UBCO Centre for Human Rights, Diversity and Identity

Welcome to the UBCO Centre for Human Rights, Diversity & Identity (CHRDI), located at the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

The primary goal of the Centre is to cultivate and facilitate research and education that encourages social justice and promotes diversity in contemporary society.

The Centre provides an inter-disciplinary environment for a range of scholars from UBC and beyond to engage in research, educational outreach, and community service related to social justice and diversity studies.  Members of the Centre conceptualize the relationships between human rights, diversity and identity in the broadest terms, encompassing such things as the right to adequate shelter, access to education and health care, and freedom from oppression and exploitation.

Centre researchers draw upon critical social theory to better understand the ways that structural forms of inequality are produced by, and in turn reproduce inequitable social relations of, for example, racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, classism, ableism, and ageism. 

The Centre's researchers also specialize in research that is designed to support social and political change aimed at challenging, dismantling, and transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of exploitation, oppression, imperialism, neo-liberalism, national aggression, and environmental destruction.

For further information about the Centre, please review our web pages via the links at left, or contact the Centre Director, Dr. Lawrence D. Berg, Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Diversity and Identity.