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, media, and other essential parts of the political process currently in the US continue to be dependent on unequal, coercive, and violent systems that impede democracy.

Thus, to work towards a transformation of these systems and a genuine political practice, as scholars we situate our work alongside public demands for basic principles to be upheld in treaty rights and land back, racial justice and reparations, an anti-hate stewardship of Earth and all relations, as well as our prerogative to uphold the interests of our communities in building political-cultural movements that further decolonize our neighborhoods and institutions of learning.