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Archive for: Ananya Roy

Latest Cohort of 4 Activists-in-Residence Is Largest Ever UCLA's cityLAB, Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and Asian American Studies Center will serve as on-campus hosts

February 3, 2023/0 Comments/in For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, School of Public Affairs Ananya Roy, Dana Cuff, Karen Umemoto /by Mary Braswell

UCLA welcomed an artist and three community organizers to campus on Jan. 31 during the 2023 UCLA Activists-in-Residence reception held at DeCafe in Perloff Hall.

This year, four activists were selected, making this the largest cohort in the program’s six-year history. Steve Diaz and Josiah Edwards will be working with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which has selected at least one activist since 2017.

Diaz is deputy director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) based in downtown Los Angeles, and Edwards is a youth climate justice organizer who grew up in the South Bay area of L.A. County.

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center returns to the residency program after a pandemic-related hiatus to host Melissa Acedera. The daughter of Filipino immigrants to Los Angeles, Acedera is a founder of two community-powered food systems helping feed unhoused and food-insecure communities across L.A. and Orange counties.

New to the Activists-in-Residence program this year is cityLAB-UCLA, which selected Marlené Nancy Lopez, a public artist whose work focuses on serving communities through muralism, storytelling and multimedia. She was born and raised in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Conceptualized as a sabbatical, the residency allows for time and space to reflect, envision new projects, and connect with UCLA faculty, students and staff. At the reception, each of the activists spoke briefly about their previous experiences and their plans for the next few months.

Find out more about the activists and their plans.

View photos from the reception on Flickr.

2023 Activists in Residence

A Worldly Perspective

January 3, 2023/0 Comments/in Luskin Forum Online Ananya Roy, Manisha Shah, Paavo Monkkonen /by Les Dunseith

Thinking beyond borders is an integral part of a UCLA education.

The commitment to international scholarship is even spelled out in the Luskin School’s strategic plan. It recognizes UCLA’s unique position as a public university situated “in the ‘world city’ of Los Angeles, a living laboratory for the far-reaching issues facing communities across the United States and around the world.”

Roughly one in five current faculty members at UCLA Luskin conduct research primarily with an international focus. Their scholarly contributions frequently appear in journals with a global orientation or get recognized in other ways.

Two men in academic robes present a canister containing a document to a woman in the middle

Professor Ananya Roy receives the Doctorat Honoris Causa (honorary doctorate) at the University of Geneva from Rector Yves Flückiger and Social Sciences Dean Pascal Sciarni.

For example, Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning and social welfare, traveled to Switzerland in October to receive a Doctorat Honoris Causa at the University of Geneva. An honorary doctorate is one of the highest academic honors one can receive.

“I didn’t have any ties to the University of Geneva,” Roy said after the ceremony, which was televised. “But as the faculty there reminded me, it will now always be my university.”

Some faculty efforts involve a pooling of resources. The Latin American Cities Initiative draws on Los Angeles’ ties to countries across the Americas to share knowledge about managing urban spaces. Directed by Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy, the initiative known as Ciudades hosts seminars and conferences and conducts an international planning studio in Latin America that immerses students in real-world case studies.

And the Global Lab for Research in Action focuses on hard-to-reach populations around the world through a social justice lens. Manisha Shah of public policy leads the research, which seeks remedies for the health, education and economic needs of women and children.

A global focus is also found in many L.A.-based efforts, both new and ongoing.

In summer 2022, social welfare students and scholars hosted the International Summer University in Social Work, during which colleagues from around the world explored theories and practices that promote justice. More than 20 participants from four continents came to campus for a two-week exploration of topics such as racism, the wealth gap, gender bias and homelessness.

Last spring, the Luskin School hosted a virtual Global Mini-Summit as part of its signature Luskin Summit policy dialogue series. Discussions are underway to expand this concept into an ongoing series focused on international concerns.

Plus, numerous alumni now hold positions in foreign governments or work in agencies or businesses with an international mindset.

Several stories in this edition of Luskin Forum take a closer look at the ways UCLA Luskin is bringing a global perspective to issues of public concern.

