We've gathered all of the mainstage talks and performances from O&B 2024 in one place!
Revisit all of your favorite moments and catch up on any conversations you missed. Use the buttons below to jump down to the respective sections for each day, and click the titles to watch the recordings and find additional resources like further readings, presenter slideshows, and ASL interpretation.
Recordings of the breakout sessions are soon to come.
Day One, April 25
Description
A dancer and choreographer who has taught theater, mindfulness, violence prevention, and dance, Sarah Crowell was formerly the Artistic Director and Executive Director for 30 years at the celebrated Destiny Arts Center in Oakland. Sarah is also the Artistic Director of our O&B 2024 conference.
Joining Sarah is The Belonging Resident Company (BRC), an exciting new dance/theater troupe hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute, whose purpose is to amplify and celebrate the framework of belonging through movement, poetry, spoken word, and playback theater. Directed by Sarah Crowell with Sangita Kumar and Julia McKeown, this year’s inaugural group is a colorful garden of folks ages 19 - 60. They are UC Berkeley students, dancers, folks who thought they were retired dancers, filmmakers, theater directors, professors, nonprofit leaders, writers, somatic healers, therapists, authors, musicians, and poets. They are youth development workers, diversity, equity and inclusion trainers, dreamers and weavers of belonging in all aspects of their lives. This group of passionate storytellers and changemakers is honored to be making their debut at the Othering and Belonging conference 2024.
Featured Speakers and Performers
Additional resources
Description
Indigenous leader Yuria Celidwen shares indigenous worldviews and invite us into building an ethics of belonging that allows us to come into more purposeful connection with each other and all living beings.
Featured speaker
Additional resources
Description
Hear from Ashlin Malouf-Gashaw, Deputy Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, on vision and goals for the conference and the larger movement of building belonging.
Description
The City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Manager Roberto Bedoya has been building belonging for decades, through his work in creative placemaking that expands our definitions of who belongs in the cultural and government sectors.
Roberto led the implementation of “Belonging in Oakland: A Cultural Development Plan,” for the city, its first in 30 years, a roadmap to elevate the role of culture in building a just and equitable city – so that every Oaklander in every neighborhood has access to cultural amenities. Roberto’s work has been deeply invested in how belonging in and to place contributes to the rights of individuals that is crucial in building healthy, pluralistic democracies of shared space and access to the commons and public resources.
Kicking off this year’s series of Belonging- and Bridge-Builder Talks, Roberto illuminates how place is not just a space but an idea that needs to be animated through agency and co-creation in order to build sustainable, healthy communities.
Ashley Gallegos opens the talk with an introduction to the vision and intention of the Places of Belonging Track.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
- Watch with ASL interpretation
- Roberto Bedoya's slideshow on "Belonging in Oakland"
- Belonging in Oakland: A Cultural Development Plan
- City Releases First Cultural Plan in 30 Years
- Belonging In Oakland: A Just City Cultural Fund, a partnership of the City of Oakland's Cultural Affairs Division, Akonadi Foundation, and East Bay Community Foundation
- Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging
- Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City
- Podcast: Belonging in Oakland
- Belonging Is a Sticky Word: Roberto Bedoya in Conversation with Tom DeCaigny
- ArtPlace Reflection
Description
A talk on the interdependence of disability justice and belonging, featuring Imani Barbarin.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
Description
On our opening day we were thrilled to bring Oakland, CA-based ensemble Orchestra Gold to headline an hour of healing and community through the universal gift of music.
Orchestra Gold offers a kaleidoscope of sound deeply rooted in the Malian tradition while introducing a genre-bending nod to the future through their rare and artful fusion: African Psychedelic Rock. This original sound with a retro feel results from a decade-long collaboration between Mariam Diakite of Mali and Erich Huffaker of Oakland. The music of Orchestra Gold represents this powerful intersection, transcending borders and boundaries to be a force of healing within the community.
OG’s vibrant sound is spearheaded by the dynamic Mariam Diakite, whose raw, hypnotic vocals deliver heartfelt and thought-provoking lyrics in the highly symbolic Bambara language. While paying homage to Malian musical traditions, this fierce new sound thrives with heavy swinging rhythms, a funky fresh brass section, and cosmic guitar licks. With last year's release of their third album, Medicine, this profoundly spiritual and dance-inducing ensemble continues their pursuit of spreading healing and community through the universal gift of music.
Featured performers
Additional resources
Day Two, April 26
Description
Bongo Sidibe and Blibi Eric Gore with Duniya Dance & Drum Company open up Day Two of O&B 2024.
Description
Belonging Resident Company opens the day with movement and connection, grounding us for Day Two of O&B 2024.
Featured performers
Additional resources
Description
We are bombarded with a larger public story that insists we are hopelessly divided, a narrative that increasingly suggests a type of fatalism about fragmentation, that our political disagreements may be irreconcilable, or that humans are “naturally” wired toward creating an us and a them, that perhaps we are better off living separately and not engaging with the other who threatens our story and place in the world.
Throughout his work, Scott Shigeoka has set out to tell another story: that we yearn to connect and people desire to find ways to bridge. Scott has been translating research into ideas that promote well-being and connection, including in his best-selling book Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World; through his work at the Greater Good Science Center, where he spearheaded the Bridging Differences Playbook; in working with musician David Byrne on a series that showcases ways in which We Are Not Divided; and through his groundbreaking courses at the University of Texas at Austin.
