ISE VISION

A more socially inclusive society in which all communities benefit from key rights, resources, and opportunities.

MISSION

We build strategic alliances to ensure that all members of our society have safe housing, quality education and healthcare, fair terms of employment, nutritious food, personal safety, and judicial equity. Together, we work to dismantle the barriers that prohibit access to these essential rights, resources and opportunities by advocating for structural change in our society.
 
We pursue our mission through three areas of activities:

• Research: to identify the structural origins of social disadvantage and to inform structural approaches to change;
• Community outreach: to respond to community-idenfitied needs; and
• Public Awareness: to increase public understanding of how disadvantage is structured and the imperative for structural interventions.

INTERSECTIONS NEWSLETTER

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 Summer 2010 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 systematically 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 social marginalization - loom large in the social exclusion literatute. Typically, responsibility is attributed to structural features of society, such as laws: public policies: institutional practices; organizational behaviors: and dominant ideologies, values and beliefs. These structures often convey unjust outcomes resulting in disparite 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 communities; and addressing social disadvantage requires a thorough analysis, understanding and tackling of its underlying 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;
• Stimulate public dialogue on the underlying causes of disadvantage and on possible solutions; and
• Engage in practical work that sheds light on and addresses social marginalization.