The lab was founded to bring new kinds of expertise and perspectives into the field of violence prevention. We have cultivated a team whose personal, professional, and disciplinary backgrounds are unique in the field, bringing psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, mental health specialists, educators, experts in media and digital communication, and a wide variety of subject matter experts in violence, youth, terrorism, and prevention together to tackle problems that have traditionally been handled by law enforcement and security experts. In our founding “blue sky” meetings, we held intensive, three-day workshops with scholars on race, immigration, and social justice, victims of hate crimes and terrorism, parents of perpetrators of violence, and former members of hate groups to generate ideas about what might work to prevent persuasion by manipulative content and mobilization to violence. The ideas those meetings generated helped shape the lab’s first projects.
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