Archive for: Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld

Steinert-Threlkeld on Social Media Response to Kamala Harris

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Assistant Professor of Public Policy Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld spoke to Zenger News about the growing role of social media in recent election cycles. Social media engagement with stories about Joe Biden hit a high the week the Democratic presidential candidate named Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. Social media has become a more significant part of the political process than in previous election cycles, Steinert-Thelkeld explained. This increase in social media engagement makes it difficult to draw comparisons with Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as his running mate in 2016. However, Steinert-Thelkeld highlighted the differences between the vice presidential candidates. “I think it’s more about the person that people are responding to as opposed to the four-year difference,” he said. “Pence is not that exciting. Pence is like the Biden now, and Kamala is like the Trump then.”

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8th Annual Trivia Night Is a Battle of Bits

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Super Quiz Bowl — a longstanding UCLA Luskin tradition — went virtual this year due to COVID-19, but enthusiasm remained high with nearly 250 competitors participating via home computers and cellphones in a trivia night held May 28. “From this mighty group, we had 19 faculty and staff, 110 students and 119 alumni,” said organizer Tammy Borrero, the School’s director of events. “This was our highest participation since its inception eight years ago.” Individuals and groups were able to compete simultaneously in the six-round tournament while enjoying a quick home-cooked meal or sofa snack and favorite beverage, thanks to Borrero and a team of staff and faculty who served as game hosts, co-organizers and participants. All three of the School’s graduate programs and the undergraduate Public Affairs major formed creatively named teams including PhDs in PJs, Mighty MURPs and Categorial Exemption. This year’s group prize went to a combined team of urban planners and social welfare graduate students, which evened out department standings across all years of competition, according to organizers. Plans are already underway to bring the event back under the tent next year.

Team Competition Winners

First Place: Plucky Opposers (Social Welfare and Urban Planning) Hanako Justice (SW), Julia Kulewicz (SW), Sam Speroni (UP), Arthur Sun (SW), Meagan Wang (UP)
Second Place: All Coast All Stars (Public Policy) Robert Gamboa, Brian Harris, Eric Schroer, Samuel Stalls, Sean Tan
Third Place: La Croix Taste Test (Public Policy) Adam Barsch, Jess Bendit, Rosie Brown, Dickran Jebejian, and Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld

Individual Competition Winners

First Place: Melody Wang, Urban Planning and Social Welfare
Second Place: Michael Busse, Urban Planning
Third Place: Nathaniel Singer, Undergraduate Program

Steinert-Threlkeld on Search for Facts Amid ‘Infodemic’

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Assistant Professor of Public Policy Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld was featured in a Well and Good article about the role of social media in the COVID-19 pandemic. Dwindling trust in traditional media outlets has prompted people to turn to social media for news, making it difficult to discern credible sources from non-credible sources. The WHO has described the spread of hazardous false information as an “infodemic.” Steinert-Threlkeld commented that in countries like Iran and China, where information is censored, citizens have been turning to banned networks in search of accurate information. “Because it was clear to individuals [in China] that what they were seeing was different from what state media was saying, people very quickly downloaded VPNs [to access banned sites like Twitter], which we’ve seen in past crises as well,” he explained. “What we’ve seen in a lot of provinces, especially where Wuhan is, is a tripling in the number of users accessing Twitter once the quarantine happened.”

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NSF Grant Funds New Approach to Analyzing News Data

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The National Science Foundation has awarded a UCLA research team more than $944,000 to develop a framework for integrating massive amounts of data from several types of news sources. The cross-campus collaboration between the Department of Communication and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs will produce a database that analyzes text, images, video and audio from print, television and online media.  “No one has attempted to merge different sources of social and mass media data into one database,” said Assistant Professor of Communication Jungseock Joo, the principal investigator. Using cutting-edge computational methods, the team will build a system to automatically evaluate the data to identify topics, actors, events, sentiments and other large-scale patterns. The team includes UCLA Luskin’s Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor of public policy who has studied vast troves of social media data in his research into subnational conflict. Steinert-Threlkeld said the new tool will enable researchers, students, policymakers, politicians and ordinary citizens to learn more about how information is disseminated. The team, which includes UCLA Communication faculty members Francis Steen and Tim Groeling, will collaborate with Stanford University’s Jennifer Pan, a specialist on social media data from China. — Mary Braswell