Right to Housing

November 29, 2022/0 Comments/in Alumni, For Policymakers, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, Urban Planning Ananya Roy, Kian Goh /by Marisa Lemorande

At a time of mass homelessness, deepening tenant precarity, and the criminalization of poverty, housing justice movements are pushing for a right to housing in California. In this convening, current and former UN Special Rapporteurs on Adequate Housing provide insight and guidance on key elements of such a right, how such a right can be informed by an international human rights framework, and how such a right can become an actionable government obligation. In conversation with prominent housing justice leaders, they will take up questions such as: What does the right to housing mean for those without a right to recognized housing, notably unhoused communities? How can the right to housing address the effects of global financialization on housing markets and housing systems? Is there a vision of social housing that can be a core part of such a right? How might the right to housing remake highly unequal relations of property and land?

Featuring UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Adequate Housing:
Leilani Farha, 2014 – 2020
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, 2020 – 2026
Raquel Rolnik, 2008 – 2014

With commentary by:
Gary Blasi, Tenant Power Toolkit
Clarissa Woo Hermosillo, ACLU Southern California
Christina Livingston, ACCE
Pete White, Los Angeles Community Action Network

Chaired by:
Ananya Roy, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Roy on Cold Exposure Deaths of Unhoused People in L.A.

October 5, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Ananya Roy /by Stan Paul

Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare Ananya Roy spoke to The Guardian for a story about 14 unhoused individuals who reportedly froze to death in 2021 in Los Angeles. Despite L.A.’s reputation of year-round sunshine and warm weather, the story cites data showing that hypothermia fatalities have been on the rise in recent years, exceeding the rate in San Francisco and New York City combined. The story also references a report by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which tracked deaths of people who were unhoused during the COVID-19 pandemic, and which found that Los Angeles County shelters — while open during cold periods — are not always accessible. “Each time people go through this cycle and are sent back to the streets, they’ve lost social networks and personal belongings, they’ve often had to give up pets or been separated from loved ones, and so they return more vulnerable,” said Roy, director of the Institute.

Read the article


Roy on L.A. Ban on Homeless Encampments Near Schools

August 11, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Ananya Roy /by Mary Braswell

Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, spoke to the New York Times about the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to prohibit homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet of public and private schools and day care centers. The new law, passed on a vote of 11-3, would bump the number of banned sites from 20 to 2,000, one councilman estimated. “It’s not an effort to alleviate poverty. It’s an effort to manage visible poverty and get it out of sight,” said Roy, a professor of social welfare, urban planning and geography. As more people begin living on the streets, “liberal cities are doing everything in their power to get around Martin v. Boise,” she said, referring to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 ruling that prosecuting people for sleeping in public amounts to cruel and unusual punishment when no shelter beds are available.

Read the article

 

$1.5 Million Grant Will Support Institute’s Social Justice Mission Marguerite Casey Foundation's award to Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will bolster efforts that link academic pursuits to community organizing

July 21, 2022/0 Comments/in Development and Housing, Diversity, Education, For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, Latinos, Politics, Research Projects, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, Social Welfare News, Social Welfare PhD, Urban Planning Ananya Roy /by Les Dunseith
By Les Dunseith
The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has received a $1.5 million grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation to bolster the institute’s ongoing programs in support of social justice movements in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

The institute is among four recipients of grants totaling $6 million from the foundation, which are intended as a bridge between social justice scholarship and social movements.

“We believe that bold investments in ideas about how to shift power in society must be matched with bold investments in organizing efforts that help bring them to life,” foundation President and CEO Carmen Rojas said in announcing the grants.

The new funds will help the institute, launched in 2016 and based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, continue to advance social justice in cooperation with colleagues and community partners, said Ananya Roy, the institute’s founding director and a UCLA professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography.

“We have been building an interinstitutional space connecting university-based and movement-based scholars in the shared work of research and scholarship to analyze and challenge dispossession and displacement in U.S. cities and communities,” Roy said.

As part of that work, Roy and her colleagues and partners are seeking to ensure that increased government spending on public programs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic benefits those most in need rather than further entrenching race and class inequality, exploitation and oppression.

Rojas, who, like Roy, earned a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley, stressed that organizing efforts supported by the grants “should be multiracial and durable in nature to ensure that their impact reflects the character of the communities they aim to serve and leaves those communities changed, more informed, more free and better able to shape our democracy and economy.”

