OBI’s objectives include: advancing multidisciplinary research, analysis, policy, and strategic narrative; building relationships among diverse groups and across disciplines; and employing communications and culture to illuminate research and impact policy.
Motivated by a will to help “build a world where everybody belongs”, the Institute works to define and explore belonging as something “essential to the human experience”. In an essay which serves as an introduction to a survey of Othering and Belonging in Europe, the Institute Director John A. Powell and Director of Research, Stephen Menendian, write that “defining belonging is no simple task” and one way of understanding it is by describing what it is not! Inclusion, for example, concerns the process whereby institutions and communities “open themselves to members of formerly excluded social groups”. It is a regulative ideal and a strategy for reducing social inequality. Yet while institutions may become accessible to formerly excluded groups, feelings of exclusion can persist. Belonging, the authors write, “is both objective and subjective, it is also perceptual” and contains a psychological component shaping the way social groups view the world. “If members of a social group feel as if they belong, then belonging exists.”
