Wednesday, April 28, 2021
10:00-11:30am PDT [1:00-2:30pm EDT]
john a. powell
john. a powell’s talk will reflect on othering and belonging in relation to forms of structural marginalization, including those linked to race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, and disability. He will lay out a framework for understanding how the expansion of the corporate sphere shrinks the public and private spaces, further marginalizing specific groups by pushing them out of the public sphere and into what powell calls the non-public/non-private sphere. He will discuss how people and communities get pushed out or are never included within what he calls “The Circle of Human Concern” a concept directly linked to our question of social responsibility.
john a. powell is Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. john has lived and worked in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa, and has also worked in India and Brazil. He was previously the Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, and prior to that, the founder and director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. john formerly served as the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He is a co-founder of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. john led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care, and employment and is well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions. john has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.