Wars, conflict, persecution, and climate change are causing more people to flee their homes now than at any other time since records began. The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates there are more than 65.6 million forcibly displaced people, 22.5 million refugees and 10 million stateless
After the 2016 election, I drove twelve hours to learn more about America’s invisible political majority. In order to get there, I had to pass through hundreds of miles of forgotten stories, buried memories, unrecognized sacrifices, and rusted machinery, digging deep into the troughs
This article investigates one particular narrative of “othering and belonging,” one that brings together the historical and contemporary experience of particular communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have found it possible to work out various forms of coexistence. As we grapple with contemporary American
On March 19, 2018 The New York Times published an article entitled “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys.” Drawing on longitudinal data on millions of American children, the research cited revealed that even when Black boys and white boys grew up
Read the companion piece to An Evolutionary Roadmap for Belonging and Co-Liberation. Dear Shanthi In my thirteen years working in the field of racial equity, primarily in government, colleagues from the District Attorney’s Office, the library system, and the health department brought to our
Read the companion piece: An Evolutionary Roadmap for Belonging and Co-Liberation To the reader: I was invited to contribute a piece to the journal Othering & Belonging on an emergent arts-based synthesis that I have co-created with others that speaks to the intersection of
It was October 2014, and the new Palestine Museum I was working with sent me on an assignment. I was to photograph the Palestinian village of Battir, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site under the title, “Land of Olives and Vines—Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem,
A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. —James Baldwin Children are not born knowing the nature of power or the cruelty with which we often treat one another,
By Nina Miriam Artwork by Zarina What if We Othered Your Child and You? What if we surrounded you in a sea of blackness And in an attempt to get to know you, Peppered you with a barrage of questions and statements That only served
Introduction The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “othering.” In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference. Othering undergirds territorial
Stories shape and reflect what is valued in a society; frames create the natural laws that give stories their gravity. Frames shape how a story is told: what is emphasized and deemphasized, included and excluded. If the frame is individualism, then unions, community land
Much has happened in the months since we published the inaugural issue of Othering & Belonging. Donald Trump won an unexpected victory to succeed Barack Obama as US president just as a peace agreement ended Latin America’s longest conflict in Colombia. Brazilians and South Koreans
