity lines, and hope for what is possible when we come together.

Performers: Movement Seven

Speaker: Miriam Juan-Torres (Spain)

Over the last decade, far-right populists in Europe, North America, and around the world have transformed from fringe groups into influential power players, often by deftly exploiting fear and uncertainty within the democratic majority generated by fast-changing shifts in technology, migration, culture, and climate. Their parallel successes are not happening in a vacuum, but are being developed and resourced by political strategists in different regions, many of whom are working in unique contexts but utilizing familiar tactics: maximize fear and mistrust of perceived others to cultivate sympathy for simplistic anti-democratic alternatives. In this panel, Miriam Juan-Torres, head of research for OBI’s Democracy & Belonging Forum, will offer insights into the shared strategies and connections between anti-democratic actors in diverse parts of the world, and how we might come together to effectively counter their instrumentalization of othering.

Speakers: Stefánia Kapronczay (Hungary), Magda Pochec (Poland), Nim Ralph (UK), and Phillip Ayoub (moderator, Germany)

Today, far right parties in different countries are emulating each other and using similar tactics that instrumentalize othering. Yet their approaches to issues of gender are heterogenous. Some far right movements embrace gender equality and certain aspects of LGBTQ+ rights, as they serve the nativist project against an “Other” that is said to present a threat against hard won women’s and LGBTQ rights. Other far-right movements seek to return to traditional gender roles, target the LGBTQ+ community, and aim to disband protections against gender-based violence while rolling back abortion rights.

But similarities between far right movements also abound. Across the board, trans communities are vilified, having become the cornerstone of the so-called culture wars, and primarily, radical right movements focus on binary and traditional understandings of the role of men and women.

In this panel we will examine the Far Right’s gender politics across Europe and the US, as well as existing and potential efforts to counter the gender backlash, exploring questions such as: What language are far-right actors deploying around gender and sexual orientation? How are they adapting and developing their policies? When do they succeed and how do they fail? And what role can coalition-building play in avoiding backlash and advancing rights?

Emcee: Monika Jiang

Performance: Noah Slee with The Expressions Trio + Pianist

Set by DJ Sarah Farina

Emcee Monika Jiang will open the day and introduce performer Aka Kelzz

Speakers: Indy Johar (UK), Asma Mhalla (France), Jeff Kwasi Klein (Germany), and Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou (moderator, UK/France)

This moment is one of not a single major crisis, but of many. Indeed, some thinkers have come to call this time one of “polycrisis” (“a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”) or “permacrisis” (“an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events”). Whatever the term, it is clear that the manifold crises of this moment—climate crisis, forced migration, inequality, inadequately regulated technology, and othering of all kinds—are deeply interconnected and regenerating one another, ultimately offering fertile ground for anxiety and misinformation stoked by authoritarian populists globally.

And this fearmongering seems to be working: as one recent paper noted, citizens around the world are “voting away the democracies they claim to cherish,” perhaps on some level with the belief that democratic systems are unable to deliver solutions that authoritarians are offering so effortlessly. In this panel, Indy Johar, Asma Mhalla, Jeff Kwasi Klein, and Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou will explore the implications of the interrelated crises of our time on democracy and how civic infrastructure—already cracking under the weight of low trust and hostile populism—can be renewed not only to better respond to populism and polycrisis, but to protect the concerns of marginalized groups, who are so often either cast aside in times of crisis or vilified for them. Ultimately, this panel will explore how we might revitalize democracy at a time when it may seem increasingly unequipped to handle the complex and interrelated crises we face.

Speakers: Udi Raz (Germany), Yasmeen Daher (Germany), and Cecilie Surasky (moderator, USA)

As violence continues to take the lives of more and more civilians in Palestine and Israel, communities around the world are fragmenting over profound questions like whose lives are grievable and whose are not, and who can speak and who cannot. Once-strong alliances on the left are being tested as fear of hate crimes against Jews, Muslims and Palestinians is being borne out.

In Berlin, this breaking is particularly acute. Despite real fear and pain felt by all, and despite having one of the largest Palestinian communities outside of the Middle East, the city has limited only pro-Palestine speech, often under the claim that it is protecting against anti-Semitic activity. Ultimately, however, this asymmetric silencing has contributed to deeper fragmentation between groups who might otherwise be in conversation. Indeed, Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust and its own genocide of 6 million European Jews has led to strong support for present-day Israel and a censoring of criticism towards the state, even from Israelis themselves.

In this panel we’ll discuss how divisions are fueled and weaponized by leaders, governments, traditional media, and social platforms and how fragmentation ultimately most serves those seeking to dismantle democratic structures. Our goal is to model a space where we can honor each other’s pain, find ways of bridging despite the ways that groups are pitted against each other, and explore generative forms of allyship and co-liberation in moments of crisis.

Speakers: Nani Jansen Reventlow (the Netherlands), Samie Blasingame (Germany), Samia Dumbuya (UK), Winta Berhe (Germany)

In this inaugural panel discussion, our aim is twofold:

We will set out to introduce and legitimize climate justice as more equitable and just approach than current methodologies used to evaluate the cause and effect of climate change and shape climate policy in Europe.

We will set the stage for forthcoming topics in the series. By doing so, we will provide audiences with a robust foundation to ground their understanding of climate justice and related concepts. Moreover, the discussion will begin to establish a shared language and narrative which we intend to develop over the course of the series.

Addressing the challenge:

We acknowledge that climate justice remains a relatively new and unfamiliar concept in the mainstream public discourse around climate change. Therefore, this breakout session will serve as an open forum – a communal space (led by BIPOC voices that are involved in community connected work) for deep exploration and the exchange of ideas related to for example, the history of climate justice, why it’s relevant for everyone, and how communities are developing real solutions to respond to the crisis.

By the end of the session, we will have an emerging shared vision and narrative of true climate justice.

Presented by Systemic Justice:

Founded in late 2021, Systemic Justice is the first Black-led, majority BPOC organisation in Europe working on strategic litigation.

We work to radically transform how the law works for communities fighting for racial, social, and economic justice by building their power to leverage the courts in their campaigns for change and opening up their access to justice. We do this by 1) building the power of organisations and movements; 2) launching community-driven litigation; and 3) scaling impact by promoting equitable working models with the broader field of litigators.

Our central premise is that communities should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to using litigation as a tool in their campaigns for justice. They need to set the objectives, articulate the remedies, and frame the narrative, with litigators supporting the cause by doing the legal legwork that comes with it.

Speaker: Bayo Akomolafe (Nigeria/India)

Emcee: Monika Jiang

Performance: Harmonizing Choir, directed by Noah Slee

Sign up for OBI’s newsletter

Thank you!

Ashlin Malouf-Gashaw is the Deputy Director of Strategy and Program at the Othering and Belonging Institute. She is driven by the growth and development of people, teams, and systems. Whether in the role of mediator, community organizer, coach, executive director, or chief of staff, she has led by inviting people into liberatory practices of dialogue, bridging, authenticity, and power building. From her experience, when courageous conversation, storytelling, vulnerability, and self-reflection are paired with concrete and coordinated strategies, progress is made.

