A Closer Look at UCLA’s Own ‘Justice League’
They come from everywhere — unapologetic revolutionaries and leading voices in causes across the spectrum of social justice. They seek resources and space to recharge, regroup and, often, to plan the next stage of their struggle — all while planting seeds to grow the next generation of activists. Recently profiled in UCLA Magazine, they are part of the university’s Activist-in-Residence program, launched in 2016 by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D). The program has hosted 11 activists, including four this year, with areas of expertise that include tenants’ rights, food insecurity, climate change, support for incarcerated people, ethnic storytelling and protection for the unhoused. “Their presence transforms our classrooms and our research centers,” said Ananya Roy, founding director of II&D and a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography. “It’s this shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements that we see to be very fertile ground for making change.” Other campus hosts include the Asian American Studies Center and cityLAB-UCLA. The magazine piece includes mini-profiles of five of UCLA’s Activists-in Residence.
Lytle Hernández Receives Bancroft Prize in American History
Kelly Lytle Hernández, professor of history, African American studies and urban planning, has been awarded the 2023 Bancroft Prize for her book “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands.” The book tells the story of the band of Mexican rebels, led by journalist and dissident Ricardo Flores Magón, that helped spark the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize is considered one of the most prestigious honors for writing on American history and diplomacy. “Bad Mexicans” was also a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in the nonfiction category, and was named one of New Yorker magazine’s best of 2022. The book focuses on how Flores Magón and his magonistas — intellectuals, poor workers, dispossessed rural dwellers and other marginalized groups — waged a campaign to overthrow U.S.-backed Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. Drawing on archives in both Mexico and the United States, the book explores how the cross-national movement threatened not only Díaz, who would eventually be deposed, but Mexican elites and powerful American capitalist interests that benefited from Díaz’s economic policies. In announcing the award, the Bancroft Prize jury praised Lytle Hernández’s “riveting story of revolution and counterrevolution,” adding that the book “helps shift the boundaries of what constitutes American history.” Lytle Hernández, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2019, is also the author of “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” and “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.”
Todd Franke, Agile Visual Analytics Lab to Evaluate Suicide Prevention Programs
Social Welfare Professor Todd Franke and the Agile Visual Analytics Lab at UCLA Luskin have been awarded $1.8 million by the state’s Department of Public Health to evaluate two youth suicide prevention efforts in California. In response to an increase in youth suicide rates during the pandemic, California public health officials have launched two projects:
- A data-driven, targeted, community-based suicide prevention outreach campaign for youth at increased risk of suicide.
- A new approach to making youth suicide attempts reportable public health events to trigger crisis response efforts and allow support to be provided more readily at the local level for impacted schools and communities.
The funds will support evaluation of these programs led by Ashley Long, senior research associate at Agile Visual Analytics Lab. The lab was founded by Franke and Robert Blagg in 2014 to help provide stakeholders with data visualizations that meet diverse and dynamic information needs.
Here are examples of AVAL’s work:
UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute Presents Research to Stakeholders in Washington, D.C.
Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas of the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute (UCLA LPPI) recently presented research about Latino voters in the United States to political campaigners, media stakeholders and advocates meeting in the nation’s capital. During “Majority Makers !Presente!” hosted by TelevisaUnivision at the Washington headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters, Dominguez-Villegas also previewed the forthcoming U.S. Latino Data Hub. This publicly available web tool will explore Latino well-being across all 50 states in a clear, disaggregated and reliable data platform. “To successfully reach Latino voters, campaign managers and organizers need to understand that there is great dynamism and complexity in the factors that impact Latino voter behavior, and the Latino Data Hub provides a window to understand that diversity and complexity through key indicators like educational attainment, income or health care,” said Dominguez-Villegas, co-director of research for UCLA LPPI. Dominguez-Villegas provided context based on UCLA LPPI research for stakeholders looking to effectively engage with Latinos. He pointed out that political preferences are driven by the rich mosaic of Latino communities and thus more diverse than many assume. Understanding this dynamism is critical in reaching Latino voters, he said. They should be viewed not as monolithic but as a rich and diverse community that has varied, and sometimes rapidly changing, demographic and socioeconomic trends. Another topic of discussion was the deeper level of trust that many Latinos hold for Spanish-language media over other sources. By providing information in Spanish that is culturally and linguistically relevant while addressing issues of importance to Latinos, Spanish-language media can help ensure that Latino voters have the information they need to make informed decisions and meaningfully engage in the political process.