Jungseock Joo

Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld

Tapping Twitter to Understand Crowd Behavior and Protests UCLA Luskin Public Policy scholar Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld authors a how-to guide on cutting-edge research using social media data

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By Stan Paul

Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld has long been fascinated by crowd dynamics, especially among those drawn to mass demonstrations. As a Ph.D. candidate in political science, Steinert-Threlkeld knew that social media generated at protests were a rich source of data — but he could find few tools to help him analyze it.

Now, in a world awash with popular uprisings and social movements — from Tahrir Square in 2011 to the Women’s March following the 2017 presidential inauguration — the assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs has used data generated by millions of posts on Twitter to learn more about crowd behavior and mass motivation.

Steinert-Threlkeld created a guide for acquiring and working with data sets culled from Twitter, which has more than 320 million global accounts generating more than half a billion messages every day.

His efforts culminated this year with the publication of “Twitter as Data,” the first guide in Cambridge University Press’ new Elements series on Quantitative and Computational Methods for Social Science. The series provides short introductions and hands-on tutorials to new and innovative research methodologies that may not yet appear in textbooks.

“When I was learning this as a graduate student, there was a lot of piecing together this information,” said Steinert-Threlkeld, who said he relied on sources such as Twitter documentation and online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow. “I was able to do it, but it would have been a lot nicer if I had a textbook to show me the lay of the land.”

Steinert-Threlkeld, whose work combines his interest in computational social science and social networks with his research on protest and subnational conflict, said the book includes an interactive online version that allows users to click on links to download information and even sample data.

“It is differently comprehensive than a book,” Steinert-Threlkeld said. He described it as a “more interactive book experience — the first in social science that does this.”

In the book, Steinert-Threlkeld writes: “The increasing prevalence of digital communications technology — the internet and mobile phones — provides the possibility of analyzing human behavior at a level of detail previously unimaginable.” He compares this to the development of the microscope, which “facilitated the development of the germ theory of disease.”

He adds: “These tools are no more difficult to learn and use than other qualitative and quantitative methods, but they are not commonly taught to social scientists.”

To remedy this, Steinert-Threlkeld provides a systematic introduction to data sources and tools needed to benefit from them.

For example, people always want to know who’s protesting and how that influences others who might protest, Steinert-Threlkeld said. Most information has been restricted to surveys, which have limitations. “And so the researcher either gets lucky and happens to have scheduled a survey that occurs during a protest, but usually it’s after the fact.”

That is what’s exciting about using big data to study crowd behavior. “It’s like people always answering surveys,” he said. “Basically, every second you’re giving me survey data. Now we can tell in real time who’s protesting.”

One application of Twitter data is estimating crowd size, Steinert-Threlkeld said. In the past, he has had to rely on reports from organizers, police and the media to gauge the size of protests. “But I’m collecting tweets with GPS coordinates so I can say, ‘Oh, there are these many tweets or these many users from L.A. at this time or Pershing Square at this time, and explain whether that’s a reliable estimate or not of actual protesters.”

Twitter information can also be used to create data based on images shared from protests, Steinert-Threlkeld said. “The work I did before was all text based: What are people saying? Who’s saying it? When are they saying it? That sort of thing. But people share a lot of images online. They share more than they did three or four years ago. It’s really where the space is moving.”

Steinert-Threlkeld said that getting data into a form that a researcher can use requires a different skill set than designing and administering a survey. “But it’s still in some ways survey-like at the end of the day,” he said.

And “it’s fun,” he said. “Now we can tell in real time who’s protesting. We don’t know where the person lives, or their income, or their name. It’s still anonymous. We don’t know if the person who shares the image was there so we’re not incriminating anyone, but we can get a lot of information about protesters that we couldn’t before.”