Since 2006, Ashlin has worked in a variety of capacities with the Faith in Action Network (previously the PICO National Network), equipping those closest to the pain with the tools and strategies to make structural change. She began as a Community Organizer in Colorado, then returned to her hometown of Sacramento where she served as the Executive Director of Sacramento ACT. Most recently, Ashlin was the Chief Formation Officer and then Chief of Staff with PICO California. During her tenure in organizing, she worked on countless campaigns including healthcare access, community benefits agreements, reinvestment of public funds, moving from punitive to restorative practices, immigration reform, and affordable housing, to name a few.
Ashlin received her BA in Political Science and Social Change and Development, and her MA in International Conflict Resolution. She lives in Sacramento with her husband Theodros and her 2 children Kayden and Davin.

Read more about her work here.

bell hooks was an American scholar and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender, and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities.

hooks grew up in a segregated community of the American South. At age 19 she began writing what would become her first full-length book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which was published in 1981. She studied English literature at Stanford University (B.A., 1973), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1976), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 1983).

hooks assumed her pseudonym, the name of her great-grandmother, to honor female legacies; she preferred to spell it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She taught English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California from the mid-1970s, African and Afro-American studies at Yale University during the ’80s, women’s studies at Oberlin College and English at the City College of New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004 she became a professor in residence at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The bell hooks Institute was founded at the college in 2014.

In the 1980s hooks established a support group for Black women called the Sisters of the Yam, which she later used as the title of a book, published in 1993, celebrating Black sisterhood. Her other writings included Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995), Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996), Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999), Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000), Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), and the companion books We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003) and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004). Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice was published in 2012. She also wrote a number of autobiographical works, such as Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) and Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997).Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian-American attorney and human rights activist. She received her Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Michigan, and her Juris Doctor from the American University Washington College of Law, where she focused her studies on international human rights and humanitarian law.

Over the past two decades Huwaida has been involved in a number of legal and grassroots initiatives for Palestinian rights. In 2001, she co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led non-violent resistance movement, which has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. From 2007-2008, Huwaida helped build the first accredited clinical legal education program in the Arab world, based at Al-Quds University. She was one of the initiators and organizers of the first delegation of lawyers to enter Gaza following Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), and co-authored the report on their findings, "Onslaught: Israel's Attack on Gaza and the Rule of Law."

Huwaida is the former Chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement, and from August to December 2008, led 5 successful sea voyages to the Gaza Strip to confront and challenge Israel's illegal blockade on the 2 million Palestinians living there. She was one of the primary organizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and was traveling with it when it was lethally attacked by Israeli forces on 31 May 2010. In 2011, she was one of the six Palestinian Freedom Riders, who, inspired by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Rides of the 1960s, attempted to ride segregated Israeli settler public transport, for which they were harassed then violently arrested.

Huwaida is currently based in Michigan where she practices civil rights law and continues to devote much of her time to activism on Palestine and other human rights and social justice issues. She is the co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Palestine Subcommittee, and sits on a number of organizational boards, including New Generation for Palestine, Eyewitness Palestine and the Advisory Board of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. In 2020 she served as a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

john a. powell (who spells his name in lowercase in the belief that we should be "part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify") is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.

john holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion and is a Professor of Law, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Previously, he was the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University where he also held the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. He has won several awards including the 2021 Housing Hero Award, 2021 John W. Gardner Leadership Award, and the Convergence Bridge-Building Leadership Award for 2022.

He regularly appears in major media offering expert insights on a host of issues. Recent appearances include NPR and WYNC's On The Media in an episode about free speech and the constitution, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in an episode about housing segregation, and CBS Evening News where john discussed the Institute's frameworks like Targeted Universalism. john gives frequent keynotes talks at a range of institutions such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Washington State University, the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, Nonprofit Quarterly, Project Democracy, the Gates Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, the InterFaith Leadership Council, the Permanente Medical Group, and many more.

john has written extensively on a number of issues including structural racism, racial justice, concentrated poverty, opportunity-based housing, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity, spirituality and social justice, and the needs of citizens in a democratic society. He is the author of several books, including his most recent work, Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

The founder and director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, john has also served as Director of Legal Services in Miami, Florida and was the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory. john led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care, and employment and is well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions.

john has lived and worked in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa, and has also worked in India and Brazil. He is one of the co-founders of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national and international organizations. He is also a member of the New Pluralists. john has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University.

Follow john on Twitter @profjohnapowell and read his blogs on HuffPo.

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

The author of ten books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays and children's books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Harjo delivered the 2021 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale, part of the virtual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival that year. That lecture was the basis for Catching the Light, published in 2022 by Yale University Press in the Why I Write series.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She served as Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project.
She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Find her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook or at her website.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

They are the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009), Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and a co-edited volume, Vulnerability in Resistance, with Duke University Press (2015), The Force of Nonviolence (2020), and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages.

They served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. They received a Mellon Foundation grant to found and developed the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2016-2020) where they serve now as Co-Chair of the Board and editorial member of Critical Times. Earlier, they served as Department Chair of the Department of Rhetoric in 1998-2003 and 2006-7, and the Acting Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, 2002-3. They also served as the Chair of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Center in Irvine. They were elected member of the Executive Council of the Modern Languages Association and chaired its committee on Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibilities before serving as President of the organization in 2020. They are also affiliated faculty with the Psychosocial MA Program at Birkbeck College University of London and teaches as the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Sass Fee, Switzerland. They have taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the New School University in 2020-2022. They will be the intellectual in residence at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2024.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13) and received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and was named the Albertus Magnus Professorship from the City of Cologne, Germany in 2016. They are the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. They have given the Wellek Lectures at Irvine, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Watts Lecture at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Gauss Lectures at Princeton, the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, the Tanner Lectures at Yale University, and the annual Freud Lecture at the Freud Museum in Vienna. They have received 14 honorary degrees: Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University, University of St. Andrews, Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Liège Université, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad de Chile, University of Belgrade, Universidad Veracruzana, and the Autonomous University of Mexico and appointed an Honorary fellow at Birkbeck University of London. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as Commandant. They served as well on the Advisory Committee of the Institute fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. In 2015, they were made an “honorary geographer” by the American Association of Geographers and was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. They were also elected as member of the American Philosophical Society and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2022, they received the Catalonia International Prize from the canton of Catalunya and the gold medal from the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.

Keith Hennesy was born in a mining town in Northern Ontario, Canada, lives in San Francisco, and tours internationally. He is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, a laboratory for live performance that plays with genre and expectation. Rooted in dance, Hennessy’s work embodies a unique hybrid of performance art, music, visual and conceptual art, circus, and ritual.

