Introduction
Work for justice and liberation requires the inclusion of arts and culture. The Haas Institute’s Notes on A Cultural Strategy report outlines a cultural strategy for belonging that centers the leadership, voices, storytelling, practices, and knowledge of people and communities who are marginalized in our society.
It offers resources, evidence, case studies, and a workshop module for cultural strategies that are rooted in the Haas Institute’s Othering & Belonging framework as well as in many successful models of activism and organizing.
Aimed at storytellers, artists, organizers, cultural strategists, funders, and other collaborators who are working to develop cultural strategies alone or as part of organizations and movements, this report offers notes and ideas on how cultural strategies can be developed for the greatest impact.
Like many cultural strategy practices, Notes on a Cultural Strategy for Belonging doesn’t fit well into one box–it is a bit theory, a bit case study, a bit recommendation, and a bit workshop. It outlines a what, how, and why of a cultural strategy for belonging, while also looking to next steps.
Foreword
Foreword from director John a. Powell
Philosopher and friend Iris Young famously identified five major “faces of oppression” that thwart our efforts in advancing justice and fairness. Of the five possible overarching themes of oppression she identified, including exploitation, powerlessness, and violence, one of the five was culture.
Culture, she argued, is one of the five primary, foundational forces that can be utilized against people. When a dominant group of people want to subordinate or control another group, one of the first things they do is try to take away peoples’ language, their religion, their food—in other words, their culture. And they work to enforce that of the dominant culture as the “norm.”
Culture is essential to our survival. It is not an overstatement for me to say that I would not be where I am today without having access to music. The music of Nina Simone and John Coltrane enabled me to get through my undergraduate experience as a black student in a predominantly white institution. Music was where I went to experience and find belonging in a place where I didn’t experience it through a variety of signals and structures.
Culture plays a vital role in understanding what it means to be human and our particularly human needs. Culture does not just talk to the conscious, it feeds the spirit. We are meaning-making, spiritual animals, and the spiritual part is transmitted through culture. Culture has taught us the power of seeing ourselves interconnected in a web of mutuality, as Dr. King put it.
Our interconnection is a key element for understanding culture and its power as culture is a deeply social experience. The ability to tell stories and create collectively is what scientists believe allowed our species, homo sapiens, to evolve.
Stories and myths helped give us a new self and create new relationships as we built cooperation across thousands of people, rather than small or singular tribes.
Culture and art speak to the conscious and the subconscious. It helps us unite the heart and the mind. The information that culture transmits moves extremely fast, largely in ways we are not aware of. Culture signals in a way that is direct and experiential. And culture is in constant movement and interaction with us all, whether we recognize it or not. It’s a foundational part of how we make meaning as human beings. And what this report does is attempt to name and expand our understanding of how we can utilize culture as a site of change, as author Evan Bissell explains.
Culture is neither purely positive or negative. Too much of the world has been organized around a belief in the ideology of whiteness, with the need to dominate and control. This expression of whiteness is at its most foundational not a material belief, it’s about culture. For too long the story of whiteness has been a story about being special, about individualism and separation—being separated from God, from nature, and even oneself. And a central component of the story of whiteness has also been about fear. So it lives in constant anxiety. But while the ideology of whiteness is a myth, the belief in it produces real outcomes that affect everyday lives.
So we need new stories. Stories where people who are not white heterosexual men don’t show up as less than, as the “other.” Stories that reject a re-assertion of an idea that who belongs should be organized around race, blood, or phenotype.
Culture can move people in a way that policies cannot. People largely organize themselves and operate around stories and beliefs, not around facts. And they organize more around love and belonging than shame and fear. So in constructing our new we, we need to be careful not to replicate ways of what I call breaking.
Building a culture of belonging is not the same as simply removing barriers. We must also organize our spaces, our structures, and our policies to do the work we need to build the world we want to live in. We have to work together to build a well-developed ecosystem that supports our work. We need research and analysis, we need inclusive narratives, and we need organizing, which is about building power. And we need all these things activated and in alignment—and all of these move through culture.
Developing our new story will take a lot of work. As illustrated in this report, there are many rich cultural histories to learn from as well as many emergent expressions to which we can look to for inspiration and aspiration. These Notes delve into the ways that artists, culturemakers, and community leaders are anchoring work in cultural expressions that celebrate our differences and provides models on how arts and culture can create space for more fully realizing that which we share.
