David C. Turner III Receives 2025 Marie O. Weil Best Article Award Award recognizes Turner’s research on the lived experiences of Black youth and systems of punishment.

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David C. Turner III is an Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice in the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He is also a faculty affiliate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the faculty director of the Million Dollar Hoods Project on campus. Turner is this year’s winner of the Marie O. Weil Outstanding Scholarship Award, co-sponsored by the Association of Community Organizations and Social Administration (ACOSA) and Taylor & Francis Publishing.  

Turner’s article, “To Me, it Kind of Felt Normal”-Defining the Normalcy of Carcerality with Black Men, Boys, and Youth Workers,” draws on dozens of interviews with Black male youth activists and examines how Black boys and young men experience the normalcy of carcerality—the everyday presence of carceral power and control in their lives. 

Headshot of assistant professor David C. Turner III“This award is an incredible honor and a testament to the value of community-driven research. I’d like to thank the selection committee, and I’d especially like to thank the young people and community partners who participated in this project. Oftentimes, the experiences of Black male youth are told through the lens of others, especially with a framing that positions them as just “receiving” the impact of social institutions. This article, and my work more broadly, speaks to how important agency is in transforming the punishment-driven conditions that Black boys and young men who work to change their communities have declared as normal. Those young people and their peers are unnormalizing carceral culture every day.” 

The Marie O. Weil Outstanding Scholarship Award recognizes outstanding scholarship published in the Journal of Community Practice and is based on contributions to the field, scholarly approach, and promotion of macro practice values. 

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

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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.

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'

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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).

UCLA scholars, from left, Ananya Roy, David C. Turner III and Sherene H. Razack join featured speaker Barbara Ransby on stage at Kerckhoff Hall.

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.

Barbara Ransby Luskin Lecture

Turner on the People’s Budget

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David C. Turner III, assistant professor of Black life and racial justice on the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty, spoke to Spectrum News’ “Inside the Issues” about the history and current goals of the People’s Budget, a community-led alternative to Los Angeles’ official budget. The People’s Budget coalition surveyed Angelenos and found that they want to see funds spent with them in mind, Turner said. For example, money reallocated to grassroots violence prevention programs and gun violence education would “actually help keep us safe,” he said. “We need to make sure we are investing in those strategies.” Continued investment in law enforcement “not only hasn’t worked but statistically doesn’t necessarily help communities,” Turner said. “We could reinvest those dollars and get so much more return on our investment.” The interview begins at the program’s 21-minute mark.

Watch the interview

 

Turner on Alternatives to School Police

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David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare, spoke to the San Fernando Valley Sun about the Police Free LAUSD Coalition, which calls for redirecting funds away from school police and toward expanded mental health and academic counseling programs. Turner is co-author of a report released by the coalition that includes a five-point plan to invest in the holistic well-being of all students. “We wanted to make sure that we were able to uplift the community’s voice and also uplift some alternatives to policing that people can adopt today,” Turner said. The new report reflects the LAUSD community’s wants and needs, including the position that policing in schools prevents people from feeling safe and puts the community in danger, he said. Reallocation of funds to support students of different races is a priority, as well as community development, holistic academic achievement and the well-being of students.

Read the article

 

Turner on the Need for Disruptive Protest

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A Los Angeles Times column about recent clashes between L.A. public officials and protesters cited David C. Turner, assistant professor of social welfare. Scandals have enveloped City Hall, with three former council members facing federal corruption charges and continuing fallout from a leaked recording of a racist conversation among city leaders. In response, members of the public have been loud, aggressive and disruptive, and high-ranking officials have openly condemned their detractors. Turner said it’s a deeply troubling sign when elected leaders or their supporters attack their constituents and critics. All protest is by nature confrontational and no social movement has ever succeeded without violating the rules of decorum, he noted. “There’s always this dichotomy drawn between those who protest nicely versus those who are disruptive or confrontational,” Turner said. “But if you study social movements, you know that they need one another. Real change doesn’t happen without both.”

Read the essay

Turner on Combating Crime With Racial Justice

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A Los Angeles Times column arguing that Democrats have failed to convincingly address voters’ concerns about crime cited David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare. The GOP’s midterm messaging casting Democrats as soft on crime is largely aimed at a white audience, but many people of color also fear that they or their families will be the victims of violence. The column noted that 81% of Black voters and about 65% of Latino voters cite crime as a top issue. Rather than a militarized response, these communities seek proposals for preventing violent crime, such as after-school programs and job opportunities for young people, said Turner, whose scholarship focuses on Black life and racial justice. “We don’t want increased police presence, because what the research has shown is that regardless of socioeconomic status, increased police presence is not good for any Black community,” he said.