Hennessy was a member of Sara Shelton Mann’s legendary Contraband (85-94), as well as the collaborative performance companies CORE (95-98) and the France-based Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including Composing While Dancing (Melinda Buckwalter, U of Wisconsin: 2010), How To Make Dances in an Epidemic (David Gere, Univ of Wisconsin: 2004), Gay Ideas (Richard Mohr, Beacon: 1992), and Dancers in Exile (RAPT Productions, 2000). Hennessy is a co-founder of 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE a thriving performance and culture space in San Francisco. He earned an MFA (Choreography) and PhD (Performance Studies) from UC Davis.

Hennessy's awards include the Sui Generis Award (2017), Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship (2012), a Bilinski Fellowship (2011), a NY Bessie (2009) for Crotch, Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (1998, 2000, 2009) for performance, dance activism, and visual design, a Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005). Keith has enjoyed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, MANCC, and Djerassi. Keith’s 2016-17 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, J Jha, Annie Danger, Gerald Cassel, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. Keith's recent teaching in universities, independent studios, and festivals includes VAC Foundation (Moscow), Ponderosa (Germany), FRESH (SF), HZT (Berlin), Movement Research (NYC), Impulstanz (Vienna), Portland State University, Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), St. Mary's, and Warsaw Flow International CI Festival. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), SF MOMA's Open Space, Itch, Front, and In Dance.

Mónica Guzmán is Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, a nonprofit working to depolarize America, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, an organization working to build a more curious world; and author of I Never Thought Of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

Moni is the inaugural McGurn Fellow at the University of Florida, working with researchers at the UF College of Journalism and Communications and beyond to better understand ways to employ techniques described in her book to boost understanding. She was a 2019 fellow at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, where she studied social and political division, and a 2016 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she studied how journalists can better meet the needs of a participatory public.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, the Glenn Beck Podcast, Reader's Digest, BookTV, and EconTalk, and she is an advisor for Starts With Us and the Generations Over Dinner project.

Before committing to the project of helping people understand each other across the political divide, Mónica cofounded the award-winning Seattle newsletter The Evergrey and led a national network of groundbreaking local newsletters as VP of Local for WhereBy.Us.

She was named one of the 50 most influential women in Seattle, served twice as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes, and plays a barbarian named Shadrack in her besties' Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Visit her website to learn more about her work.

Sheryll Cashin writes about race relations and inequality in America. Her new book White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality (September 2021) shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition. Her book Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy explores the history and future of interracial intimacy, how white supremacy was constructed and how “culturally dexterous” allies may yet kill it. Her book Place Not Race was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction in 2015. Her book The Failures of Integration was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin is also a three-time nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for non-fiction (2005, 2009, and 2018). She has written commentaries for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Root, and other media and is currently a contributing editor for Politico Magazine.

Cashin is Professor of Law at Georgetown University where she teaches Constitutional Law, and Race and American Law among other subjects. She is an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Cashin was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists. She currently resides in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons.

Learn more about her work at her website.

Winona LaDuke—an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) member of the White Earth Nation—is an environmentalist, economist, author, and prominent Native American activist working to restore and preserve indigenous cultures and lands. Winona LaDuke is a rural development economist and author working on issues of Indigenous Economics, Food, and Energy Policy. She co-founded Honor the Earth, a platform to raise awareness and support for indigenous environmental issues.

She graduated from Harvard University in 1982 with a B.A. in economics (rural economic development) and from Antioch University with an M.A. in community economic development. While at Harvard, she came to understand that the problems besetting native nations were the result of centuries of governmental exploitation. At age 18 she became the youngest person to speak to the United Nations about Native American issues.

In 1989 LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, focusing on the recovery, preservation, and restoration of land on the White Earth Reservation. This includes branding traditional foods through the Native Harvest label.

In 1993 LaDuke gave the Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture entitled “Voices from White Earth.” That same year she co-founded and is executive director of Honor the Earth, whose goal is to support Native environmental issues and to ensure the survival of sustainable Native communities. As executive director she travels nationally and internationally to work with Indigenous communities on climate justice, renewable energy, sustainable development, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and human rights.

Among the books she has authored are All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, 2016); The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings (2002); Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); The Militarization of Indian Country (2013).

LaDuke’s many honors include nomination in 1994 by Time magazine as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40; the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women’s Leadership in 1997, and the Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998. In 1998 Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007, and in 2017 she received the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy, and Tolerance.

Winona LaDuke was an active leader as a Water Protector with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2017 at Standing Rock, where the Sioux Nation and hundreds of their supporters fought to preserve the Nation’s drinking water and sacred lands from the damage the pipeline would cause. Over the years her activism has not deviated from seeking justice and restoration for Indigenous peoples.

Biography from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

Yuria Celidwen is a senior fellow at the Othering and Belonging Institute, and a native of Indigenous Nahua and Maya descent, born into a family of mystics, healers, poets, and explorers from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico.

She teaches Indigenous epistemologies and spirituality and her work pioneered the Indigenous contemplative experience within contemplative studies. In addition, she leads workshops on prosocial practices (such as mindfulness, compassion, kindness, gratitude, etc.) from an Indigenous perspective. She emphasizes cultivating a sense of reverence and ecological belonging, raising awareness of social and environmental justice and community-engaged practices, revitalizing Indigenous languages, traditional medicine, clean energy, and conservation.

She is affiliated with Berkeley's Department of Psychology where she is conducting research into how Indigenous Peoples psychologies are expressed through self-transcendent practices of contemplation, and developing her talents for laboratory science, including experimental design, physiological measurement, and the concepts and tools of social and cultural psychology.

Since November 2021, she has co-chaired the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and is part of the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Unit. She co-chaired the Indigenous Religions Unit and was the Women's Caucus Liaison to the Board of the Western Region of the AAR (2018-2021), where she previously co-chaired the Psychology, Religion, and Culture unit (2016-2019).

As an Indigenous woman and as a scholar, she has taken the quest to bring the voices of Indigenous peoples of the world as equal holders of sophisticated systems of contemplative insight. She is committed to the reclamation, revitalization, and transmission of Indigenous wisdom, and the advancement of Indigenous rights and the rights of the Earth for social and environmental justice.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press).

I study Black people's lived experience of racial capitalism and underdevelopment and advances radical and productive reparative frameworks. Through analyses of injury, violence, repair, and community, my work has been centrally concerned with the question of reparations as a means of understanding the historical constitution but also the future of Blackness as a lived and political project. I am currently working on my third book project that examines Black relations beyond injury.

From 2021 to 2023, I was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to the State's Reparations Task Force, the first state-level reparations commission in the country. I was responsible for framing the community of eligibility and overseeing the development of compensation recommendations.

I started the Berkeley Black Geographies Project in 2016 after joining the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. The project has advanced a contemporary understanding of Geography and other disciplinary analyses of spatial relations through the centering of Blackness across the areas of programming, pedagogy, and publishing. Through proactive recruitment of graduate students and faculty, the project has grown to represent the central intellectual and institutional heart of the department, which I now lead as chair. Geography at UC Berkeley has become an institutional leader in the disciplines of Black Geographies and Black ecologies.

Bertrall Ross is the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Virginia. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, constitutional theory, election law, administrative law and statutory interpretation.

