Sara Grossman

Media & Messaging Strategist
Strategic Communications,Network for Transformative Change

EMAIL

sara.grossman@berkeley.edu

Sara Grossman is a Media & Messaging Strategist at the Othering & Belonging Institute. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy in 2015 and later moved to Berlin, where she co-led a narrative arts collective that told stories about the urban experience. She is now based in London where she studies media, messaging, and social change. As an intern, Sara previously wrote for CNN, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other news outlets. 

NEWS

Rucker Johnson headshot
Making The Dream Reality: Talking School Integration With Rucker Johnson
Rucker Johnson, a Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, is a member of three Haas Institute faculty research clusters: Diversity and Health Disparities; Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy; and Economic Disparities. Johnson recently...
Interview
Sonia Katyal headshot
Sonia Katyal appointed chair of LGBTQ Citizenship research cluster
The Haas Institute is thrilled to welcome eminent legal scholar Sonia Katyal as the new Distinguished Chair of its LGBTQ Citizenship research cluster . Katyal, the Chancellor's Professor of Law and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology , has been a faculty member at UC...
Press Release
Janelle Scott profile picture
Janelle Scott appointed chair of Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy research cluster
We are proud to welcome Janelle Scott as the Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities, leading the Haas Institute’s Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy research cluster . Scott is an Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education...
Press Release
Headshot of Claire Snell-Rood
Faculty Profile: Public health scholar Claire Snell-Rood on mental health challenges facing rural women
Claire Snell-Rood is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley and a member of the Haas Institute's Diversity and Health Disparities research cluster. Here, she discusses mental health problems facing women in rural areas and effective policy and non-policy interventions that can help...
Faculty Profile
Denise Herd head shot
New Faculty Director Denise Herd to Bolster Cross-Cluster Collaboration
Renowned Public Health scholar Denise Herd began serving as the Haas Institute's new associate director this month, pledging to bolster collaboration among the Institute's faculty clusters to make the impact of their work towards equity more potent. “My initial plans are to dialogue with faculty...
Press Release
Us, Reimagined
This piece was originally published in the Haas Institute spring 2018 news magazine . This spring, singer and rapper Childish Gambino set off a heated national debate after releasing the music video for his song This is America . The video, both cryptic and startling, is shot entirely in a...
Essay
Senior Fellow Josh Clark
What Comes Next?
A conversation with Senior Fellow Joshua Clark about his post-2016 election research and analysis—work that is part of his joint position with the Haas Institute and Tides Foundation. On the week of the one-year anniversary of the 2016 presidential election, we released a report you authored called...
Interview
Faculty Profile: Chris Zepeda-Millan on Immigration and Racialization​ ​in the Era of Trump
This piece was originally published in the Haas Institute spring 2018 news magazine . Chris Zepeda-Millan is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Berkeley and is a member of the Haas Institute’s Diversity and Democracy research cluster . His...
Faculty Profile
Economist Hilary Hoynes named to Academy of Arts & Sciences
Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Distinguished Chair of the Haas Institute Economic Disparities faculty research cluster Hilary Hoynes was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April, joining a select group of scholars, business leaders, and changemakers...
Press Release
Haas Institute mourns loss of Saba Mahmood, religious scholar and adored faculty member
It is with great sorrow the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society receives the tragic news of the passing on March 10 of Saba Mahmood, a brilliant and beloved thinker, mentor, and humanist who broke ground with her work challenging liberal assumptions around religion, secularism,...
The 2017 Othering and Belonging Conference: Envisioning a "nation that is yet to be”
Speaking on the first night of the 2017 Othering and Belonging Conference , and on the hundredth day of the Trump presidency, in a moment where “it feels like we might all fall apart," keynote speaker Jeff Chang told more than 1,100 conference attendees that it is not too late to reimagine a...
Event
The Power and Promise of Public Memory
MONUMENTS REFLECT SOMETHING MORE THAN IRON AND STONE: THEY ARE THE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF A COMMUNITY’S UNDERSTANDING OF ITS OWN HISTORY. THEY ARE ALSO REFLECTIVE OF THE STORIES WE TELL—OR DON'T TELL—TO OURSELVES AND OUR CURRENT AND FUTURE GENERATIONS. This piece was originally published in the...
Essay
Color Of Change's Rashad Robinson to speak on digital activism and civic engagement at Othering & Belonging
Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of Color Of Change , will be sharing insights on movement-building in the digital age at our Othering & Belonging conference later this year in Oakland. Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, has fought since 2005 to change...
California Endowment Awards Major Grant to Develop Progressive Narrative for California
The Haas Institute has received a major new grant from The California Endowment to support the Institute's Blueprint for Belonging initiative. The project, which goes by B4B for short, will work on developing a strategic meta-narrative and practices based on core values of inclusion and belonging...
