The Democracy + Media Lab is a multidisciplinary faculty initiative at the Latinx Research Center of the University of California, Berkeley. As a “lab,” our work as scholars and community partners focuses on the conditions and practices of democracy towards transformative justice in the American hemisphere.

Such research begins with the recognition that exclusion, violent extraction, and dehumanization have long time been tied to the nominal cause of democracy in the United States and other parts of the world. Citizenship, elections, and political participation continue to be dependent on unequal and violent systems of exclusion.

Thus, to work towards a transformation of these systems and a genuine practice of democracy, as scholars we situate our work alongside public demands to organize for treaty rights and land back, racial justice and reparations, as well as our prerogative and rights to uphold the interests of our communities in building political-cultural movements that further decolonize our neighborhoods and institutions of learning.