Ross’ research is driven by a concern about democratic responsiveness and accountability, as well as the inclusion of marginalized communities in administrative and political processes. His past scholarship has been published in several books and journals, including the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review and the University of Chicago Law Review. Two of his articles were selected by the Yale/Harvard/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.

Prior to joining the Virginia faculty, Ross taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he received the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also been awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the Princeton University Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, the Columbia Law School Kellis Parker Academic Fellowship and the Marshall Scholarship. Ross is currently serving on the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.

Ross earned his undergraduate degree in international affairs and history from the University of Colorado, Boulder; his graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs; and his law degree from Yale Law School. After law school, he clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

Demetria McCain serves as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). At FHEO, McCain assists HUD’s efforts to eliminate housing discrimination, promote economic opportunity, and achieve diverse, inclusive communities.

McCain joins HUD following fifteen years of service, with five as president, at the Inclusive Communities Project (ICP), a Dallas, TX-based affordable fair housing nonprofit. Prior to becoming president, she oversaw operations, communications and ICP’s Mobility Assistance Program, a housing mobility program that helps housing choice voucher holders exercise their fair housing rights. Conceived by Demetria, ICP’s “Voices for Opportunity” initiative has provided advocacy training to low-income renters and neighborhood groups of color.

Before joining ICP, McCain worked on USDA Section 515 rural multifamily housing matters at the National Housing Law. She was also a staff attorney for the Neighborhood Legal Services Program of Washington, D.C., assigned to the southeast office, where her portfolio primarily included landlord-tenant matters for low-income renters in private and public housing. She has taught, as an adjunct instructor, a Fair Housing and Homelessness course to undergraduate Coppin State University students.
McCain brings dual vantage points to FHEO after having spent years assisting both housing choice voucher holders who sought low-poverty well-resourced housing options and neighborhood groups in underserved communities of color who sought more equitable distribution of resources and services. She is a graduate of Howard University School of Law, New York University and Brooklyn College and a member of the Dallas Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he supervises many of the Institute’s research projects and ongoing initiatives. Most notably, Stephen spearheaded the “Roots of Structural Racism Project,” a multi-faceted study revealing the persistence of racial residential segregation and its harmful consequences, the "Racial Disparities Dashboard," an analysis of racial disparities in American society, and the “Structural Racism Remedies Project,” an exhaustive repository and analysis of policy recommendations aimed at addressing racial inequality. Stephen is also the lead author of the Inclusiveness Index, an annual ranking of global and US state inclusivity.
Stephen’s primary areas of expertise are structural racism, civil rights, fair housing, spatial inequality, affirmative action and educational equity, but his research focuses on the mechanisms of inter-group inequality and the optimal design of effective equity policy interventions permitted under prevailing interpretations of law, including the equal protection clause of the federal constitution and California’s anti-affirmative action ballot initiative, Proposition 209.

Stephen is the author of many scholarly publications, book chapters, journal and law review articles and is a contributor to the Berkeley Blog. He has been interviewed and his work has been covered by CNN, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Five Thirty Eight, The Root, Axios, Bloomberg News, the New York Post, and the East Bay Times, among other print media, and many local radio and television stations across the country (see media mentions below).

Stephen’s most important scholarly publications are: "The Problem of Othering: Toward Inclusiveness and Belonging," a heavily cited journal article defining "othering" and the mechanisms of othering, co-authored with john a. powell for the Othering & Belonging Journal; "What Constitutes a 'Racial Classification'?: Equal Protection Doctrine Scrutinized," a law review article investigating the parameters of federal jurisprudence restricting the use of race in public policymaking, for the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review; and “The Road Not Taken: Housing and Criminal Justice 50 Years after the Kerner Commission Report,” a retrospective report analyzing the failure to heed the warnings and adopt the policy recommendations advanced by the Kerner Commission in the realms of housing and policing, co-authored with Richard Rothstein.

Other notable scholarship includes: “Race and Politics: The Problem of Entanglement in Gerrymandering Cases,” a law review article explaining why the exceptionally divergent constitutional standards governing judicial review of partisan gerrymandering versus racial gerrymandering claims are untenable in practice for the Southern California Law Review; “On Belonging: An Introduction to Othering & Belonging in Europe”, an essay presenting our most recent and fulsome definition of “belonging” and the elements of belonging as contrasted with “diversity, equity or inclusion,” co-authored with john a. powell; and his series “Racial Segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area,” a 5-part examination of the extent, effects and remedies to racial residential segregation in the Bay Area, as well as the heavily covered follow-up reports examining the extent and consequences of exclusionary, single-family-only zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area and the greater Los Angeles region. Stephen also authored a seminal paper entitled "Systems Thinking and Race," which explored how complex systems theory helps make sense of the production of racial inequality.

Stephen’s research tends to have a policy focus or policy implications. His most notable publications in that regard are: “Targeted Universalism: Policy and Practice,” a landmark primer contrasting targeted versus universalistic policy frameworks and defining the elements of the targeted universalism policy development process, co-authored with john a. powell and Wendy Ake; “We Too Belong: A Resource Guide of Inclusive Practices in Immigration & Incarceration Law and Policy,” a systematic review of best or promising practices and policies that promote inclusion for immigrants and currently and formerly incarcerated people, including the possibilities for extending voting rights to both groups; and “Responding to Rising Inequality: Policy Interventions to Ensure Opportunity for All,” a policy brief examining trends in economic inequality and advancing six promising policy interventions to disrupt that trend, co-authored with Justin Steil.

Relatedly, Stephen co-chaired “Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50 conference,” a conference held in the spring of 2018 that brought together the nation’s leading experts on race and housing, the criminal justice system, employment, transportation and health care in order to envision a contemporary racial justice agenda. The proceedings are archived on our Kerner@50 conference page.

Stephen is also an expert on housing law and policy, especially fair housing, disparate impact liability, the use of opportunity mapping methodologies to guide affordable housing siting and development, as reflected in the following additional publications: "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: A Reckoning with Government-Sponsored Segregation in the 21st Century" for the National Civic Review, "Opportunity Communities: Overcoming the Debate over Mobility Versus place-based Strategies" in The Fight for Fair Housing, “Putting Integration on the Agenda,” co-authored with Richard Rothstein for the American Bar Association’s Journal of Affordable Housing, and “Opportunity, Race, and Low Income Housing Tax Credit Projects: An Analysis of LIHTC Developments in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Stephen is also a member of the Task Force that updates the opportunity mapping methodology guiding the siting of Low Income Housing Tax Credits in California.

Stephen developed and co-authored the Institute's Amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. the Inclusive Communities Project, cited by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision recognizing disparate impact claims under the federal Fair Housing Act. He also co-authored the Institute’s Amicus brief in Fisher v. Texas asking the Court to uphold the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy in 2016.