Former Greenpeace head Kumi Naidoo to discuss environment and social justice at O&B conference
“The struggle has never been about saving the planet,” Kumi Naidoo told The Guardian just over a year ago. Then the director of Greenpeace International, Naidoo was explaining exactly why, paradoxically, “the planet does not need saving”. “If we warm it up to the point where we cannot exist we’ll...
Renowned Sociologist Saskia Sassen to Speak at Institute’s Othering & Belonging Conference
Acclaimed scholar and public intellectual Saskia Sassen will be taking the stage at the Haas Institute’s Othering & Belonging conference this spring to discuss the mechanics and forces of Othering, including the financialized global economy, widespread displacement, and toxic inequality, as...
Press Release
Newly Appointed Haas Chair Holder in Diversity and Health Disparities on Colorblindness and the Need for a New Biopolitics
Osagie K. Obasogie is the new endowed chair of the Haas Institute's Diversity and Health Disparities research cluster. Obasogie, Professor of Bioethics in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health, spoke with us about his research on racial disparities in health, the myth of "...
Faculty Profile
Masculinity, Anxiety, and Fear of the Other in the Age of Trump
On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy stood before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia and presented a list of over 200 State Department employees who were supposedly members of the Communist Party. These individuals, of course, needed to be eliminated...
Essay
Taeku Lee on Racial Politics, Voting Patterns for People of Color, and Intersections of Scholarship and Social Change
Taeku Lee, UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science and Law , was recently named the new Haas Institute Associate Director. We interviewed Taeku about his scholarly work on voter engagement, racial politics, and the implications for the future of the political landscape due to the collective...
Faculty Profile
Lifetime Activist and Changemaker Gary Delgado Joins Haas Institute
Delgado will bring years of organizing experience and a deep commitment to racial and social justice to his new role as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute. When Gary Delgado started organizing, many decades ago, the challenges were vast. Could welfare recipients and poor folks be organized? Could...
Faculty Profile
Thinking Ahead with Paul Pierson photo with Paul Pierson, Jessica Bartholow, and Mark Gomez
Thinking Ahead: Paul Pierson on How a Strong Government is the Key to Prosperity
Let’s be honest about the way America works, Berkeley Political Scientist Paul Pierson told to a full house in Oakland last week for a lecture organized by the Haas Institute. “It’s not a nation of rugged individualists. All of us get to where we’re going with help from others.” Pierson offered the...
Event
Steve Phillips
Thinking Ahead: Steve Phillips on How We Can Move From Protest to Power
“How can we move from protest to power?” asked author and seasoned political advocate Steve Phillips at the Haas Institute’s first event in its Thinking Ahead discussion series. “We have the numbers, we have the ability—the disconnect is that too much of today’s politics does not speak to the...
Event
Building Power at the Intersection of Immigration and Incarceration: An Event to Discuss Inclusive Practices and Policies in the “Double Is”
john a. powell began his keynote address with a comment on anxiety. In California, he said, whites are no longer the majority, nor even the largest plurality. For many people, this creates “tremendous anxiety.” “But how people process that anxiety is based on leadership and the stories we tell,” he...
Event
Faculty profile: Malo Hutson on Health Disparities and the Built Environment
Malo Hutson is an associate professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, Associate Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, and a faculty member of the Haas Institute’s Diversity and Health Disparities cluster. He spoke with us about his key areas of research in...
Faculty Profile
Voting Rights for Immigrants & the Incarcerated; The Case For Inclusion
This is the feature article of our Fall 2015 newsletter. Download full issue here . He pays taxes, volunteers in his community, and is gainfully employed, but still his voice remains unheard. Although today he could be on a politician’s reelection campaign poster, Gary Malachi Scott was once on the...
Essay
Looking through a fence/Creative Commons License
Unequal Rates of Poverty and Access to Care Play a Role in Widening Health Disparities
America’s alarming racial disparities have come to the forefront of our national consciousness in recent years, at least partly thanks to the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased media coverage of racial inequality. Although this awareness is today more sensitized to...
Essay
Georgina Kleege Portrait
Disability Studies Cluster Member Georgina Kleege Honored with Distinguished Teaching Award
For Georgina Kleege , the best part of teaching at UC Berkeley is, quite simply, the students. “I find that Berkeley students are very serious about learning,” Kleege said recently. “Coming to Berkeley made me a better teacher.” And quite the teacher she has become -- Kleege was recently announced...
Press Release
Author and Activist Deepa Iyer Discusses Islamophobia and Racism at Campus Book Talk
The Haas Institute welcomed activist and author Deepa Iyer to UC Berkeley on Jan. 19 to speak about Islamophobia and racism in the United States. Iyer, a senior fellow at the Center for Social Inclusion , read selections from her new book “We Too Sing America,” and later invited Berkeley students...
Event
john powell at Bioneers in Oct 2014
Race and Interconnectedness