In the final section of his guide, Steinert-Threlkeld writes: “These data are not a ‘revolution.’ Instead, they represent the next stage in the constant increase in data available to researchers. To stay at the forefront of data analysis, one needs to know some programming in order to interface with websites and data services, download data automatically, algorithmically clean and analyze data, and present these data in low-dimension environments. The skills are modern; the change is eternal.”

New Sources, Innovative Applications of Big Data Explored at Conference UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation researchers demonstrate how digital technology is transforming humans into sensors that generate behavioral data on an unprecedented scale

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By Stan Paul

If your 2016 Thanksgiving dinner was shorter than usual, the turkey on your dining table may not have been to blame.

Who you had dinner with and their political affiliations following last year’s divisive election may have shortened the holiday get-together by about 25 minutes — or up to an hour depending on how many campaign/political messages saturated your market area. It’s all in the data.

“It’s not that conservatives and [liberals] don’t like eating Thanksgiving dinner with each other;  they don’t like eating Thanksgiving dinner together after an incredibly polarizing period,” said Keith Chen, associate professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Chen was among a group of scholars and data researchers who presented recent findings on Aug. 25, 2017, at a daylong conference about computational social science and digital technology hosted by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.

Information gleaned from social media and from cellphone tracking data can reveal and confirm political polarization and other topics, such as poverty or protest, said researchers who gathered at the “The Future of Humans as Sensors” conference held at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

The event brought together social scientists and data researchers to look for “ways to either extend what we can do with existing data sets or explore new sources of ‘big data,’” said Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, assistant professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin and the leader of the program.

Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, led “The Future of Humans as Sensors” conference and presented finding from his research on measuring protests with social media.

Steinert-Threlkeld presented his latest research, which was motivated by the Women’s March in the United States, as an example of measuring protest with new data sources that include geo-located Twitter accounts. While conducting research, Steinert-Threlkeld has observed that working with social media data has actually become more difficult of late.

“While Facebook lets you use data from profiles that are public, most people have private profiles,” Steinert-Threlkeld said. Seeing private data requires researchers to work directly with Facebook, which has become more cautious in the wake of a controversial 2014 paper, thus impacting what scholars can publish. In addition, Instagram previously provided much more data, but since 2016 it has followed the Facebook model and that data has been severely restricted despite Instagram’s norm of having public profiles, he said.

“This workshop will discuss how ‘humans as sensors’ can continue to yield productive research agendas,” Steinert-Threlkeld told conference attendees.

Talking about new and innovative ways to do this, Michael Macy, a sociologist and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell, began his presentation by pointing out the innate difficulties of observing human behavior and social interaction, as well as both the potential and the limitations of social media data.

“There are privacy concerns; the interactions are fleeting. You have to be right there at the time when it happens.” He added, “They’re usually behind closed doors, and the number of interactions increases exponentially with the size of the population.”

But, Macy said, new technologies in various scientific fields have opened up research opportunities that were previously inaccessible.

“We can see things that we could never see before. In fact, not only can we see things, the web sees everything and it forgets nothing.”

He tempered the potential of digital data with the fact that for the past several decades the main instrument of social science observation has been the survey, which comes with its own limitations, including unreliability when people recount their own behavior or rely on memories of past events. But, he said, “In some ways I see these social media data as being really nicely complementary with the survey. They have offsetting strengths and weaknesses.”

Macy provided examples of ways that tracking of political polarization can be done, not by looking at extreme positions on a single issue but by inferring positions on one issue by knowing the position that individuals hold on another. This can range from their choices of books on politics and science to their preferences for cars, fast food and music.

“The method seems to recover something real about political alignments … political alignment can be inferred from those purchases, and then we can look to see what else they’re purchasing,” Macy said.

“What I think we’re really looking at is not the era of explanation, at least for now … it’s the era of measurement, and what we are now able to do is to test theories that we could not test before because we can see things that we could not see before.”

