Founded in the fall of 2022,  the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism and Belonging (C-LAB) seeks to help us understand systemic forms of inequality and to work towards solutions to achieve social justice. We have four primary goals:

  • Establish UCI’s reputation as a research justice university, which means
  • Prioritizing the investigation of race, Indigeneity, and migration in structuring social injustice and motivating activism
  • Innovating collaborative research methodologies that enable the participation of faculty, students, staff, and community members in co-creating knowledge
  • Maximizing public impact of research through multiple forms of dissemination that leads to social change.

C-LAB enacts a vision of a “research justice” university, in which social justice informs the research inquiries that are launched, guides the selection of appropriate methodology, and shapes the method of knowledge of dissemination.1 Traditional forms of scholarship tend to focus on the production of new knowledge, originated through academic production of knowledge, and value research monographs and peer-reviewed papers. While fostering scholarship that follows this path, C-LAB seeks to expand our conception of the academic enterprise by prioritizing questions that help us understand social inequality and efforts to achieve social justice, consider methodologies that foster collaboration between university and community partners, and find innovative ways to share the results of research that can lead to a social impact.  

C-LAB is based in the School of Humanities with funding support from the Office of Research and the Schools of Biological Sciences, Education, Law, Medicine, Physical Sciences, Public Health, Social Ecology, and Social Sciences.

 

1Andrew J. Jolivette, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change (Oakland, California: Police Press, 2015); “An Introduction to Research Justice,” Data Center Research for Justice, 2015; https://newkirkcenter.uci.edu/2021/03/11/welcome-to-the-community-based-research-initiative-for-research-justice/); Research Justice: a Strategic Framework to Achieve Self-determination for Marginalized Communities, http://www.datacenter.org/services-offered/research-justice/ (accessed September 16, 2021)