Stephen presents regularly on the subjects of fair housing, affordable housing, racial segregation, zoning and land use policies, structural racism, poverty, the racial wealth gap and racial demographics, Proposition 209 and race-conscious policymaking, voting rights, ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging’ (DEIB), and targeted universalism. In 2022, for example, Stephen was a featured speaker at the UC Center Sacramento, where he unpacked the “housing crises,” and on a panel for the San Francisco Ed Fund on how to promote educational equity.

Stephen also regularly advises and provides technical assistance to policymakers, foundations, non-profits and other institutions on creative ways to promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the bounds of law and on equity metrics, such as measures of segregation, opportunity and belonging. For example, Stephen testified before the California Reparations Task Force on housing segregation and the racial wealth gap, before a joint hearing of two California General Assembly committees on the subject of racial disparities in homeownership and policies to reduce them, and before the Richmond, CA city council on the legality of noncitizen voting in municipal elections. Stephen was also an expert reviewer for the “Stronger Democracy Award,” and has served as an expert witness in multiple disparate impact housing lawsuits. Stephen is a licensed attorney.

Dr. Charles Chip Mc Neal is an award-winning, international educator, researcher, civic leader & activist – engaging in transdisciplinary practice across art-forms and genres, with a focus on arts, educational equity, social justice, community engagement, and cultural competency. He guides government agencies, non-profits, and schools on change-management, creative collaboration, program creation, equitable arts policies, diversity, and organizational cultural competency.

Mc Neal has over 30 years of senior leadership experience and flexibly negotiates the intersection between creativity, new technologies, and professional learning. He has trained in multiple culturally responsive practices including; restorative justice techniques, social-emotional learning, and Teaching Tolerance curriculum (from the Southern Poverty Law Center). He is an accredited Integrated Learning Specialist and a certified Oral Historian. A frequent and sought-after conference presenter, Mc Neal has lectured on arts, education, social justice, multiculturalism, and equity for The Edinburgh International Festival, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Mr. McNeal is the first-ever Director of Diversity, Equity and Community for the San Francisco Opera. A pioneering leader in the field of arts, McNeal is ostensibly the first director of diversity for an opera company in the United States. Mr. McNeal has operationalized a new department in a major arts organization for the second time. In his role, he leads internal and external initiatives aimed at developing diverse audiences, creating a safe, and diverse working environment and facilitating the further advancements of the organizational mission. He is tasked with creating a culture of belonging and acceptance, we’re diverse peoples on value and inspiration in the arc of Opera. He is guided by the goals and objectives outlined in the 2019 Strategic Plan – to place develop diversity, and equity inclusion at the core of arts and business practice. Mr. McNeal works organization-wide to advise, consult, and mentor on diversity and equity initiatives.

He also continues training teaching artists, conducts arts research, develops novel initiatives, and advises on artistic content, culturally responsive pedagogy, creative collaboration and more. He designs and curates accredited professional development training for credentialed educators who partner with the San Francisco Opera.

A celebrated dance educator, Mr. Mc Neal is the former Director of Education for San Francisco Ballet where he established the distinguished, San Francisco Ballet Center for Dance Education, engaging over 30,000 people annually through 1,500 culturally diverse events.

Mc Neal served as a Transformative Learning Coach, Leadership Advisor and Arts Integration Specialist for Alameda County Office of Education where he developed culturally responsive, inquiry-based, social justice curriculum. He is a founding member of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Education Master Plan Advisory Committee. McNeal is on the Leadership Council of Create California, a statewide-advocacy consortium, where he Chairs the Equity Committee – working to creating a sustainable, equitable, arts learning eco-system for the state of California.

Mr. Mc Neal holds two bachelor’s degrees – in psychology, and sociology from Excelsior University, and a master’s degree in education from Lesley University. Dr. Mc Neal holds a Ph.D. in Transformative Studies in Education from the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. Mc Neal’s research focuses on Critical Pedagogy, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive studies, and Artistic Inquiry and lies at the intersection of arts, cultural responsiveness, and educational equity as he devises solutions to the pressing issues of education reform and racial equity in the arts.

Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She is also on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality, race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Professor Franke is the founder and faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at Columbia Law School that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. In 2021, Professor Franke launched the ERA Project, a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.

Professor Franke is currently leading a team that is researching Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies.

Her first book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. Her second book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.

Ashley Gallegos works as the Belonging Coordinator at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. Her work is at the intersection of belonging research, application, and societal change. Ashley’s work centers the application of OBI’s unique conception of belonging which is rooted in both the feeling or sense of belonging and the necessary structural design for belonging. Ashley works closely with the director of the Institute to advance initiatives of belonging, currently focusing on Places of Belonging. This initiative works with high impact collaborators nationally and internationally to align and advance belonging in varying contexts.

Ashley creates and circulates belonging educational materials, amplifies belonging practices in motion, and uses her understanding of the Institutes frames of Belonging, Bridging and Targeted Universalism to support initiatives. Ashley engages in complex considerations of how belonging moves with and positively contributes to our world's biggest necessary shifts like that of global human rights, climate justice, cross-movement alignment and much more. Ashley is one of three co-facilitators at Belonging a Weekly Practice, a free, low barrier virtual belonging space open to all. Registration information for the sessions is available here

Before working with OBI, Ashley worked within public health and healthcare to advance health equity and racial equity in application. She directed state wide equity coalitions and believes in the power of network models to co-create momentum beyond any one entity's capacity.
While born in Southern California, Ashley was raised in Belen, NM, grew as an adult in Denver, CO, and found her way to the place where her spirit feels aligned in Oakland, CA. In her free time, Ashley enjoys spending time with loved ones, building community, experiencing and contributing to the arts, reading, being near water and maintaining a spiritual groundedness.

Ajmel Quereshi serves serves as Senior Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). In that role, Ajmel maintains a diverse caseload spearheading LDF’s work in the areas of education and economic justice, among others. In 2019, Ajmel led LDF’s efforts in Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education, a case on behalf of a class of school children in Baltimore who have been denied a constitutionally adequate education. In 2018, Ajmel served as lead counsel for LDF in multiple suits challenging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s suspension of housing regulations that would have made housing more accessible and affordable. In Open Communities Alliance v. Carson, LDF obtained a preliminary injunction, enjoining the Trump Administration from suspending the regulation. That same year, Ajmel led LDF’s work in Morningside v. Sabree, regarding discriminatory tax foreclosures in Wayne County, Michigan. The resulting settlement saved hundreds of homes in Detroit from foreclosure. In 2016, Ajmel launched LDF’s work on behalf of airline passengers who have been subject to racial and religious profiling. The project resulted in the issuance of new federal agency documents guiding airline staff as to the proper procedures for the questioning of individuals aboard planes. In 2015, Ajmel spearheaded the filing of a federal complaint regarding the cancellation of the Baltimore Red Line. The filing was covered by and Ajmel was quoted in The Guardian, among others. The Washington Post described the complaint as raising the “next civil rights issue of our time.”

