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Clark University
Integration and Belonging
Move-in Day at Clark University is a welcome for families all over the world. A family stands talking on a pathway lined with international flags

The Integration and Belonging Hub is an initiative formed within Clark University’s Department of Sustainability and Social Justice. Its mission is to foster migrant and refugee-inclusive communities locally, nationally, and globally through student learning, community engagement, and research and policy analysis.

The Integration and Belonging Hub views our dynamic societies and the mobile people among them (refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and others) as “integrating together“ and seeks innovative approaches for creating shared worlds. The IBH aims to cultivate a new generation of practitioners and scholars and to develop frameworks to support multi-directional processes of social cohesion.

The establishment of the IBH is a response to the need to involve migrants and refugees as a vital part of 21st-century transformation in the face of significant social, economic, political, and environmental strain. While our work overlaps with other efforts to address structural marginalization and inequality, we do so primarily through the lens of people who move and the need to accommodate mobility for social cohesion. Integration research and practice highlights the urgency of updating our view of societies as sedentary receivers of migrants, and instead involve them as key participants in sustainable development.

Areas of focus

Shifting policy discourse

National and international migration and refugee policies have not been able to adequately accommodate dramatic increases in global mobility. We develop frameworks to enable inclusive and just integration policies.

Training for bridge-building and inclusion

We work with institutional partners to discover alternative frameworks for refugee and migrant participation in social, economic, and political arenas and provide training to organizations on bridge-building and inclusion.

Advancing integration studies

We contribute to new thinking around mobility and belonging as part of transformations to sustainability. We also foster dialog among researchers investigating integration as an inclusive relational process.

Contact Information

Integration and Belonging Hub

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