A culture of belonging recognizes that we are always in a state of dynamic action and reaction. Belonging is never done and will constantly have to be remade. We’re in the midst of constructing new ways to see and new ways to be. This is not always comfortable, but it is part of our human experience.
As we move forward together in this time of rapid and concentrated change, the work of arts and culture will play a major role in how we lean into a future that says to everyone: You belong.
We hope this report will provide some ideas for understanding some of the vital and visionary aspects of a cultural strategy for belonging.
Note: This report by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley which is now known as the Othering and Belonging Institute.
Contents
Foreword 6
Introduction 8
WHAT AND HOW
Attributes and essential practices 12
Twelve attributes 13
Four essential practices 27
WHY
A cultural strategy for belonging provides a
unique opportunity for effecting change 31
Cultures of othering are dynamic and contestable 32
Cultures of belonging already exist 33
Cultural forms and expressions can advance
belonging despite asymmetries of power 34
CONCLUSION
Next steps for a cultural strategy 36
for belonging
Ways cultural strategists can strengthen the field 37
Ways funders, researchers, and leadrers can strengthen the field 41
APPENDICES
Workshop 44
Resources 48
Endnotes 49
Attributes of a Cultural Strategy for Belonging
The following 12 attributes of cultural strategy are a palette. These attributes clarify the unique contributions of a cultural strategy for belonging.
They can also guide the development of cultural strategy projects. At a minimum, these can be assessed against the needs of a project that is looking to integrate cultural strategy. Ideally, this assessment occurs early in the analysis of a need or problem as a way to shift the “quality of light” of analysis.
Each attribute is generated from an analysis of case studies of our work at the Haas Institute, as well as art and cultural projects that have inspired this work.
- Insisting on humanness
- Reclaiming cultural memory
- Articulating and validating alternative and marginalized value systems and ways of knowing
- Shifting and democratizing concepts of expertise
- Trespassing across sectors and silos
- Bridging across divides and differences
- Convening and connecting coalitions, movements, communities
- Activating and provoking emotion
- Disrupting the dominant worldview through interventions of worldviews from the margins
- Building the space and means to imagine, play and envision alternatives
- Making complex concepts more accessible
- Expanding the reach
Four Essential Practices
There are numerous ways to activate cultural strategy. In the emergent work of a cultural strategy for belonging at the Haas Institute, we’ve identified four essential practices.
These practices align process and outcome by balancing questions of leadership, knowledge and cultural production, and power, with questions of cultural strategy’s relationship to other change strategies.
- Cultivate vibrant and diverse forms of cultural practice that support the growth of leadership and practice of those directly and deeply impacted by systems of oppression.
- Amplify the knowledge, insight and vision that comes through culture and cultural production and create containers and experiences where this knowledge, insight and vision can be expressed and understood on its own terms.
- Align with efforts for material, political, and social change.
- Make social and cultural change into a new “common sense.”
A culture of belonging recognizes that we are always in a state of dynamic action and reaction. Belonging is never done and will constantly have to be remade. We’re in the midst of constructing new ways to see and new ways to be. This is not always comfortable, but it is part of our human experience. – Evan Bissell, Notes on a Cultural Strategy for Belonging
Access Full Report
- Notes on Cultural Strategy for Belonging (Website)
- Notes on a Cultural Strategy for Belonging (PDF – 52 pgs)
Watch Video
Cultural Strategies for Belonging: Learning from Doing 2019 – 2021
Watch this related video from 2022.
Two years into our cultural strategy efforts, the work has affirmed the importance and power of culture’s role in creating belonging. Learn from four projects – on care, climate displacement, planning and development, and abolition – that exemplify the four practices of our strategy.
Designed for: Artists, cultural strategy practitioners, non-profit staff, organizers and funders interested in strengthening cultural strategy in organizing, research, planning or other social change work.
Explore Further
- Belonging Design Principles: Guide for Building Belonging
- Right-Sized Belonging: Six Practices For Organizers
- Belonging Design Principles: Guide for Building Belonging
- Belonging: A Facilitator and Practice Guide
- Social Identity and Group Norms
- Identity Groups to Build Diversity and Power
- Pathways to Repair: Guides to Navigate Healing, Trust building and Human Messiness
- Standing in Solidarity with People of Colour
- United We Stand: Fostering Cohesion in Activist Groups
- Othering & Belonging Institute