|
The mission of the Adler Institute on Social Exclusion (ISE) is to advance social justice. We do this by working to integrate the concept of "social exclusion" into U.S. popular and public policy discourse; by helping to contextualize social disadvantage; and by advancing the idea that the point of intervention for addressing social disadvantage is its social, political, and economic context.
We advance our mission through three areas of activities:
-
Applied Research - to identify the structural origins of social disadvantage and to inform structural approaches to intervention;
-
Community Outreach - that responds to the self-identified needs of disadvantaged communities; and
-
Public Awareness - to increase public understanding of how disadvantage is structured and the imperative for structural interventions.
ISE Newsletter 'Intersections' is published quarterly, and features articles that highlight the relationships among the many critical movements, ideas and discussions that seek to combat the problem of social exclusion.
Click Here to download the ISE Fall 2009 Newsletter.
WHAT IS SOCIAL EXCLUSION?
Social exclusion refers to the complex processes that deny certain groups access to mainstream life.
Social exclusion is a concept that is used in many parts of the world outside the United States to characterize contemporary forms of social disadvantage. At the ISE, we use the phrase to refer to processes by which entire communities of people are sys tematically blocked from rights, opportunities and resources (e.g., housing, employment, health care, civic engagement, democratic participation and due process) that are normally available to members of American society and that are key to social integration.
Questions of agency - that is, who or what is responsible for systematically-imposed disadvantage - loom large in the social exclusion literature. Typically, responsibility is attributed to structural features of society, such as laws, public policies, regulations, institutional practices, organizational behaviors, and dominant ideologies, values and beliefs. These structures often convey unjust social outcomes resulting in disparate social consequences for different communities of people.
PREMISE OF THE WORK OF THE ISE
Societal structures fundamentally impact human welfare, often in ways that convey extreme and persistent relative disadvantage to some social groups; and addressing social disadvantage requires a thorough analysis, understanding and tackling of its structural origins.
THE GOALS OF THE ISE ARE TO
- Analyze the ways in which structural features of society condition, sometimes in adverse ways, human welfare;
- Engage in practical work that sheds light on and addresses structurally-induced social disadvantage; and
- Stimulate public dialogue on the underlying causes of disadvantage and on possible solutions.
|
