Aaron Belkin

Projects

Military diversity

Since 1999, Belkin has served as founding director of the Palm Center, a research institute that used social science scholarship to inform public opinion about "don't ask, don’t tell," (DADT) and transgender military service. The Advocate named the Palm Center as one of the most effective LGBTQ rights organizations in the nation.

Judicial reform

In 2018, Belkin founded Take Back the Court, whose mission is to inform public opinion about the urgency of expanding the U.S. Supreme Court. When Belkin launched the project, no other organizations in the U.S. supported court expansion. After three years of making the case to the public, more than 50 organizations, mostly Black and Brown-led, have endorsed expansion, and 30 members of Congress have co-sponsored legislation to expand the Court.

Militarism and gender

Belkin’s concerns about the militarization of American culture and its relationship to gender and war led him to co-found the Costs of War project at Brown University and to provide $125,000 in seed funding through the Palm Center. The project’s first initiative involved the production and release of more than twenty studies that generated 250+ media stories about the financial, psychological, cultural and social costs of ongoing wars in the Middle East.

Organizational strategy

Belkin is interested in the leadership and management of progressive social justice organizations, in particular how they achieve and measure success, how they attract media and public attention to their messages, how they obtain funding, and how they motivate personnel to remain committed to key missions.
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Biography » Download CV/Resume

Aaron Belkin is a scholar, author, activist and dancer. He has written and edited more than twenty five scholarly articles, chapters and books, the most recent of which is a study of contradictions in American warrior masculinity and the ways in which smoothing over those contradictions makes U.S. empire seem unproblematic. The book, titled Bring Me Men, was first published by Columbia University Press in 2012 and then picked up by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Since 1999, Belkin has served as founding director of the Palm Center, which the Advocate named as one of the most effective LGBTQ rights organizations in the nation.
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