The Democracy + Media Lab is a multidisciplinary faculty initiative that began in January 2017 at the University of California, Berkeley.

As a “lab,” our work as scholars and community partners focuses on the conditions and practices of democracy in the American hemisphere in relationship to media and performance studies.

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. The D+M Lab approaches questions such as who constitutes ‘the people’ of a democracy, systemic failures of representation, participatory access to airwaves, media, and information, and systems of knowledge production. From this perspective, we see that the framework of critique and ‘solutions’ are too often grafted into unequal, coercive, and immoral conduct in the name of ‘democracy’ without confronting the central problem of imperialism.

Thus, to work towards a transformation of these systems and a genuine political practice of democracy, as scholars we situate our work alongside widespread demands for basic anti-imperialist principles to be upheld including the return of stolen lands, racial justice and reparations for systemic harm and exploitation, respect for sovereignty and non-interference, climate justice, and an anti-hate stewardship of Earth and all relations. It is our moral prerogative to uphold the interests of our communities in building political-cultural movements that further decolonize our neighborhoods and institutions of learning.