Faculty: Ananya Roy

Fugitive Sanctuaries: Ananya Roy on Migration, Solidarity, and Sanctuary Luskin professor examines how migrant movements, not states, create safety in the face of structural violence.

Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning and social welfare, and founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, recently contributed a powerful essay to Jewish Currents titled “Fugitive Sanctuaries.” In this piece, Roy expands on her longstanding scholarship on inequality, displacement, and urban policy by placing recent federal immigration crackdowns in a broader historical and political context.

Drawing on the harrowing events of the 2025 “deportation summer” in Los Angeles, she shows how routine civic life was transformed into zones of terror for marginalized communities. Protesters challenged these policies, only to be met with claims of “violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement,” she notes, highlighting the escalation of federal force.

Roy writes that “it has only ever been migrant movements, rather than benevolent states, that have granted true safety for the endangered,” a line that encapsulates her central argument about solidarity and sanctuary. She urges readers to see sanctuary not as policy alone but as collective struggle in the face of aggressive enforcement.

Read the full article in Jewish Currents.

Welcoming the 2026 UCLA Activists-in-Residence

The UCLA Activists-in-Residence program welcomed its ninth cohort to campus for a five-month residency that provides time to reflect and recharge, envision new projects, and connect with UCLA faculty, students, and staff.

Four activists are participating in this year’s program, which supports artists, community organizers, and movement leaders as they undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change. The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will host three activists — José Gama Vargas, Chelsea Kirk, and Chris Tyler — and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center will host Set Hernandez.

José Gama Vargas, a steward of the vast ancestral territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation, is exploring what it means to unite gardeners as they stand in solidarity with the land, with each other and with the land’s original caretakers.
Set Hernandez is a queer and undocumented filmmaker, writer, and community organizer with roots in the Philippines. Since 2010, they have organized around migrant justice issues, from deportation defense to health care access.
Chelsea Kirk is a tenant organizer, researcher, and policy advocate whose work is oriented toward building a better world without predatory landlords. She earned her UCLA Luskin Master of Urban and Regional Planning in 2025.
Chris Tyler, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union and communications manager at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, works for housing and economic justice, organizing neighbors, fighting evictions, and coordinating educational programs.

Learn more about the UCLA Activists-in-Residence program and this year’s cohort

Housing the Third Reconstruction

February 10, 2026/in For Faculty, For Students, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Urban Planning Ananya Roy, Kian Goh /by Marisa Lemorande

As the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy turns 10, this convening takes up the conditions and possibilities of a third reconstruction, or the unfinished work of abolition, reparation and decolonization. Learning from freedom movements, as the Institute has always done, we foreground insurgencies that dismantle police-property relations and situate the U.S. as an empire-state within a world of landless and poor people’s movements. Taking place at a conjuncture of resurgent white nationalism, we ask how the public university can house the third reconstruction and chart the forms of study necessary for dangerous times.

Sessions: We Believe in Living: Organizing in the Wake; From White Reconstruction to the Third Reconstruction; Reconstructing the University; We Live in Public: Abolitionist Futures

Convenors: Ananya Roy, Hannah Appel, Kian Goh, Marisa Lemorande

Participants: AnMarie Mendoza, Annie Powers, Lupita Limón Corrales, Terra Graziani, Anthony Orendorff, Robin D.G. Kelley, Cheryl Harris, Hilary Malson, Dylan Rodriguez, K-Sue Park, Charmaine Chua, Grace Hong, Hamid Khan, Raúl Carrillo, Rahim Kurwa, Andrew Ross, Malav Kanuga, Michele Lancione, Carla Orendorff, Amy Ritterbusch, JT Roane, Leonardo Vilchis

For more information & RSVP>> https://housingthethirdreconstruction.eventbrite.com

Fourth Annual Distinguished Lecture in Ideas and Organizing with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy is honored to welcome Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore for its Fourth Annual Distinguished Lecture in Ideas and Organizing. One of the preeminent abolitionist scholars of our times, she is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center where she was Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014 to 2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including Critical Resistance, Professor Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

This lecture is part of the ongoing programs celebrating the Institute at 10. Since 2016, the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has organized knowledge to challenge inequality, accompanying movements and communities on the frontlines of displacement and dispossession. We look forward to seeing you at this in-person program at the historic UCLA Nimoy Theater where Professor Gilmore will be joined by Institute directors Ananya Roy, Hannah Appel, and Kian Goh.