In this opening talk, Scott will discusses the values and practices, such as deep curiosity and the willingness to stay open to each other’s story, that will help us hold onto the inherent humanity of all of us, not by denying our differences or what makes us unique, but by recognizing that co-creating together is the only way to a sustainable and shared future where we all belong.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
Description
This opening conversation between celebrated journalist Maria Hinojosa and OBI Director john powell will unpack the radical proposition of creating a world based on belonging, without othering.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
Description
Melanie DeMore is a 3-time Grammy nominated singer/composer, choral conductor, music director and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. In her presentations, DeMore beautifully brings her participants together through her music and commentary. DeMore facilitates vocal and stick pounding workshops for professional choirs, community groups as well as directing numerous choral organizations across the U.S, Canada and beyond.
Featured performer
Additional resources
Description
Acclaimed author and organizer Astra Taylor shares the intersections of the diverse areas of her work in examining, writing, and organizing around democracy, solidarity, and co-founding America’s first union of debtors.
This session opened with an introduction to the "Belonging Economies" track (or thematic area) of the conference by Hossein Ayazi, Global Justice Program Senior Policy Analyst at the Othering & Belonging Institute.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
Description
Powerful spoken word poet, activist and Executive Director of Youth Speaks, Michelle "Mush" Lee shares an original poem that directly connects with the Othering and Belonging bridging framework.
Featured performer
Additional resources
Description
Belonging means having the opportunity to co-create the structures, institutions, and norms that shape our lives in order to build a world based on inclusion, fairness, justice, and care for the Earth. By definition, this includes the right to co-create the economic systems that shape our lives, non-human life, and the Earth itself.
What would economies built on belonging look like? If we are to build Belonging Economies, what about our economic systems—as well as our political, social, and cultural arrangements—might need to be re-envisioned and reorganized, including addressing the harms of racial capitalism, colonialism, and slavery? What are the challenges to building Belonging Economies, and what efforts and successes can we look to for guidance?
This panel addressed these questions and their stakes while also exploring the role of repair in Belonging Economies. Panelists drew from work across local and global networks and movements—including work in Land Back and reparations—that strive to generate community wealth, produce governance structures that benefit the whole, and build community power for economies that are rooted in belonging.
Featured speakers
Additional resources
Description
Award-winning Navajo hoop dancer, Patrick Willie, shares traditional hoop dancing and dynamic storytelling.
Featured performer
Additional resources
Description
Renowned social movement strategist Maurice Mitchell, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and now National Director of the Working Families Party, gives a closing keynote on new formations and ways of being and working with each other that are needed to confront the current era of rising authoritarianism, climate emergency, toxic inequality, and widespread precarity and fragmentation.
Featured speaker
Additional resources
Day Three, April 27
Description
Taiko drumming by Dance Brigade opens up day three of the Othering & Belonging Conference.
Description
Destiny Arts Center's mission is to inspire and ignite social change through the arts. Destiny's dynamic martial arts demo team share the virtuoso of their martial arts practice while incorporating strategies for peace and wellbeing.
Description
What is the role of collective memory in creating identity and belonging? Is it even possible to imagine a belonging that does not require flattened identities that pit one group against another? And most urgently, what are the narratives that can support bridging and solidarity, and repair and rehumanization, even during this time of unimaginable destruction, division, and dehumanization.
Cecilie Surasky of the Othering & Belonging Institute discusses these questions with three of our sharpest chroniclers, observers, and witnesses: Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly, acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Viet Nguyen. This rich conversation will connect the people, places, struggles, and history of Europe, Israel/Palestine, Vietnam, Asia, and the United States. It will bring into sharp focus how structures of othering such as colonialism, US militarism, ethnonationalism, racism, and patriarchy strip us of our humanity and mobilize fear and trauma to create an other. And most importantly, it will explore the liberatory possibilities of reconceptualizing identity and aspiring toward belonging without othering.
Description
Suppose the path toward building the infrastructure for "belonging without othering" is the right direction: How might we then practice leadership in and beyond our movements, organizations, communities, and nations in the context of defending collective institutions and norms that support multi-racial democracies and dignified life?
Panelists DeAngelo Bester, Myriam Méndez Montalvo, Pastor Bob Roberts, Omar Salha, and moderator, Yuna Blajer de la Garza offer practical applications for long bridging and practices across social and institutional differences to help us see the value of bridging as a prerequisite condition for belonging.
Multiple approaches, strategies, and sectors doing this work with a coherent vision and set of principles can add up to a new school of thought that drives a collective project articulated around human dignity and belonging.
Description
Belonging without othering is a radical new proposition to create a shared future for all including our earth. Where might belonging without othering, as a new political, social, and spiritual frame, take us next on the bending of the arc and beyond?
In March 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr famously proclaimed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What is our global trajectory of equality, peacebuilding, and human rights, and how does belonging add to that? How might we integrate and build new norms that advance belonging?
As we face a warming planet and violent conflicts now rage in more than 100 countries, since King’s lifetime, we have also traversed through the adoption of a historic number of peace agreements, the end of apartheid in South Africa, mass decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe. Growing recognition of women’s and LGBTQ rights globally and Identities that were previously hard and enshrined into clear boundaries of “us” and “them” have shifted into new formation, allowing for more expansive understandings of who we are as living beings in relation to each other and the earth.
In this conference closing conversation, four thought leaders whose work spans nations, cultures, regions, and identities, grapple together on belonging without othering as a global frame and a collective aspiration, and what’s required to build that future together. Among other things, they help us think through the new norms, both symbolic and institutional, that could move the foundational premise that all people belong that is already happening around the world.
Description
OBI Director closes out the 2024 Othering & Belonging Conference in Oakland.
Description
Oakland's legendary pianist, emcee, bandleader, and music historian Kev Choice and harpist extraordinaire Destiny Muhammad take the stage with a choir for a collective, closing experience to send us off in harmony from O&B 2024.
Featured performers
Additional resources