Join the effort.
The Problem
Extremist hate perpetrators have radically changed the way they operate and mobilize people to advance their agendas. The internet and social media not only provide them with a vast arena for recruitment, but also places where they can hide. These platforms have made the distribution, mobilization and spread of online hate much harder to monitor and prosecute. It’s also more difficult to decipher the extent to which virtual communities of hate are simply reinforcing each other or being pushed by organized extremist organizations. That’s created challenges for researchers and law enforcement who are trying to understand how they work and how to intervene.
Join Us
We are currently calling for interested collaborators with diverse backgrounds and relevant expertise to build out the center’s research team. We welcome those with knowledge and passion for combating extremism and radicalization.
Pitt + CMU
The center will bring together the collective expertise from all relevant disciplines — including computer science, data science, social sciences, psychology, psychiatry and the law — as we seek to better understand and combat hatred based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and other prejudices.
The center aims to develop effective interventions to inhibit every stage in the creation and growth of extremist hate, as well as interventions to minimize its impacts. Researchers will study how extremism originates and circulates, how it shapes extremist views and fosters polarization in society, and how it provokes harmful and illegal acts, with a focus on its effects on minoritized and marginalized groups in society.
Commitment to Independence and Transparency
Our research is made possible by a diverse set of funding sources, including grants and gifts from government agencies, foundations, corporations, and individual donors. We anticipate that some of our funders will also partner with us on research projects, for example, providing data or opportunities to pilot interventions. While we value this financial support and partnership, we are committed to conducting independent, high-quality, research with scientific rigor that furthers the mission of the Collaboratory and benefits society. We retain total discretion regarding the use of funds, subject only to our commitment to use these funds for the specific use of supporting the project described in any agreement. We will not accept conditions or limitations on CAH’s independence in research, findings, conclusions, publications, events, speakers, and participants. Our researchers have autonomy over the research directions they pursue, the methods they use, and the dissemination of their results. We will support the pursuit of independent research even when it may be contrary to the desires of funders. We ask our researchers to be fully transparent about their funding sources and to disclose relevant funding and partnership relationships in research reports and presentations. In cases where our researchers enter into non-disclosure agreements as part of a project we ask them to disclose the existence of the agreement in reports on that project.
OUR MISSION
The Collaboratory Against Hate aspires to develop and support innovative multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-university research aimed at understanding how extremist hate is generated, how it circulates in online and real-life spaces, and how it polarizes society and provokes harmful and illegal acts, especially toward communities of color and other minoritized groups. We seek to develop effective interventions to inhibit every stage in the creation and growth of extremist hate and to minimize destructive consequences.
Our Values
We strive for translational research with impact, creating a world where hate cannot thrive.
Our research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and translational. Our interdisciplinary focus enables research that could not be done within a single-disciplinary silo.
We value scientific rigor and research excellence, consistent with best practices in our respective disciplines.
We commit to building impactful partnerships with other research organizations, community organizations, companies, and those who seek to inhibit hate.
We believe in treating people with compassion, dignity, and respect as we design and carry out our research and report our results.
We strive to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in both our research team and in our interactions with research participants and partners. It is important to us to include impacted groups and communities as our research partners.
We do not accept conditions or limitations on the independence of our research or activities. We support the pursuit of independent research even when it may be contrary to the desires of funders.
We are transparent about our funding sources and agreements with partners.
We understand that when communities agree to participate in and support our research they incur direct costs such as time and energy as well as opportunity costs. We strive to minimize the costs to communities and return benefits to them.