Haas Institute Director john a. powell is a frequently sought-after speaker on race, civil rights, spirituality, and social justice. During the last year john was invited to give dozens of talks and interviews across the US on these issues. Here are recaps from four of john’s talks that opened up...
Event
Photo of Karen Barkey
Karen Barkey, Columbia Professor and Expert on Empire, to Join the Haas Institute
Karen Barkey has forged an impressive career from a simple childhood fascination with empire. Raised in Istanbul by a Sephardic Jewish family with a long history in the Ottoman Empire, Barkey found herself invariably drawn to stories about the Empire. At its height, the Ottoman Empire encompassed...
Interview
Acclaimed Professor and Disability Studies Expert to Join Berkeley Faculty as Endowed Chair of Equity and Inclusion
For Karen Nakamura , leaving her esteemed position at Yale University was no easy decision. In the end, though, Nakamura, a Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies, believed that the offer of a new appointment at UC Berkeley “was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” she couldn’t...
Press Release
Haas Institute's Newest Faculty Cluster Member: Economic Anthropologist Jovan Scott Lewis
From an early age, Jovan Scott Lewis had his feet firmly planted in two very different worlds: Montego Bay, Jamaica and Lauderhill, Florida, the latter of which is well-known for its high population of Jamaicans. “I was aware that I was a part of these two “Jamaica’s,” Lewis said in a recent...
Faculty Profile
Faculty profile: Jason Corburn on Why Public Health is Important for Equity and Opportunity
Jason Corburn is an Associate Professor of Public Health and City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and the new director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD). His research interests include urban environmental health and policy, environmental justice, health...
Faculty Profile
Faculty profile: Emmanuel Saez on Why Inequality Matters
Emmanuel Saez is a UC Berkeley economist who is renowned for his scholarship on wealth and income inequality. Saez, a member of the Haas Institute's Economic Disparities research cluster, holds the Chancellor's Professorship of Tax Policy and Public Finance and is the director of the Center for...
Faculty Profile
(Un)Conscious: How Understanding the Subconscious Can Further Efforts for Social Justice
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT , Lanre Akinsiku was regularly pulled over while navigating the narrow city streets near University of California, Berkeley in his hulking ‘92 Ford Taurus. “Often I’d see a squad car following me and just pull to the curb to get it over with,” Akinsiku recalled in an...
Essay
Faculty Profile: Saba Mahmood Discusses Religious Freedom in the Modern Era
August 25, 2015 Professor Saba Mahmood is a member of the Haas Institute Religious Disparities cluster and a professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Mahmood’s work is known for its interrogation of liberal assumptions about the boundary between ethics and politics, freedom and...
Faculty Profile
Faculty profile: Law professor Jonathan Simon on 'Othering' through Mass Incarceration
Jonathan Simon is a professor at the Berkeley Law School and a member of the Haas Institute's Diversity and Democracy research cluster. His scholarship focuses on the role of crime and criminal justice in governing modern societies. He recently published a book, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A...
Faculty Profile
The Other Wealth Gap: The Racial Wealth Rift No One is Talking About
Most of us are at least marginally aware of America’s notorious “wealth gap”—the growing cliff between the rich elite and everyone else—that has become so prominent in our national consciousness in recent years. This gap, however, is not one rift, but two. There is the well-known economic gap...
Essay
Haas Institute Economic Disparities Chair Hilary Hoynes Receives Prestigious Economics Award
January 7, 2015 Hilary Hoynes , Distinguished Chair of the Haas Institute’s Economic Disparities cluster and Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UC Berkeley, was recently announced as the 2014 recipient of the prestigious Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economics Association’s (...
Faculty Profile: Seth Holmes Discusses Migrant Workers, the US agricultural system, and Structural Inequality Exacerbated "through metaphors of ethnic difference"
Seth M. Holmes is a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology and a member of the Haas Institute Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster . Holmes is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States , which...
Faculty Profile
john powell: KPFA Evening Dialogue - A History of Race and Power
by Sara Grossman | November 6, 2014 Haas Institute director john a. powell began his speech Wednesday night with an unexpected analogy. “Race is a little bit like gravity,” he told more than 100 audience members at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church, who were gathered that evening to hear...
Portrait
Faculty Profile: Juana María Rodríguez on sexuality in public discourse
Juana María Rodríguez is a member of the Haas Institute's LGBTQ Citizenship cluster and a professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Here, she discusses the "politics of respectability" in the gay marriage movement and how sexual identity politics influence...
Faculty Profile
Michael Omi and Howard Winant Radically Revise "Racial Formation in the United States" book
UC Berkeley Ethnic S tudies professor Michael Omi is perhaps best known for his treatise on race in America, first published in 1986 with co-author Howard Winant, a professor of sociolo gy at UC Santa Barbara. A third edition of Racial Formation in the United States was published July 2014 and...
Faculty Profile