For more information & RSVP>> https://ruthwilsongilmore.eventbrite.com

On Migrant Crackdowns and Empty Humanitarian Rhetoric

October 31, 2025/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News, Urban Planning Ananya Roy /by Mary Braswell

UCLA Luskin’s Ananya Roy spoke to KPFA’s Against the Grain program about the recently published book “Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion.”

Co-edited by Roy and Veronika Zablotsky, the book’s essays examine how poor and vulnerable migrants are viewed and treated, and the empty humanitarian rhetoric of liberal democracies of the West.

Being forced out of a country that one considers to be home is a form of racial segregation and oppression, Roy said on KPFA.

“We wanted to take seriously the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants are crossing deadly borders, risking death, risking separation from loved ones, risking never to be able to return home. And to understand what happens to migrants after they cross these borders, which is often the illegalization of their presence, of their migration, the denial of asylum status,” said Roy, a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography and founding faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

UCLA Grants Deepen Ties to the L.A. Community Projects by Luskin faculty will build collaboration among scholars, students and local partners

March 17, 2025/0 Comments/in For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, Urban Planning Ananya Roy, Chris Zepeda-Millan, David C. Turner III, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Kirsten Schwarz, Laura Abrams, Michael Lens, Paavo Monkkonen, Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld /by Mary Braswell

The first goal of UCLA’s Strategic Plan is deepening collaborations and connections with Los Angeles. This academic year, several UCLA Luskin faculty are helping the university meet that mark.

As recipients of grants from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, these faculty will explore ways to strengthen ties between community partners and UCLA students and scholars, with the goal of finding solutions to L.A.’s most pressing issues.

This year, the UCLA Community-Engaged Research Grants will fund exploratory projects including:

Achieving and Implementing Abolition in Los Angeles

Co-Principal Investigators: David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez, professor of history, African American studies and urban planning

Community Partners: Justice LA; Check the Sheriff’s Coalition; Police-Free LAUSD Coalition; People’s Budget LA Coalition; PUSH LA Coalition; LA Youth Uprising Coalition

Million Dollar Hoods is a UCLA research project that advances the labors of activists and advocates working to change how public dollars are spent in Los Angeles. In particular, it advances the work of those seeking to reduce criminal justice budgets while expanding health services, housing options, welfare benefits and employment opportunities. This grant will fund a deep strategic planning and research process focused on implementing community-led policy initiatives that reallocate public resources to supporting human-centered services.

Aligning Housing Policy With Popular Demand for More Housing

Co-Principal Investigators: Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, associate professor of public policy, and Paavo Monkkonen, professor of urban planning and public policy

Community Partner: Abundant Housing Los Angeles

Angelenos understand the scarcity of housing and want to see more constructed. According to a November 2020 survey by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 64% of Angelenos call increasing housing supply a top or high priority. Support for more housing is one of the few bipartisan policy issues in the country, yet new housing construction in Los Angeles remains at multi-decade lows and rents and housing prices continue to rise. Untangling this puzzle is the focus of this community research.

