2024
Identifying interventions to increase the uptake of evidence-based policy
PI: Graeme Blair (Political Science)
Abstract forthcoming.
Sidewalking: Design for Equitable Youth Mobility
PI: Dana Cuff (Architecture and Urban Design)
For youth in the city, independent mobility and access to safe and vibrant sidewalk spaces can foster wellbeing, social cohesion, and urban citizenship. But in many underserved neighborhoods, sidewalks are infrastructural symbols of structural inequity. cityLAB's recent Pathways to Autonomy study identified the mobility needs and visions of young pedestrians through youth-centered, transdisciplinary methods to understand the social and spatial conditions shaping youth mobility in Westlake, Los Angeles. To transform these research findings into practical, impactful interventions, through Sidewalking we will design, fabricate, and install a series of experimental and adaptable infrastructural elements that support youth mobility in Westlake. These prototypes will activate sidewalks as safe, social spaces and demonstrate how design research and building strategies can creatively translate youth-centered insights into youth-serving infrastructure. In continued partnership with the community organization Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), LADOT, and StreetsLA, we will evaluate the interventions and generate a widely applicable handbook of effective sidewalk infrastructure strategies that support youth mobility in urban contexts.
Language development of bilingual children with hearing loss in Los Angeles
PI: Margaret Cychosz (Linguistics)
Hispanic children in the U.S. are more likely to be diagnosed with hearing loss than non-Hispanic peers. They are also more likely to be acquiring two languages. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are assistive listening devices that help children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, including bilingual children, improve their spoken language development. But Hispanic families face systematic barriers to healthcare access in L.A., so their children often don’t receive the critical listening devices that they need to learn spoken language. The result is that Hispanic deaf and hard-of-hearing children, many of whom are bilingual, have poorer language skills than non-Hispanic, monolingual peers. This proposal examines how the language that bilingual deaf and hard-of-hearing children hear at home impacts their spoken language development to understand the trajectory of language development in an under-served population. Results will provide informed and educational recommendations to create supportive, bilingual home environments for children and families.
The Roots/Routes of Ecological Crisis, Public Activism and Repair Lab (REPAIR)
PI: Keston Perry (African American Studies)
Since 2019, a growing resurgence of climate justice activism has gripped the world. These actions confronting the climate emergency have regularly centered global North participants and ignore historical actions, knowledge, experiences, and ideas from global south, Afro-descended, and Indigenous communities, and movements. This project aims to create space and develop a community of practice among scholars, activists, artists and performers that engender deeper synergies between social scientific research and public activism centering emerging movements, community-based knowledge, and artistic practice engaged in climate justice research and activism in the Caribbean. The project will culminate in a community gathering bringing together social scientists, community workers, artists, writers, and performers to explore the roots of ecological crisis, emerging and past climate justice movements, interventions, and activism and social science knowledge about climate justice. It thus offers opportunities for community engagement and practice-based learning for academics working to support non-academic audiences and engaging in public-facing community work.
Heat, Climate Change and Platform Work Futures
PI: Raval Noopur (Information Studies)
This exploratory project will inaugurate a new long-term ethnographic inquiry into the impact of climate change on 'gig workers' such as food delivery drivers, app-based cab drivers and app-based care workers in urban India. Even as there is growing scholarship on the exploitative nature of algorithmic and app-based platform work, the experiences and vulnerabilities of platform workers vary widely depending on their gender, race, caste, class and citizenship status. This project will aim to deepen that understanding by documenting how increasingly hot summers as well as extreme youth unemployment are contributing to a more precarious work future for platform workers and how they are coping with it.
Collaborative Synergy and Upcycling to Enable Academic AI Research and Education
PI: Dan Ruan (Radiation Oncology)
Artificial intelligence (AI) has brought significant changes in technology advancement and reshaped resource availability. Current large foundation models are trained on huge GPU farms with unlimited network bandwidth, and a significant carbon footprint. Such extreme concentration of computational power and the heavy dependency on it in building AI systems, leads to exclusively industry monopolized large models, depriving researchers at nonprofit academic institutions from developing, inspecting, or dissecting such models independently, and even less accessible to teachers and students for educational purposes. As the AI models become larger and deeper, this forms a fast-growing critical gap between the desire to work, teach, and learn AI, and the resource to support such endeavor. Working with multiple computational medicine departments and labs, our research aims to identify the strategies to support AI research, and strategies to enable AI education infrastructure under resource constraints.