In applying for the grant, the institute pledged to support efforts to “advance the collective power of those who have been excluded, evicted, criminalized, banished and disappeared by liberal democracy, from the unhoused to climate refugees.”

The institute’s grant-related plans include:

  • Expanding its signature activist-in-residence program.
  • Hosting a distinguished speakers series focused social and racial justice movements, with particular attention on scholars based in the global South. To this end, the series will use both in-person and virtual formats.
  • Organizing “freedom schools” that bring together movement-based and university scholars for theoretical and methodological training related to social justice.
  • Initiating a program to unite leading university and movement-based scholars around a shared vision and narrative of housing justice that reaffirms housing as a reparative public good.
  • Creating doctoral student and faculty seed grants to support research at the intersection of ideas and organizing.

Also receiving $1.5 million grants from the foundation were the Portal Project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago; Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher based in Chicago; and the Highlander Research and Education Center, a grassroots organizing and movement-building organization active in Appalachia and the American South.

A Tool to Aid Renters Fighting Eviction

July 20, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Ananya Roy, Hannah Appel /by Mary Braswell

Media outlets including CalMatters, Los Angeles magazine, Telemundo48 and Truthout covered the launch of the Tenant Power Toolkit, an online platform that helps renters facing eviction navigate a complicated legal process. The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D) is one of several groups that collaborated on the toolkit, which helps California tenants who receive an eviction notice prepare an initial response under tight deadlines, protecting them against default judgments. The online tool also educates renters about their rights and connects them with advocacy groups that can provide legal assistance. More than 50 tenant advocates and attorneys worked on the Tenant Power Toolkit over the last two years. In addition to the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, they represented groups including the Debt Collective, co-founded by II&D Associate Faculty Director Hannah Appel; the LA Tenants Union; the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project; and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

Read the CalMatters story
Read the Truthout op-ed

 

An Institute Whose Name Is Also Its Mission

June 22, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin Forum Online Ananya Roy /by Les Dunseith

Upon receiving the naming gift from Meyer and Renee Luskin, the School embarked on a self-examination to codify a path forward. One goal identified a decade ago by the planning task force reads: “position UCLA Luskin as a national leader in analyzing and teaching about the root causes and consequences of inequality in America.” How? Create a research center — and that became the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, now in its sixth year. That name didn’t spring forth easily, however. Learn that history and more about the Institute, known for providing a voice for activists and advocates, from our former dean, the Institute’s founding director and a doctoral student who has been with the Institute almost since the beginning.

Frank Gilliam, whose tenure as dean at the Luskin School ended in 2015 when he became chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The Luskins are very interested in inequality and in a just society. It was the thing that they hammered home over and over. 

We started talking about creating a research action center to address that. And we fumbled in the weeds a bit for a couple of years, trying to figure out a name, trying to figure out what the institute would look like and the issues that it would work on.

It was called Institute X for a couple of years because we couldn’t figure out the name. And then, finally, we landed on two big concepts that, as it turns out now, often seem to be under attack. On the one hand, democracy, and on the other hand, equality. 

Ananya Roy, founding director of the Institute and professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography 

You didn’t want to call it the Institute for Social Justice?

Gilliam: We worried that social justice had such heavy quantitative meaning that people wouldn’t be able to give [the Institute] a chance to do the work, even settle on what it ought to be. So, we stayed away from that.

Roy: I think the name is a really interesting provocation. It prompted me to look at the ways in which democracies, inequality persist. How? Why? And what do we do
about that?

I had spent much of my academic career at UC Berkeley. And I was willing to make the move and serve as founding director of this institute because I found this to be such a wonderful and unusual opportunity.

I looked closely at other centers that are focused on inequality at other universities — Harvard, Stanford. And most of them focused on inequality but did not think about democracy simultaneously. None of them thought about space and cities. Almost none had serious relationships with communities and movements, and almost all of them were focused exclusively on the U.S.

Most of them were led by economists, so I said, “OK, we’re going to do something different here” and take very seriously this question of power, political power, or collective action of what a radical meaningful democracy would mean. What it means to actually think about issues such as housing in relation to rights.