REPORTS

Fall 2016 Newsletter Cover
Fall 2016 Newsletter
This edition of the Haas Institute newsletter, which covers activities from Jan. 1–August 31, 2016, features articles on fear of the Other and toxic masculinity in the age of Trump, many updates on our programs and projects, the latest news on our faculty clusters, and much more. Download the issue...
Newsletters

BLOG POST

Unconscious bias illustration
White people: Let’s start by understanding our own biases
Sara Grossman | November 27, 2018
The headlines this summer were seemingly incessant: “Georgia woman calls cops on black man taking care of 2 white kids”; “Woman Assaulted Black Boy After Telling Him He ‘Did Not Belong’ at Pool, Officials Say”; Neighbor Calls the Police on a 12-Year-Old Boy Mowing the Grass”; and so many others...
BLOG
Blog: On Shared Spaces and Belonging in the "Imagined Community" - Part 1
Sara Grossman | September 04, 2018
This fall, we will explore the use of the police and other government oversight agencies as a tool of power wielded by white people against their neighbors of color—and the various systemic factors that have contributed to this phenomenon. First in this series: the spatial dimensions of race, and...
BLOG
By Libertinus rebelArte (Dresden Nazi Frei 2012) [CC BY-SA 3.0 es (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/es/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons
Blog: What Can We Learn from Other Western Nations on Matters of Speech?
Sara Grossman | September 25, 2017
Sept. 25, 2017 From nearly all vantage points, the United States stands apart from its peers in the West for its lax legal treatment of hate speech. As noted in one New York Times article , “What much of [the] West bans is protected in [the] US.” Fundamentally, our nation has prioritized the right...
BLOG
Blog: Revisiting 'Dog Whistle Politics'
Sara Grossman | September 22, 2017
The basic mechanism of what Berkeley political scientist Ian Haney Lopez calls “dog whistle politics” is simple: call upon the anxiety or fear of minorities that already resides not-so-far beneath the surface, divide class interests, and win elections. “Dog whistles” are what Lopez terms political...
BLOG
Blog: For Undocumented Communities, Fear and Anxiety on the Trump Agenda
Sara Grossman | March 07, 2017
March 7, 2017 Barely one month into the new administration and President Trump has already demonstrated he is willing to make good on some of his most dangerous campaign promises. Immigration raids from Los Angeles to Atlanta, coupled with a disastrously-conceived and implemented travel ban on...
BLOG