Comparing Two Methodologies for Generating Historic Protest Data
PI: Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld (Public Policy)
Data on overlooked protests fit into three categories. The first, available online for download, is the rarest. The other categories require dataset creation. The second is data via narrative history, events in prose that need to be put into dataset format with human reading. The third is data already in dataset form in a book, such as tables or maps of events. This category is the most promising for dataset creation because the data exist in print form, so making digital versions of them is straightforward; all that is required is labor. The ORCA Acceleration Grant will allow me to test two methodologies to build data from the third category, spurring a new phase of my research and eventually enabling other researchers once the final database is public.
Investigating Clausal Complementation in West African Languages
PI: Harold Torrence (Linguistics)
This project seeks to broaden and deepen understanding of how clausal complementation systems work cross linguistically by focusing on West African languages. Led by linguist and African Studies Center Director, Professor Harold Torrence, the team will conduct research and training in Ghana and Senegal pairing students at UCLA with counterparts at African universities.
Fostering Civil Discourse and Community Well-Being: Strategies for Building Campus Cohesion and Support at UCLA
PI: Jennifer Wagman (Community Health Sciences)
The proposed study aims to investigate the increasing mistrust and division among students and faculty at UCLA, exacerbated by recent political and social activism, polarized opinions, and violent incidents. Using a qualitative methodology, we will conduct 40 in-depth interviews and 10 focus group discussions with diverse members of the UCLA community, including students, faculty, staff, and administrative leaders. The research will focus on understanding barriers to civil discourse and constructive engagement, promoting respectful dialogue, and identifying strategies to enhance mental health and community well-being. Data analysis will yield evidence-based recommendations for fostering trust and inclusivity. The study's findings will be shared through a dedicated website and with UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, ensuring broad dissemination and practical application to create a safer, more supportive campus environment.
2023
Male Labor Migration and Rural Women’s Health: Understanding Connections and Optimizing Actions
PI: Victor Agadjanian (Sociology)
Co-PIs: Alina Dorian (Community Health Sciences), Shant Shekherdimian (Surgery)
The project will bring together the sociological, biomedical, and public health perspectives and corresponding expertise of the team members to link men’s international labor migration with left-behind women’s health in rural Armenia. A standardized survey with a representative sample of women in rural communities and semi-structured interviews with health providers serving those communities will be carried out. These data will be jointly analyzed to examine how men’s migration, through its gendered effects on family resources, opportunities, and relationships, may facilitate or obstruct women’s demand for, access to, and utilization of two types of health services: reproductive healthcare and breast/gynecological cancer prevention and detection. The findings will provide guidance for effective policy interventions by governmental institutions and non-governmental agencies. They will also greatly strengthen the team’s ability to obtain extramural funding for larger-scale investigative and applied projects focused on improving health and wellbeing of rural women and other vulnerable populations.
Sidewalk Stories: A Narrative Podcast Series for Providers Working with People Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles
PI: Elizabeth Bromley (Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior)
This project will use narrative podcasts to bring to life the stories of those in service to people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in Los Angeles (LA). Each episode will be inspired by true stories told by homeless service providers in LA adapted for a general audience. Narratives will be followed by a discussion that inspires and supports while addressing intersectional concerns including burnout, class and poverty, race and racism, structural and interpersonal violence, and incarceration. Episodes will be professionally produced to include compelling voice acting and sound design and will have an accompanying online library of poetry, visual artwork, and resources. Our DMH + UCLA Public Mental Health Partnership (PMHP) team will integrate this series into an existing podcast feed of evidence-based clinical trainings. This project centers homeless services providers as creative storytellers in ways that promote reflection, emotional expression, and imagination in the work of serving PEH in LA.
Sleep Deprivation in Prison
PI: Sharon Dolovich (Law)
Prisons are notoriously volatile environments. They are also places in which everyone inside—staff and prisoners alike—is chronically sleep deprived. Advances in sleep science strongly suggest that this situation is already taking a severe toll on the physical, psychological and emotional health of all who live and work in carceral settings. And as an institutional matter, persistent sleep disruption exacerbates the danger and instability of the prison. This constitutive aspect of the carceral experience has received little attention from scholars. This study fills this gap. Through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people and current correctional officers, this study will excavate and analyze the various conditions that together produce systematic sleep interference. It will also investigate the effects on the prison environment when everyone inside operates under a perpetual sleep deficit, consider available policy responses, and explore the normative implications of the phenomenon.