The day’s presentations also included the ways in which data can be used to provide rapid policy evaluation with targeted crowds and how demographic sampling weights from Twitter data could be used to improve public opinion estimates. Data could also help fight poverty worldwide.

The world seems awash in information and data, but “most of world doesn’t live in a data-rich environment,” said presenter Joshua Blumemstock, an assistant professor at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information and director of the school’s Data-Intensive Development Lab.

“You can use Twitter data to measure unemployment in Spain. The problem is that these methods don’t port very well in developing countries,” Blumenstock said. “There’s these big black holes in Africa for Twitter.”

Blumenstock discussed how data from billions of mobile phone calls in countries such as Rwanda could be used in conjunction with survey data to create a composite of where individuals fall on the socioeconomic spectrum. In turn, the information collected could be “aggregated up” to a much larger regional or national level.

“And when you aggregate up, you start to get things that might be conceivably useful to someone doing research or some policymaker,” such as being able to respond instantaneously to economic shocks, Blumenstock said. In addition, instead of costing millions of dollars and taking years, he said this methodology could potentially cost thousands of dollars and be conducted in weeks or months.

“For researchers like me who are interested in understanding the causes and consequences of poverty … just measuring the poverty is the first step. For people designing policy for these countries, their hands are tied if they don’t even know where poverty is,” Blumenstock explained. “It’s hard to think about how to fix it.”

 

 

 

Organized Protest May Come From the Fervor of Crowds, Not Core Individuals UCLA Luskin professor’s analysis of 14 million tweets from the Arab Spring showed that normal people drive huge movements

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By Stan Paul

The massive Arab Spring protests that began in late December 2010 and spread from North Africa to the Middle East generated huge crowds and had quick and profound effects — including the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had held a firm grip on the country for decades.

Was this the work of people at the core of networks trying for years to create such a movement? Not according to research by Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

In a paper published in “American Political Science Review,” Steinert-Threlkeld argues that individuals not central to a social network may be more responsible for generating collective action and driving protest than those at the center. Steinert-Threlkeld calls his theory of the periphery’s ability to mobilize “spontaneous collective action.”

“Protests occur as a result of decentralized coordination of individuals, and this coordination helps explain fluctuating levels of protest,” Steinert-Threlkeld wrote in the study, “Spontaneous Collective Action: Peripheral Mobilization During the Arab Spring.” Although not intended to explain the Arab Spring, Steinert-Threlkeld’s paper presents the first large-scale, systematic evidence of how individuals behaved in each country.

Unlike simple models such as disease contagion or transmission of news, which need only one exposure to infect or inform the next individual, the spreading of protests is more complex, making it less certain, said Steinert-Threlkeld, who teaches courses on these topics at the undergraduate and graduate levels at UCLA Luskin.

“Having someone tell you, ‘Hey, I’m going to protest tomorrow’ is much less impactful than having multiple people tell you they are protesting tomorrow,” he said. Large groups of people, as opposed to a few central individuals, are able to discuss “where to go, how to get there, when to go,” as well as what is going on once there, Steinert-Threlkeld added. In addition, individuals debating whether or not to protest must receive a credible signal that large numbers of people are protesting.

“Protests are a complex contagion phenomenon because increasing participation makes others more likely to join,” Steinert-Threlkeld said, pointing out that because more individuals are on the periphery than in the core of a network, protest is more likely to occur where the larger group is located. “The decision to participate in a protest appears to be driven by normal people taking cues from each other, not from elites.”

In testing his theory, Steinert-Threlkeld took advantage of the Integrated Conflict Early Warning System, a dataset of daily protests across 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa during 14 months in 2010 and 2011. He then combined the dataset with geocoded, individual-level communications (nearly 14 million tweets from the same period), to measure the numbers of connections of each person.

“These 13,754,988 tweets show what was being said, when it was being said, where and how many connections each tweet author had,” he reported in the study. “Combining these datasets and using a wide range of models and operationalizations, mass mobilization is shown to occur through peripheral individuals.”