While at LDF, Ajmel has also assisted in filing a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on account of the President’s derogatory statements regarding Haiti, settled a class action against the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority regarding its racially discriminatory background check policy, filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education regarding its failure to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, coordinated a national coalition of organizations working to reduce the over-criminalization of African-American children in schools, and composed a report – Locked Out of the Classroom – regarding the role of implicit bias in the over-disciplining of African-American children. In addition, he represents an individual sentenced to death in Arkansas as well as African-American parents in four school desegregation cases in Alabama.
Beyond his work at LDF, Ajmel serves as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, where he also has taught courses in Torts, Federal Civil Rights, and Appellate Litigation. Under his direction, the Clinic has filed amicus briefs in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in Fletcher v. Lamone, in which the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland upheld the nation’s first statewide law to prohibit prison-based gerrymandering. Last fall, the Clinic filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. His teaching has been recognized by Harvard Law School, which in 2016, awarded him a Wasserstein Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes exemplary lawyers who have distinguished themselves in public interest work and who can assist students who are considering similar career paths.
Before joining LDF, Ajmel worked as Staff Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, where he litigated complex class action claims involving the United States’ most inhumane correctional facilities. He served as one of the lead counsel in Dockery v. Epps, challenging conditions at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, and assisted in the representation of the Plaintiff class in Parsons v. Ryan, a statewide class action concerning the lack of health care and conditions of confinement in Arizona’s prisons.
Before joining NPP, Ajmel received a Skadden Fellowship and directed the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Maryland. In that capacity, he argued before Maryland’s highest court and regularly testified before the Maryland legislature. He currently serves on the ACLU of Maryland’s Board of Directors.

Ajmel frequently speaks with the media, having been interviewed by the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio, among many others. In addition, he regularly presents on racial justice issues to large audiences. In 2016, he debated the future U.S. Solicitor General regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Bank of America v. Miami, concerning whether cities had standing under the Fair Housing Act. Likewise, he has represented LDF at multiple Supreme Court reviews, debating various Supreme Court advocates from the public and private bar.
Ajmel’s editorial writings have appeared in the Baltimore Sun and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; he has published articles in several legal journals on topics ranging from international environmental law to the compatibility of Islam and democracy; and his cases have been featured by the New York Times and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, among others. He has spoken at law schools around the country, including Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Connecticut, the University of Maryland, American University, and George Mason University. In 2010, the Maryland Daily Record named him one of the top legal professionals in Maryland under 40 and the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s DC Chapter recognized him for his work in legislative advocacy.
Ajmel is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School. After graduating, Ajmel clerked for the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the Honorable James G. Carr of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Trevor Smith is a writer, researcher, and strategist focused on the topics of racial inequality, wealth inequality, reparations, and narrative change. He is currently the Director of Narrative Change at Liberation Ventures, a field builder fueling the movement for Black-led racial repair, where he is building a “Reparations Narrative Lab.” The Lab is a first-of-its-kind creative space designed to build narrative power behind reparations. He is also the creator, curator, and editor of a newsletter titled Reparations Daily (ish).

Trained as a journalist, he has extensive experience working within advocacy communications on an array of issues including housing, economic opportunity, criminal justice, voting rights, education inequality, and fiscal policy. He has previously held program and communication roles at various racial and social justice organizations, including the Surdna Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
His research and writing on reparations have been published in academic journals like The Review of the Black Political Economy and major media outlets like Business Insider, USA Today, and TIME Magazine.
A first-generation American with Sierra Leonean roots, he is the son of Gerald and Olivette Smith, and brother to Megan. He spent a large portion of his life in New Delhi, India, and Seoul, South Korea, and owes a large part of who he is today to the people and experiences that shaped him throughout his time there. He received his B.A. in Journalism from American University and his Masters in Public Administration from New York University. He is an avid reader, taker of walks, food buff, and joke-teller. He currently resides in what he considers the best neighborhood in New York City, the Lower East Side.

Learn more about his work at his website.

Donald K. Tamaki is a Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP. Prior to January 1, 2021, he was the firm’s Managing Partner.
For over 40 years, Mr. Tamaki has specialized in providing value-driven legal counsel to entrepreneurs, privately-held companies, and nonprofit corporations, with special focus on commercial leasing, personnel and employment law, corporate governance and other internal practices, licensing, acquisition, and other business transactions.

In addition, Mr. Tamaki has extensive experience negotiating talent agreements and endorsement deals, representing Olympic ice skating gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi, and various television news anchors, reporters and weather persons including Carolyn Johnson, Kristen Sze, Mike Nicco, Carolyn Tyler, Lyanne Melendez, David Louie, Matt Keller and Jonathan Bloom.

For 19 years straight (2004-2022), Mr. Tamaki has been selected to Northern California Super Lawyers, and has received the highest rating for competency and ethics, AV® Preeminent™, from the Martindale-Hubble attorney directory. He is the recipient of the ABA Spirit of Excellence Award (2020), the National Asian Pacific Bar Association Trailblazer Award (2003), and the State Bar of California Loren Miller Award (1987).
Representative clients include, the Straits Restaurant and Sino Restaurant chain, Konica Minolta, East Bay Pediatrics Group, the California HealthCare Foundation, the State Bar of California, the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco, the Kristi Yamaguchi Always Dream Foundation, the Asian Pacific Fund, the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, and Baker Places, Inc.
In keeping with the firm’s tradition of community service, Mr. Tamaki served on the pro bono team that reopened the landmark Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. the United States, overturning Fred Korematsu’s conviction for refusing as an American citizen to be incarcerated on account of his racial ancestry. Mr. Tamaki is past member of the board of Glide Foundation and is the board president of the San Francisco Japantown Foundation.

On May 7, 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Mr. Tamaki to serve on the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The Task Force is charged with studying the institution of slavery and its lingering negative effects on living African Americans, including descendants of persons enslaved in the United States and on society. By statute, the Task Force will issue a report to the Legislature by June 1, 2022, which will be available to the public.

Dr. Bayo hopes to inspire what he calls a “diffractive network of sharing” and a “politics of surprise” that sees the crises of our times with a posthumanist lens.

In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont as adjunct and associate professor, respectively. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (SAND).

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent.
The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker an award-winning public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’. He is writing his third book about the spirituality and emancipatory lessons of the transatlantic slave journeys, called “The Times are Urgent, Let us Slow Down”.

Find him at https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/

john a. powell (who spells his name in lowercase in the belief that we should be "part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify") is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.

john holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion and is a Professor of Law, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Previously, he was the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University where he also held the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. He has won several awards including the 2021 Housing Hero Award, 2021 John W. Gardner Leadership Award, and the Convergence Bridge-Building Leadership Award for 2022.