We’re going to do this by paying close attention to the spaces in which people actually live their lives and struggle with these forms of inequality. And we are going to recognize the connections across different parts of the world.

What makes us different, even from other centers in the Luskin School and at UCLA, is that we realize that we can’t do this work without building deep relationships of trust with the communities that are actually most impacted by inequality. 

In Los Angeles, this is everything from unhoused communities to working-class communities of color
facing eviction to the communities that are subject to racialized policing.

In my early years as a director, I spent a lot of time getting to know movements in these communities, spending time at community events and with community organizations. I joked early on that L.A. is the sort of city — this was before COVID — that you showed love by showing up. You braved the traffic and you showed up consistently. … And sit in the back of the room and listen and learn.

Now we have research partnerships with movement organizations … the research we do is often “homework” assigned to us by communities in need and by movements that are doing the advocacy work.

I’m very proud … we’ve done our work with integrity. Powerful universities are often mistrusted by communities that are suffering. They’re worried about how academic research almost extracts their stories, puts it on display without giving anything back.

We try very much to do the opposite. I call this research justice. It is about being accountable to the communities most impacted and to those whose futures and whose reality we are writing about. 

Mostly importantly, we believe that they have the right to critique us, to call us out and to say, “You didn’t do this properly. Do it again.”

Hilary Malson, a June 2022 doctoral graduate in urban planning who is among the many students who have worked with Roy or received funding through the Institute

My first introduction to working with the Institute actually started before I set foot on campus. Professor Roy, she reached out to me once I was admitted as a Ph.D. student and asked me to consult on a grant that she was putting together.

I have previous work experience in public history … as a curatorial research assistant at the Smithsonian Institution. From the moment I arrived on campus, I was involved in stewarding that housing justice and unequal city research coordination.

My independent dissertation work … analyzes Black displacement from cities through a critical Black diaspora studies lens. So, instead of quantifying and mapping the losses of gentrification — how many people no longer live here, for instance — I ask, what does community building look like for a people that has faced ongoing, generational displacement and dispersal.

The work that we have undertaken on housing justice is community-based, first and foremost, which means it is fundamentally and primarily accountable to the communities with whom we study and from whom we learn so much.

Gilliam: The work that this center does is extraordinarily important. And I think the thing that separates it — its secret sauce — is that it also translates into action. And that’s the part I’d hoped for.

But it took Professor Roy to make that happen, and I’m so glad it did.

A System That Threatens Rights of the Unhoused

May 27, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Ananya Roy, Marques Vestal /by Mary Braswell

A New Republic article on Los Angeles homelessness policies that led to the 2021 sweep of an encampment at Echo Park Lake cited UCLA Luskin faculty members Ananya Roy and Mark Vestal. The two scholars described a shelter system that often violates the rights of unhoused individuals. Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and author of a report on the fallout from the Echo Park Lake eviction, said residents of interim housing face “a constant stripping of rights in the way that in prison you’re stripped of your rights.” Before entering interim housing, residents must testify that “no tenancy is created,” effectively denying them hard-fought rights associated with being a tenant, said Vestal, an assistant professor of urban planning. He added that politicians and police often deploy the language of mental illness, “justifying the shelter system as a medical intervention,” rather than confronting the public policies that deprive people of dignified housing.

Read the article

 

Roy and Henderson on Warring Perceptions of Life on the Streets

May 10, 2022/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Ananya Roy /by Mary Braswell

The Los Angeles Times published an extended conversation between two key figures at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy that revealed the growing solidarity between movement-based scholars and unhoused public intellectuals as Los Angeles grapples with the crisis of homelessness. Ananya Roy, the institute’s executive director, spoke with Theo Henderson, this year’s UCLA Activist-in-Residence, about warring perceptions about life on L.A. streets. What city officials call “cleanups” of homeless encampments are actually dehumanizing sweeps of people and their belongings that do not provide lasting housing solutions, said Henderson, founder of the podcast “We the Unhoused.” “They’re doing it because the public does not want to see poor people,” he said. The two spoke of art as a tool for empowering Los Angeles’ diverse network of community advocates. “We need creative releases to be able to keep the movement going, the spirits up, the morale up and to hope for a better day,” Henderson said.

Read the article

 

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