The Black Feminist Healing Arts Labs
PI: Ugo Edu (African American Studies)
This project seeks to create a space for exploring and practicing Black feminist healing arts. In partnership with Black Womxn’s Health Collective and the Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health & Healing, we bring together scholars, creatives, activists, healers, and community members to share healing journeys, experiences, techniques, and practices in Black feminist healing arts. The project will culminate in a community gathering where we will showcase a representative collection of the healing arts curated for public experimentation. This work is part of a larger project focused on building a comprehensive digital learning platform that will guide visitors through various Black feminist healing modalities, syllabi, and resources.
Student Debt
PI: Melissa Ann Finell (Film, Television, Digital Media)
"Student Debt" is a narrative short film about a millennial woman living in Los Angeles. Underemployed and saddled with student debt, she is presented with a unique opportunity to make enough money to get herself back on her feet. The only question is - how far will she go? This film project uses dark humor and irony to explore the student debt crisis, the housing crisis, income and wealth inequality both in Los Angeles and across the US.
Arms Around America
PI: Daniel Froot (World Arts and Cultures/Dance)
Arms Around America (AAA) is a community-based oral history/podcast/theater project by Dan Froot & Company (DF&Co), a Los Angeles-based, socially-engaged theater ensemble. AAA fosters dialogue from across the ideological spectrum on Americans’ relationships with guns. To what extent can theatrical storytelling increase mutual understanding and reduce polarization? Can the arts impact Americans’ attitudes toward guns and gun violence? AAA’s theatrical material derives from book-length oral histories conducted by DF&Co of diverse families from around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. It culminates in live theater performances across the U.S., community dialogues, and a podcast featuring artists, scholars, and community stakeholders. The Arms Around America Public Relations and Community Ambassadors Initiative extends this work through targeted community partnerships and a focused media campaign, aiming to lower barriers to accessing the live theater events, diversify theater audiences and build lasting relationships within participating communities.
Characterizing the impact of genomic structural variation in the UCLA Precision Health ATLAS EHR-linked Biobank
PI: Roel Ophoff (Medicine)
Genetic factors play an important role in health and disease. This includes disease susceptibilities impacting age of onset, disease severity, progression, and trajectory. Large-scale genetic studies are performed to identify causal genetic factors in hopes of improving disease diagnosis, prevention, and early intervention. One class of genetic variants, i.e., genomic deletions and duplications (also known as copy-number variants (CNVs)), is understudied because of technical challenges. At the same time, CNVs represent a significant proportion of the human genome and have been causally linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, type-II diabetes, and coronary heart disease. Here, we propose to characterize the landscape of CNVs using data from the UCLA ATLAS Community Health Initiative, one of the largest and most ancestrally diverse cohorts with > 60,000 individuals. Facilitated by the rich phenotypic resource, our research aims to reveal population-specific distributions of CNVs and their phenome-wide effects, featuring an exploration that supports future epidemiological, clinical, and pharmaceutical studies.
Street vendors in Mexico and the United States: A binational comparison of organizing capacity in distinct economic and political conditions
PI: Christopher Tilly (Urban Planning)
In close collaboration with my colleague Georgina Rojas-García of Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Study in Social Anthropology (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS), I propose to conduct a comparative qualitative study of the political and organizing strategies of street vendor organizations in Mexico and the United States, based on case studies of organizations in two of the largest cities in each country. The current moment offers a unique opportunity to study the relevant grassroots organizations in action, given the stresses imposed on street vendors by the pandemic and the shifting political opportunities presented by changing local governments and legal regimes.
Jovita y Valentín: A Story of Grief and Action (Feature-Length Documentary)
PI: Maria Teresa Zubiaurre (European Languages and Transcultural Studies)
Jovita García Ortiz (State of Hidalgo, Mexico) and Valentín Flores Flores (State of Puebla, Mexico) are just two of the thousands of migrants who have perished trying to cross the Arizona desert into the United States since the implementation in 1994 of “Prevention through Deterrence,” a set of policies that reroutes migration into remote and unforgiving terrain. Jovita y Valentín: A Story of Grief and Action is a feature-length documentary in post-production on the devastating impact of migrant death in rural Mexico. It is the story also of four other migrants who take action to help locate, identify, repatriate, and honor Jovita and Valentín, namely, Oaxacan Eli and Marisela Ortiz, the founders of the search and rescue organization Aguilas del Desierto/Desert Eagles; Guatemalan Mirza Monterroso, the Missing Migrant Program Director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights; and Colombian border artist Álvaro Enciso.