Said Steinert-Threlkeld: “Egypt’s January 25th protests surprised everyone — activists, bystanders and state authorities — with its large mobilization and brief occupation of Tahrir Square.”

He added that many Muslim Brotherhood leaders were summarily jailed — even though they did not sanction protests — because the Mubarak regime assumed only they could have mobilized such a crowd.

“This paper demonstrates the contributions big data can make to understanding processes of social influence in social networks,” he said.

Putting Post-Election Protests in Context A UCLA Luskin expert on collective action says mass protests in the U.S. will likely lose steam

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By Les Dunseith

The wave of protests that erupted after Donald J. Trump’s unexpected presidential victory was no surprise to Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs Department of Public Policy whose research focuses on spontaneous collective action and the mobilization of mass protests.

“There were protests before the election as well,” said Steinert-Threlkeld, noting that most of Trump’s campaign rallies were accompanied by small altercations between his supporters and opponents. “But I would be surprised if it persists. These things tend to die out” as time passes.

The ebb and flow of protest movements are one of the key elements of Steinert-Threlkeld’s research, which has looked primarily at the role of mass protest in countries where citizens rose up unexpectedly against authoritarian regimes.

During the Arab Spring of early 2011 that helped topple governments in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, demonstrations had begun to subside before an emotional interview with a Google employee about his secret incarceration and interrogation by Egyptian police sparked new protests.

“Even in something as severe as overthrowing a dictator, there is a natural decay” in protest movements, Steinert-Threlkeld explained. Such mass actions tend to lose momentum unless new events arise to spark anger and trigger renewed focus, and this is likely to prove true in America as well.

“People get tired; people have jobs; you get fatigued from protesting,” Steinert-Threlkeld said. “Or maybe you just can’t afford to participate anymore.”

A new addition to the UCLA Luskin faculty this year, Steinert-Threlkeld said he has long been interested in collective actions, and that interest turned into serious research when the Arab Spring happened to occur during the first quarter of his first year in graduate school. His interest relates primarily to a desire to understand and analyze how people work together as groups, he said, not because he has any strong activist tendencies himself.

His academic pursuits look, in part, at the nature of protest movements. Contrary to what some may think, Steinert-Threlkeld has found that group actions are most often driven by those on the periphery of a protest — average people whose motivation is spontaneous and rooted in emotion. Protest organizers and political activists actually have little control over whether people get together or stay together, he found.

For instance, during the Arab Spring movement in Egypt, a protest organizer tried to put together a major rally early on, “and no one came out,” Steinert-Threlkeld said. One week later, the protest movement started around Cairo before converging on Tahrir Square. “Pockets of small protests sprang up around Cairo, with people just banging pots and pans, and walking through these narrow alleyways telling other people to come and join them,” Steinert-Threlkeld explained.

That’s when the movement in Egypt really took off, he said, because most demonstrators are much more likely to be motivated to action when they see “local people from your neighborhood protesting, which tells you that maybe you should join the protest too.”

In the case of the anti-Trump rallies, it’s therefore logical that most protests have occurred in places like California with a significant population of like-minded, politically liberal residents. Someone thinking about joining a protest is much more likely to actually participate, Steinert-Threlkeld said, if they know someone “who is protesting and could tell them where and when to go.”

The recent protests in the United States have primarily been peaceful, which is usually the more productive approach, according to Steinert-Threlkeld.

“The academic literature suggests that non-violent mass action is more effective because the protesters then have legitimacy. If you are destroying property, then the news media just focuses on the 10 people who are destroying property,” he said. “Violence would be bad for the protesters because it would decrease their legitimacy and make it harder for them to gain allies.”

One aspect of the post-election protests in the Unites States that is very different than the Arab Spring uprisings he studied, Steinert-Threlkeld said, is the lack of a clear path that would achieve the protestors’ rallying cry to “dump Trump.”

At this point, it’s unlikely that a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress would be motivated toward impeachment of Trump. “It has to be those people who voted for him who would have to tell their congresspeople to impeach him,” Steinert-Threlkeld said.