He regularly appears in major media offering expert insights on a host of issues. Recent appearances include NPR and WYNC's On The Media in an episode about free speech and the constitution, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in an episode about housing segregation, and CBS Evening News where john discussed the Institute's frameworks like Targeted Universalism. john gives frequent keynotes talks at a range of institutions such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Washington State University, the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, Nonprofit Quarterly, Project Democracy, the Gates Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, the InterFaith Leadership Council, the Permanente Medical Group, and many more.

john has written extensively on a number of issues including structural racism, racial justice, concentrated poverty, opportunity-based housing, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity, spirituality and social justice, and the needs of citizens in a democratic society. He is the author of several books, including his most recent work, Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

The founder and director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, john has also served as Director of Legal Services in Miami, Florida and was the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory.

john led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care, and employment and is well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions.

john has lived and worked in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa, and has also worked in India and Brazil. He is one of the co-founders of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national and international organizations. He is also a member of the New Pluralists. john has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University.

Stefánia Kapronczay currently serves as the Director of Strategy at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (since April 2023). Previously, she had been the Executive Director of the HCLU for ten years during transformative years for the organization. During these ten years, the organization has adapted to the closing democratic space in Hungary by broadening its previously predominantly legal tools and topics addressed. During these ten years, the HCLU has also seriously diversified its budget from being dependent on one institutional donor to having several institutional donors and 30% of its funding from Hungarian private donors.

Kapronczay graduated cum laude from the Faculty of Law at ELTE as a lawyer and completed a five-year master's program in sociology in 2010. Stefania started working at the HCLU in 2005. She was the Head of the Patients’ Rights Program from March 2008 to August 2012; as program director, Kapronczay led HCLU's effort to stop restrictions on reproductive rights and criminalization of homelessness and to foster the rights of persons with disabilities.

Between August 2012 and July 2013, she was a scholar at Stanford University, attending courses on human rights and public interest work and graduating as Master of the Science of Law. Stefania wrote her dissertation on the sexual and reproductive rights of people with disabilities. She was elected co-chair of the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations in May 2014.

Currently, she is a member of the board of the digital rights organization Access Now and the advisory board of Lakmusz, a Hungarian fact-checking website. She was a German Marshall Fund fellow in 2015. Stefania is an advisory board member to the School of Public Life, a community-based research and training center, and a former member of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies advisory board. She is a 2018 European Young Leaders (EYL40) program class member.

The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley is thrilled to invite the co-founders of A Song For You, Dhanesh Jayaselan & Noah Slee, to produce and curate the Arts & Culture mainstage program for the Othering & Belonging Berlin conference.

A Song For You:

A Song For You is a vocal ensemble project rooted in the Berlin neo-soul/RnB/HipHop scene, consisting of approximately 60 vocalists and a dynamic band. Founded by singer Noah Slee and creative director Dhanesh Jayaselan, the group aims to celebrate the abundant talent present in Berlin's live soulful music scene while providing a platform for BiPOC & underrepresented voices to shine in their own artistic medium.

In late 2022, the ensemble dedicated their efforts to crafting their debut album, which was recorded at Limusic Studios in Limoux, France, and Brewery Studios in Berlin, Germany. Guided by the expertise of producer S. Fidelity, the album features captivating collaborations with artists like Theo Croker, Annahstasia, Moses Yoofee, and others. Simultaneously, ASFY has created a captivating live performance experience that seamlessly combines music, dance, storytelling, and visual installations. ASFY made their grand debut on March 8, 2023, at Volksbühne in Berlin. The performance, entitled "Matriarch," was a 90-minute theatrical production that paid tribute to International Women's Day. Through the powerful mediums of song, dance, and visual imagery, the ensemble conveyed the story of the "Matriarch." The show featured a lineup of 34 singers, an eight-piece band encompassing strings and a rhythm section, as well as five talented dancers from “Movement Seven”. Notably, "Annahstasia" made a special guest appearance. The overwhelming response to ASFY's announcement led to the show selling out all 800 tickets within a mere two weeks, marking a momentous achievement for the group.

Following their successful debut, ASFY has also graced the festival frontlines at XJAZZ! 2023 and MELT festival's Mainstage, meanwhile performing at the historical “Expressions: In The Garden”, which saw them reimagine the music of Noah Slee, Kelvyn Colt, and LARY, alongside their house band and The Expressions Orchestra - to close out the summer, the group performed a conceptual show as a headline act at this years’ Pop-Kultur. A Song For You explored a new pathway with a recent collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, wherein they were invited to co-create and perform a choral arrangement and choreography of the Soundwalk Collective’s score on the recent film “All The Beauty & The Bloodshed” - at Berlin’s newest feature performance space - Reethaus. With their captivating performances, dedication to amplifying underrepresented voices, and their commitment to pushing the boundaries of live soulful music, A Song For You continues to leave a lasting impression on Berlin's music scene.

Dhanesh Jayaselan

Malaysian born, of Indian heritage, raised in Melbourne Australia - Jayaselan, 26, is a multidisciplinary artist who explores his concoction of identities through a variety of story-telling artistic mediums such as music, film, and events. Jayaselan focuses his attention and passion towards creative production of projects that explore the contemporary cultural landscapes, navigating an aesthetic that showcases organic beauty, intimate and poetic storytelling, and his own experience as a person of colour - using his position to platform the beauty of culture and ethnic experience.

Jayaselan also finds himself working alongside the flourishing Neo-Soul/NuJazz scene in Berlin as a musical and event curator, producer, and project commissioner. Standout projects include his role as the curator of the opening night of “Expressions: In The Garden'' as part of Kultursommerfestival 2023 program, XJAZZ 2022/2023, Cassette Head Sessions event curator, and artist manager of the Selassie and, previously, phenomenom, Moses Yoofee. Alongside these musical projects, Jayaselan has worked with artists such as, but not limited too, NOWNESS, Soundwalk Collective, Wayne Snow, Noah Slee, Jesper Munk, ZFEX, Abase, WizTheMC, Rodes Rollins, James Chatburn, JuJu Rogers and more; solidifying his role in the Berlin Jazz scene.

Noah Slee

Noah Slee is an artist for whom the term ‘community’ is a defining factor in his creativity. Be it in the relatively recent sense of belonging found as part of the free-thinking, queer community of Berlin, the community he is forever tied to through his Tongan roots, or the artist community he cultivates through running grass-roots events which strives to support home-grown Berlin talent.

Known for slick and evocative vocals, Slee was well and truly put on the map with the release of 2017 debut album Otherland (Wondercore Island / Majestic Casual), for which he was awarded two prestigious Pacific Music Awards in 2018. Fast forward a couple of years, a couple of international tours and tens of millions streams later and Slee continued pushing boundaries with his 2019 EP TWICE. The EP was crafted largely by Slee himself with help from his Berlin dynasty of trusted creatives but also showcasing talent from all corners of the globe.While the indie-club artist holds nostalgia for growing up in a Tongan household in West Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand, Slee is resolute about his choice to pack up his life and move to Germany in 2015. It’s a long way from home but ‘a big part of being in Berlin was coming into myself ’ he admits. Slee’s work has seen support from the likes of Zane Lowe, BBC1, Clash, Complex and Nylon. Relishing in the potential forces of the arts, Noah Slee is as determined as ever to create wavy ground swells with his heart opening breezy rnb dance jams.