Building Urban Soil Networks in Los Angeles for Research and Action

Co-Principal Investigators: Kirsten Schwarz, associate professor of urban planning and environmental health sciences, and Jennifer Jay, professor of civil and environmental engineering

Community Partners: TreePeople; Physicians for Social Responsibility – LA; Communities for a Better Environment; Watts Labor Community Action Committee – Better Watts Initiative

Urban soils are an important regional and national equity concern that shape the health and well-being of urban dwellers. They also represent a paradox of sorts, as contaminated soils are a hazard and clean soils are beneficial to the ecosystem. This project brings together community groups active in urban soils work in the L.A. region to build relationships, identify potential collaborations, and begin the process of coalescing around a common set of research priorities and actions.

Building Worker Power: Support for Low-Wage Worker Leadership With the Los Angeles Worker Center Network

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Zepeda-Millan, associate professor of public policy, Chicano/a and Central American studies and political science, and chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies program; and Tobias Higbie, professor of history and director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Community Partners: Los Angeles Worker Center Network, including: CLEAN CarWash Worker Center; Garment Worker Center; Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance; Los Angeles Black Worker Center; Pilipino Workers Center; Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles; Warehouse Workers Resource Center

The UCLA Labor Center, a founding member of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, seeks to document best practices around multi-racial, multi-industry, multi-language organizing in support of labor standards, immigrant rights and anti-discrimination enforcement. In this project, researchers and worker centers will determine the best methods — such as popular education, storytelling, academic journals and social media — to document successful and replicable L.A. worker campaigns since 2009. They will also implement legal clinics and provide technical assistance to local agencies enforcing fair labor laws.

Healing Within While Incarcerated: The Role of Credible Messengers in Transformative Justice in L.A. County

Co-Principal Investigators: Lauren Ng, assistant professor of psychology, and Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare

Community Partner: Healing Dialogue and Action

Incarcerated youth experience a multitude of poor social, emotional and physical health outcomes after detention. To address these concerns, Los Angeles County has adopted a “rehabilitative, care-first model” of juvenile justice that is being implemented by Credible Messengers — leaders with the lived experience of incarceration. There has been limited academic collaboration investigating Credible Messenger programs. This partnership with an organization working in county juvenile justice facilities will advance the science behind the Credible Messenger approach with the aim of promoting healing of justice-involved youth.

Housing and Homelessness Justice Research Collaborative

Co-Principal Investigators: Chris Herring, assistant professor of sociology, and Ananya Roy, professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography

Community Partners: LA Tenants Union; Union de Vecinos

This grant supports a recently established collaborative partnership between UCLA faculty and the Downtown local of the LA Tenants Union. The funds will allow the partners to broaden a study of Los Angeles’ Permanent Supportive Housing initiative to address homelessness. Despite billions of dollars recently committed to this initiative, no research to date has examined its success or weaknesses. The UCLA grant will allow additional community partners to participate and aid the collaborative in envisioning a multi-year tenant justice research agenda.

Interdisciplinary Center on Housing and Homelessness

Co-Principal Investigators: Till von Wachter, professor of economics; Michael Lens, professor of urban planning and public policy; and Elizabeth Bromley, professor in residence of psychiatry and anthropology

Community Partners: Individual community members; Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority; L.A. County Department of Health Services; L.A. County Department of Mental Health; L.A. County Department of Social Services

L.A.’s housing and homelessness crises are caused by a complex web of factors ranging from lack of housing production and zoning policies to structural racism in labor markets and justice systems. This project focuses on developing an interdisciplinary center that brings research communities together with people with lived experience of homelessness and policymakers from Los Angeles government and nonprofit agencies. The project emphasizes structural reforms needed to reduce homelessness and aims to inform the public debate by replacing misconceptions with data and research.

Previous awards from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement supported the development of two courses designed to immerse undergraduates in community-engaged research. The grants went to Associate Professor of Public Policy Meredith Phillips, who developed a course on data analysis for educational research, and Associate Professor of Social Welfare Lené Levy-Storms, who developed a course on human aging through an interdisciplinary lens.

Read about all of the 2024-25 Community-Engaged Research Exploratory Grants.