Barring a stunning change of opinion prompted by Trump’s actions as president, or disclosure of a criminal act on his part, Steinert-Threlkeld said it’s unlikely that U.S. protests will lead to “a regime change” as did the Arab Spring.

“In that sense, I think there’s much less at stake,” he said. “The extent of these protests is, perhaps, to set a check on a Trump Administration, to enlighten him and his allies that there are people who are very dissatisfied — that this election is not a blank check to do whatever they want.”

A UCLA Luskin Welcome Departments of Public Policy, Social Welfare, Urban Planning welcome six new faculty members

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By Stan Paul

Six new members of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs faculty were warmly welcomed at a reception held Oct. 18 and hosted by their new Luskin departments of Public Policy, Social Welfare and Urban Planning. Interim Dean Lois Takahashi and the three department chairs were also on hand to welcome the new teachers and researchers.

This year, the School’s three departments strengthened their faculty teaching and research rosters with the additions of Darin Christensen and Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld (Public Policy), Leyla Karimli and Laura Wray-Lake (Social Welfare), and Michael Manville and Kian Goh (Urban Planning).

In Public Policy, Darin Christensen will be teaching three classes at Luskin this year. “The students are great, really engaged,” said Christensen, who recently received his Stanford Ph.D. in political science. Christensen said he will be showing his Master of Public Policy (MPP) students how to bring evidence to bear on policy decisions, teaching them tools for wrangling and exploring data, as well as statistical methods that generate credible claims about “what policies work.” In another course offered this quarter, he is discussing how political institutions and public policies affect why some countries are rich and peaceful while others with persistent poverty and instability.

Also joining the Public Policy department this year is Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld, who will begin teaching this winter quarter on topics including social networks and protest. “I study protest,” said Steinert-Threlkeld, who completed his Ph.D. in political science this year at UC San Diego. “Wherever there is a protest in the world, I go to Twitter and see what people say. Are they expressing political grievances because they’re mad about the economy?”

Steinert-Threlkeld, who studies social media as it relates to subnational conflict, teaches analysis of “big data.” “If anyone wants to learn with Twitter data,” he said, “they can reach out to me. I would love to be working with motivated students or faculty.”

In Social Welfare, Laura Wray-Lake, who comes to UCLA from the University of Rochester, will be teaching two classes in winter: research methods with children and youth, and development and resilience for the Master of Social Work (MSW) students. “I was really excited about the interdisciplinary environment” at Luskin, she said, explaining that her area of research is civic engagement. “I’m really interested in how to get young people interested in politics and the communities, and solving social issues.”

Leyla Karimli brings an international focus to Social Welfare on topics including child welfare, education and child labor. With more than a decade of international research and practice, her work has taken her to a number of countries in Africa as well as Colombia, the Philippines, Tajikistan and Krgyzstan. She will be teaching on program evaluation and topics including a multidisciplinary analysis of poverty and social exclusion, one of her main research interests.

Returning to UCLA, assistant professor Michael Manville said he is currently teaching courses on transportation and the environment and another on shared mobility. Manville, who earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Urban Planning at Luskin, most recently was an assistant professor at Cornell University in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Manville said the rest of the year he will be teaching transportation, land use and public finance, primarily for the Urban Planning Department’s master’s students.

Urban Planner Kian Goh plans to teach a winter quarter seminar titled “Urban Futures,” with a focus on space, ecology and society. In the spring, she will teach a studio course on site planning and a qualitative methods course.

“This year I am continuing my research broadly on the politics of urban climate change adaptation and research on the L.A. region,” said Goh, who comes to Luskin from Northeastern University. “It’s inevitable, not just because I am here but because it so interesting. I think the L.A. region is an example of urban form.”

Goh has focused her research on cities from New York to Jakarta.

“It is really helpful to look at other cities,” she said. “I think of the challenges we face here and all of the opportunities. We’ve learned a lot from other regions.”