Christiana Bukalo is a social change maker, speaker and co-founder of Statefree. Statefree is a non-profit organisation which follows the mission of empowering stateless people by creating community and belonging. End of 2021 the organisation launched the first global community platform for stateless people and their allies. Statefree.world allows stateless people to connect with each other, share stories and discuss questions. As a stateless person born from Germany, Christiana has had first-hand experience with the lack of transparency around statelessness and aims to fill this void by offering a space for stateless people to participate in the conversations that concern them. Furthermore Christiana has the honour of serving as a trustee and member of the Advisory Committee of the European Network on Statelessness and has been awarded the Echoing Green Fellowship (2022/2023).

Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School.

Indy was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20.

He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.
Indy Johar is an RIBA registered architect, serial social entrepreneur, and Good Growth Advisor to the Mayor of London. Indy was born in Acton, West London & is a lifelong Londoner.

He was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE in 2023.

Essays

Interviews

Reports

Policy Briefs

Lit Reviews

Books

Curricula

Tools

Lit Reviews

Policy Briefs

Explainer Videos

Panels & Presentations

Podcasts

The 2023 O&B Conference in Berlin ended, but you can revisit the conversations whenever you like. Check out the archive of this dynamic gathering of changemakers, scholars, and artists committed to building inclusive and democratic futures.

Agenda

October 26

Day One

8am | Music

9am | Introduction and Performance

9:40am | Opening Welcome

11am | Reimagining What's Possible: From authoritarianism and othering to democracy and belonging

12:30pm | Break

1:30pm | Performance

1:45pm | Same Playbook, Different Players: Charting shared tactics of anti-democratic movements from Türkiye to Texas

2:25pm | Countering the Gender Backlash: Building coalitions against the populist playbook

3:50pm | Performance and Closing Day One

4:30pm | Music

October 27

Day Two

8:15am | Music

9am | Introduction and Performance

9:30am | Is Democracy Equipped for This?: Renewing civic infrastructure in a time of populism and polycrisis

11:20am | Turning Towards Each Other, Not Against Each Other: Bridging in Times of Crisis

12:30pm | Break

2pm | From Climate Change to Climate Justice: A BIPOC Perspective in Europe

3:30pm | Reflections on Democracy & Belonging

4:15pm | Performance and Closing Day 2

Sign up for OBI’s newsletter

Bayo

Akomolafe

Bayo appears inBridging 2: The Risk & Possibility of Bridging Panel

Ella

Barrett

Ella appears in Bridging 4: Bridging through Deep Canvassing

Akaya

Windwood

Akaya appears inBridging 2: Risk and Possibility of Bridging

ALOK

Akaya appears inBridging 2: Risk and Possibility of Bridging

Ashlin

Malouf-Gashaw

Ashlin appears inBridging 2: A Conversation with Ashlin Malouf-GashawBridging 3: Two Studies of Bridging Across Power

bell

hooks

bell appears inBridging 2: Belonging with Connection, bell hooks and john a. powell in conversation

Huwaida

Arraf

Huwaida appears inBridging 3: Power Differences in Palestine and Israel

Ibram X.

Kendi

Ibram appears inStructural Racism: Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist

john a.

powell

john guides our Introduction to Othering & Belonging's Key Frameworks course.

Additionally, he appears in the courses named below.Bridging 1: The Risk & Possibility of Bridging, john a. powell and Judith Butler in conversationBridging 2: john a. powell on power and john a. powell on levels of bridgingStructural Racism: White Space, Black Hood

Josephine

Ironshield

Josephine appears inBridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Joy

Harjo

Joy appears inBridging 2: The Risk and Possibility of Bridging

Judith

Butler

Judith appears inBridging 1: The Risk and Possibility of Bridging, john a. powell and Judith Butler in conversation

Karma

Mayet

Karma appears inBridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Keith

Hennessy

Keith appears inBridging 1:Deep dive into bridging: The Space Between Us

Laura

Yohualtlahuiz Rios-Ramirez

Laura appears inBridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Michelle

Mush Lee

Michelle appears inBridging 3: The Risk and Courage to Bridge

Miriam

Magaña Lopez

Miriam appears in Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Mónica

Guzmán

Mónica appears inBridging 1: Bridging with CuriosityBridging 3: Bridging with Curiosity and HumanityBridging 4: Preparing to Bridge with Curiosity

Nana Fofie

Bayo appears in
Bridging 2: The Risk & Possibility of Bridging Panel

Ella appears in
Bridging 4: Bridging through Deep Canvassing

Akaya appears in
Bridging 2: Risk and Possibility of Bridging

Akaya appears in
Bridging 2: Risk and Possibility of Bridging

Ashlin appears in
Bridging 2: A Conversation with Ashlin Malouf-Gashaw

Bridging 3: Two Studies of Bridging Across Power

bell appears in
Bridging 2: Belonging with Connection, bell hooks and john a. powell in conversation

Huwaida appears in
Bridging 3: Power Differences in Palestine and Israel

Ibram appears in
Structural Racism: Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist

Additionally, he appears in the courses named below.

Bridging 1: The Risk & Possibility of Bridging, john a. powell and Judith Butler in conversation

Bridging 2: john a. powell on power and john a. powell on levels of bridging

Structural Racism: White Space, Black Hood

Josephine appears in
Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Joy appears in
Bridging 2: The Risk and Possibility of Bridging

Judith appears in
Bridging 1: The Risk and Possibility of Bridging, john a. powell and Judith Butler in conversation

Karma appears in
Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Keith appears in
Bridging 1:Deep dive into bridging: The Space Between Us

Laura appears in
Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Michelle appears in
Bridging 3: The Risk and Courage to Bridge

Miriam appears in
Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Mónica appears in
Bridging 1: Bridging with Curiosity
Bridging 3: Bridging with Curiosity and Humanity
Bridging 4: Preparing to Bridge with Curiosity

Nana Fofie appears in
Bridging 3: Black and Native People Bridging for Climate Justice

Sarah Anne appears in
Bridging 3: Power Differences in Palestine and Israel

Sheryll appears in
Structural Racism: Segregation: White Space, Black Hood

Winona appears in
Bridging 3: Bridging Across Indigenous and Somali Immigrant Communities

Yuria appears in
Bridging 4: Bridging through Indigenous Circle

Adam Ryan Chang is a scholar and advocate whose background centers nationality, gender, sexuality, and youth development.

Learn more about him in his essay “Second Generation: Asian, Gay, Positive and a Parent” and more about his work on his website.

Adam appears in
Structural Racism: How Invisible Preference Undermines America

Jovan appears in
Structural Racism: Reparations as the Future of Freedom

Margalynne appears in
Structural Racism: How Invisible Preference Undermines America

Stephanie appears in
Structural Racism: How Invisible Preference Undermines America

Michael appears in
Structural Racism: Reparations as the Future of Freedom

Betrall appears in
Structural Racism: Reparations as the Future of Freedom

Demetria appears in
Structural Racism: Roots of Structural Racism Project Intro