‘It Is Only Possible to Fail If We Forget’ Exhibit captures impact of the Echo Park Lake tent community, with lessons for future social movements

February 19, 2025/0 Comments/in For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, School of Public Affairs Ananya Roy /by Mary Braswell

“Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake,” a public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D), captures the spirit of community and resistance that emerged in a settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles.

The exhibition is part of an effort to preserve an important chapter in social movement history, when housed and unhoused organizers fought to protect the alternative world they created at the Echo Park Lake encampment, which was ultimately dismantled by police in March 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Presented with support from the Mellon Foundation, the exhibition is open to the public until March 30, 2025, at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, a project of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

This essay, “It Is Only Possible to Fail If We Forget” by II&D researcher Annie Powers, a PhD candidate in history at UCLA, originally appeared in the Skid Row Arts Zine and is reprinted with permission.

If, as Cuban militant Che Guevara put it, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” then the After Echo Park Lake Archive is a love letter to the future.

Convened by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the After Echo Park Lake Archive began with a collective of housed and unhoused scholar-organizers who participated in the encampment uprising — myself included. Organizing through, and bearing witness to, the afterlives of the Echo Park Lake eviction, the collective’s members experienced the ways in which the encampment was remembered — and, crucially, misremembered.

There were flashy news stories depicting the infrastructure built by encampment residents, the support of the homeless community by the housed community, and the mass eviction by militarized riot police. Marches, rallies, direct actions and eviction defenses at Echo Park Lake all made their way into print — itself an achievement. But beneath and preceding these public accounts, we knew, was the much longer, quieter work required to build the power to fight and the power to stay.

What about the months of weekly strategy meetings and outreach walks? Discussions during pick-up basketball games? Planning schematics for building the showers? Neither spontaneously formed nor perfect by any stretch of the imagination, the organizing between housed and unhoused tenants at Echo Park Lake offers key lessons, ideas and histories to homeless people’s movements of the present and future.

This became the principle of the archive: collecting records of the Echo Park Lake experience that might help housed and unhoused organizers of the future take up the fight in their own times and places. Specifically, this meant prioritizing materials not otherwise publicly available — those produced by encampment members and organizers themselves in the process of collective struggle.

Crucially, we include memories in this collection process, and so the archive contains oral histories with key participants in the Echo Park Lake encampment uprising. We opted to collect materials that would otherwise disappear, materials that tell stories not heard in the press, materials that offer a blueprint for the struggle at Echo Park Lake — not to copy-paste into new contexts, but so that organizers of the future can understand the conditions in which we operated and the paths we chose to take. We also make clear that the eviction from Echo Park Lake was not the end of the story: The people involved kept fighting back.

For members of the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective, the archive attempts to historicize the future. When we began to organize, there were few examples to which we could look. We now understand that this is not because homeless people did not organize in the past, but because there is no historical consciousness of such movements in the United States.

The After Echo Park Lake Archive attempts to cut against such forgetting. We hope to pass on these lessons of love and life — and conflict, confusion and repression, too — to our descendants in struggle. Together, unhoused and housed people, organizing in solidarity, cracked open a window into a different world — one whose undergirding logic was not banishment but loving solidarity. Despite the mass eviction and the death and suffering it yielded, the archive suggests that we must not see Echo Park Lake as a failure — but part of a long arc of organized homeless people’s struggle in Los Angeles, the United States and the world.

It is only possible to fail if we forget.

Photos from “Tents and Tenants” Opening Night

View more photos and video from opening night.

Skid Row History Museum & Archive
250 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 2 – 5 p.m.