View additional photos on Flickr
International Investigators Hear From People Who Have Experienced Homelessness
On March 1, the Spatial Justice Community Collaborative class under the direction of UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy joined with the Promise Institute for Human Rights to host the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Soledad García Muñoz, special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights. During a presentation that built on research by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, six presenters affiliated with the class talked about their lived experiences, including the time some had spent living in homeless encampments such as one at Echo Park Lake that had been forcibly cleared by law enforcement two years earlier. García Muñoz and her colleagues, Daniel Norona and Paul Mora, then asked questions and spoke about the importance of such interactions to their mission to investigate allegations of human rights throughout the Americas. García Muñoz also viewed an altar that was built by the class to honor the large number of preventable deaths of unhoused residents in Los Angeles. And she engaged in conversation with panelists such as Jennifer Blake, whose artwork focuses on uplifting people like herself who have experienced homelessness.
View photos on Flicker
UCLA Luskin Day at Los Angeles City Hall Returns
UCLA Luskin is back at Los Angeles City Hall. Following a hiatus in the annual event caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, students from the School’s three graduate programs — Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning — traveled downtown Feb. 24 to meet, interview and learn from local leaders from government, nonprofit agencies and the community. This year, Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman hosted the group, led by Luskin faculty advisor Michael Lens, on the topic “Homelessness Governance Reform — Service-Led Models, Building More Housing, Better County-City Collaboration.” “It’s important to see the economic constraints, the practical constraints, the political constraints that our elected officials and our policymakers operate under,” said Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin. Also important, Lens said, is that “the big ideas and plans we talked about in class — about what ‘Professor Lens’ thinks that the city should do tomorrow — just isn’t so easy to do.” He tasked students to take information from the day, co-sponsored by UCLA Government and Community Relations, and ask how to apply it to the real world. For Raman, getting people off the streets involves talking to, and building relationships of trust with, people experiencing homelessness. “You have to go out there and understand who they are, what brought them to the streets, and to ensure that they believe you when you say, ‘I have something to offer you that will help address exactly what brought you here and help bring you indoors,’ ” said Raman, who will receive a written memorandum of findings and policy recommendations from the students.
View more photos from the day on Flickr
On the Fiscal Politics Behind American’s Vast System of Freeways
A new book co-authored by Brian Taylor, professor of urban planning and public policy, tells the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of U.S. urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing this revolutionary type of road system about. “The Drive for Dollars: How Fiscal Politics Shaped Urban Freeways and Transformed American Cities,” published by Oxford University Press, argues that the way we raise and spend transportation revenue has shaped our transportation system and the lives of those who use it, from the era before the automobile to the present day. “Our approach is to ‘follow the money,’” wrote Taylor and co-authors Eric A. Morris of Clemson University and Jeffrey R. Brown of Florida State University. “Our fundamental argument is that freeways in general, interstate freeways in particular, and urban freeways most of all were importantly shaped by money — the constraints caused by the lack of it, the means of raising it, the politics of dividing it, the policies for spending it and the incentives promoted by it.” “The Drive for Dollars” also offers guidance for the present and future on how to fund and plan transportation more equitably, provide travelers with better mobility, and increase environmental sustainability and urban livability. The book is dedicated to the late Martin Wachs, the UCLA and UC Berkeley transportation scholar known for his passion for planning history and transportation finance as well as his commitment to teaching.