The Latinx and Democracy Cluster (LDC) vision is to build a thriving interdisciplinary intellectual community that supports individual and collaborative research to enhance justice, equity, and inclusion for Latinx people in California and nationwide.
Increasing the number of Latinx faculty and faculty whose work touches on the Latinx experience at UC Berkeley is a priority that is crucial to becoming a Latinx-thriving institution. It will allow us to reflect better who we are as a campus, state, and nation.
Therefore, the university has adopted the "faculty cluster hires" strategy to build intellectual communities in emerging research areas. Cluster hires recruits and onboards faculty with shared academic interests to work collaboratively on interdisciplinary problems to meet a university's goals. This is just another example of how UC Berkeley is changing and reimagining how we make this campus more inclusive and welcoming.
An interdisciplinary team of professors, led by G. Cristina Mora in Sociology, developed the Latinxs and Democracy cluster hiring process last academic year. This work is essential as it adds richness to the Berkeley community. In the words of Professor G. Cristina Mora, the cluster "has brought incredible new talent to campus. Their teaching and mentoring will benefit all students, and they will join others in making UCB an important, national center for cutting-edge Latinx Research."