“Tents and Tenants” public programs
Friday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m. – Tenants in the Streets, A Panel Discussion
Friday, March 21, at 7 p.m. – The Liberatory Living Room, A Performance

UCLA Public Interest Research Awards Recognize Tenant Advocacy Project

August 14, 2024/0 Comments/in Luskin's Latest Blog Ananya Roy, Hannah Appel /by Mary Braswell

When millions of Americans lost wages at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass evictions loomed. California, and particularly Los Angeles County, with an estimated 365,000 renter households at risk, were no exception. In response, UCLA scholars Hannah Appel, Gary Blasi and Ananya Roy and their colleagues launched an online eviction-defense application called the Tenant Power Toolkit. Working with housing justice lawyers, technologists and community partners, the UCLA team coded the regulatory landscape of California’s 580 jurisdictions into a program tenants can easily use on any internet-connected device, in Spanish or English, to prepare their defenses. For this work, the three scholars have received UCLA Public Impact Research Awards, which celebrate the efforts of faculty who translate research into positive public action that benefits local, national and global communities. The UCLA Office of Research and Creative Activities, which bestows the annual awards, will host a ceremony honoring the recipients later this year. Since the Tenant Power Toolkit launched in July 2022, the program has prepared more than 8,000 eviction defenses, allowing approximately 21,000 tenants — over a third of them children — to avoid default eviction. “Eviction is a systemic problem,” said Appel, who noted that tenants face civil court eviction proceedings alone. “Our toolkit seeks to provide people the tools to fight their eviction while building the collective tenant power necessary to meet that of landlords and a financialized housing market.” Roy is founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, where Appel is associate faculty director. Blasi is a professor emeritus at UCLA Law. — Madeline Adamo

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Resisting the ‘New McCarthyism’ on College Campuses and Beyond In a UCLA lecture, historian Barbara Ransby warns of a 'war over ideas, over facts, over how we see and understand the world'

February 20, 2024/0 Comments/in For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, School of Public Affairs Ananya Roy, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, David C. Turner III /by Mary Braswell

By Mary Braswell

As a leading scholar of the social and political struggles that have shaped the American experience, Barbara Ransby could easily identify the troubling signs around her.

A climate of fear, intimidation and guilt by association is on the rise today, hallmarks of what she called a new McCarthyism — not just in the halls of power but on college campuses that have historically prided themselves on freedom of expression.

“There is a war right on our campuses, a war over ideas, over facts, over how we see and understand the world, over what we can publish and what we can teach, over how we can protest and whether we can protest,” Ransby told a UCLA audience on Feb. 8.

“Our campuses are central battlegrounds and, overall, on the spectrum of liberalism to authoritarianism, we unfortunately see a steady and frightening move toward authoritarianism.”

But Ransby also pointed to important work being done on campuses around the country, “sites of resistance that inspire me and make me optimistic and hopeful in this moment.”

Ransby, an award-winning historian, author and activist, has a long record of building bridges between scholars and grassroots organizers in their common fight for equal rights and opportunities.

She is a founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, and directs the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she is a distinguished professor of African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and history.

Ransby spoke to a capacity crowd in the Grand Salon at UCLA’s Kerckhoff Hall as part of the Luskin Lecture Series and the 2nd Annual Distinguished Lecture in Ideas and Organizing presented by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D).

The event was preceded by a reception and exhibit of photos from Aetna Street in Van Nuys, an encampment where people sheltered in tents and vehicles until the site was cleared by Los Angeles city officials last August. Aetna Street residents, local activists and UCLA scholars are part of a research collective formed to study the struggle for justice for the unhoused, and the photos on display offered glimpses of the community’s experiments in living and public grieving.

During the lecture and panel discussion, several UCLA scholars whose work centers on social justice shared the stage with Ransby: UCLA Luskin professors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean of the Luskin School, and Ananya Roy, director of II&D; Robin D.G. Kelley, distinguished professor of history; Sherene H. Razack, distinguished professor of gender studies; and David C. Turner III, assistant professor of Black life and racial justice at UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

The dialogue touched on causes for alarm on many fronts: This November’s high-stakes U.S. presidential election. Repressive police tactics. The Israel-Gaza war, with its terrible humanitarian toll and fallout for free speech on college campuses.