Read the column

Megan Mullin Becomes an Endowed Chair and Faculty Director at UCLA Luskin Environmental politics scholar joins Luskin Center for Innovation leadership team as urgent climate change challenges face California and the country

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By Stan Paul and Michelle Einstein

Megan Mullin — an award-winning scholar of American political institutions and behavior, focusing on environmental politics —  has joined the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, filling two endowed roles. 

In January, she joined the faculty of UCLA Public Policy as the Meyer and Renee Luskin Endowed Professor of Innovation and Sustainability. Mullin, currently a professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has also been appointed the new faculty director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. Meyer and Renee Luskin recently endowed both the professorship and faculty director roles.

“Megan Mullin is a unique scholar whose work, at the intersection of environmental protection and the policy process, is perfectly suited to take the Center for Innovation to the next level,” said Gary Segura, former dean of the Luskin School.

Mullin’s appointment comes amid challenges facing California and the country relating to heat, drought and wildfires related to climate change. The path to solutions is steeped in politics — from the level of local communities to the nation’s capital.

“I explore environmental policies that are just, effective and environmentally sustainable. Governance research can help ensure that policies are successfully implemented,” Mullin said.

Her areas of research include the governance and finance of urban water services, public opinion about climate change and the local politics of climate adaptation. 

“Megan understands the factors necessary for action – from the role of public opinion and elections, to how environmental policy is affected by the complex layers of American federalism,” said Public Policy chair Mark A. Peterson. “My colleagues and I are thrilled that Megan will be joining our department as she also takes on the faculty director role at the Luskin Center for Innovation.”

As faculty director, Mullin plans to build upon the center’s work solving environmental challenges through collaborative, actionable research.

“I’m delighted to help advance the Luskins’ vision of bringing UCLA’s expertise to confront our biggest public challenges. The center is bringing that vision to life by collaborating with decision-makers and community members to make on-the-ground impact in environmental policy,” Mullin said. “I look forward to joining that important work and furthering it.”  

Mullin brings a breadth of qualifications for the position. In addition to her role at the Nicholas School, she also held appointments at Duke’s Department of Political Science and Sanford School of Public Policy. Mullin is a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and serves on the leadership team for C-CoAST, a National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary initiative to study human-natural interactions in coastal systems. Recipient of five awards from the American Political Science Association, she earned a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley.

“Megan is one of the nation’s most esteemed social scientists addressing the local politics of inequitable access to clean water and climate adaptation,” said Gregory Pierce, formerly the acting co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. “She will increase our local and national impact through her scholarly and community-engaged understanding of how to affect change at a critical time.”

In a recent article in Nature, Mullin explained why Americans have been slow to respond to the climate crisis and argued that “it is time to bring political knowledge to bear on decisions about protecting people from its consequences.”

Mullin envisions expanding upon the center’s work with a governance lens. Her research aims to understand political feasibility. Specifically, Mullin wants to increase the Luskin Center’s influence on environmental policies in California and more recent work on the national stage. 

“There are so many lessons learned from California’s environmental innovations that can be applied elsewhere,” Mullin said. “That’s not just about helping California learn, but also understanding what’s transportable to different contexts.” 

“She will bring an integrated set of research skills, teaching experience and policy impact that’s a fantastic fit,” said Peterson, a professor of public policy, political science and law at UCLA. 

Mullin plans to start teaching courses in the spring quarter and said she believes that students are an important bridge for research and practice. 

“And yes, I really love teaching and mentoring students,” Mullin said. “That’s an excitement about Luskin – the extent to which the center is integrating students into so many different parts of its activities.” 

She also welcomes the Luskin School’s focus on the intersection of policy, planning and social welfare. “That intersection is a powerful combination to understand environmental policy at the local level,” Mullin said. “For instance, confronting climate change also requires thinking about housing and social services. And considering how communities have enormously different risks and capacities. This is a unique opportunity to bring all of those pieces together.” 

Mullin is the recipient of a Duke University award for excellence in graduate student mentoring. She teaches and advises students in the areas of environmental politics, local politics and water governance in the United States.

“So many of my former students are now out working in environmental professions, and that’s how I understand what challenges they’re confronting. That informs my research agenda. It’s an ongoing conversation,” said Mullin, whose research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Carnegie Corporation, the JEHT Foundation, and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. 

Mullin’s appointment completed the Luskin Center for Innovation’s leadership transition following the departure of JR DeShazo, the founding faculty director, who was appointed dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in 2021.

As the faculty director of the center, Mullin joined an existing executive team with Pierce,  V. Kelly Turner and Colleen Callahan. Pierce and Callahan continue to serve in executive leadership roles, and Turner is taking on a new leadership role furthering her research on climate action.