Ransby issued a call to action, again turning to the lessons of history. During the anti-war and Black freedom movements of the 1960s, she said, campuses were “epicenters of struggle and resistance. Out of this struggle, real victories were won, even though fraught and fragile.”

Today’s scholar-activists, faculty and students alike, all have a stake in the struggle and must resist efforts to silence dissent, she said. For inspiration, she pointed to several thriving university programs that are on the front lines of the fight for racial and gender equity, police reform, climate justice and housing for all.

“These programs, courses and content areas matter, not just because students have a greater breadth of knowledge, which is true and good,” Ransby said. “But these ideas and theories are also tools for liberation and freedom making. …

“As problematic and complicated and contradictory as they are, as much harm as they do, colleges and universities are places where we build trenches, where we carve out oases, where we create spaces to think, collaborate, inspire, and ask critical and courageous questions about freedom and justice.”

Watch the lecture and panel discussion on Vimeo.

View photos of Barbara Ransby’s visit and the Aetna Street photo exhibit on Flickr.

UCLA Hosts Its Largest Activist-in-Residence Cohort Five advocates for social change will be on campus through May to ‘turn the university inside out’

January 31, 2024/0 Comments/in Alumni, Diversity, For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, For Undergraduates, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, Social Welfare News, Urban Planning Ananya Roy /by Les Dunseith

By Les Dunseith

The UCLA Activist-in-Residence program welcomed five more changemakers — the largest cohort in the program’s seven-year history — to campus with a reception Jan. 24 at DeCafe in Perloff Hall.

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which has selected at least one activist since 2017, is hosting community organizer Ron Collins II and revolutionary writer Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia during this academic year.

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center, also a longtime participant in the program, is hosting writer and social justice educator Shengxiao “Sole” Yu.

In its second year with the Activist-in-Residence program, cityLAB-UCLA is hosting Robert A. Clarke, a designer and educator practicing at the intersection of culture, identity and architecture.

A new addition to the program for 2024 is the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center, which is hosting Narges Zagub B.A. Anthropology ’20, a movement worker and facilitator.

Opening remarks for the reception were provided by UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy, who created the residency program soon after arriving at UCLA as the director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

She conceptualized the program as a sabbatical for participants, allowing them time and space to reflect, envision new projects, and connect with UCLA faculty, students and staff.

“More than ever, I am reminded, in these difficult times, that the residency is our effort to turn the university inside out,” Roy told the crowd. “At the Institute, we organize knowledge within, against and beyond the university. The Activist-in-Residence program brings to the university the movement scholars and public intellectuals who are teachers and guides for this praxis.”

Roy and other representatives of the four UCLA sponsors then introduced the individual activists, each of whom spoke briefly about their previous experiences and their plans for the next few months.

The first activist to speak this year was Gray-Garcia, who is a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public. Their rousing remarks were presented in the form of spoken word poetry.

The next activist to speak was Collins, a native of South Los Angeles who is has experience as a social justice strategist and movement builder. Collins’ work advances racial and social justice with a particular focus on Black, LGBTQ and environmental justice issues.

Yu is the creator of Nectar, an online space where she provides political education and healing justice workshops. She spoke of her efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation, particularly when it targets the Chinese-speaking community such as. harmful narratives attacking affirmative action and Black-on-Asian crime tropes during the COVID pandemic.

In his work with cityLAB-UCLA, Clarke said he aims to further efforts to canonize Black aesthetics, helping to authenticate it as a lens through which to practice architecture. Clarke is co-founder of a design practice that explores ways to unearth new aesthetics specific to African American culture, experience and identity.

Narges is a UCLA alumna who gained experience in student and community organizing as part of her undergraduate activities. Their background as a Muslim, queer person from an immigrant family from Libya has helped shape their understanding of community.

Find out more about this year’s activists and their plans.

View photos from the reception on Flickr.