2023
Improving the Representation of Black Participants in Parkinson’s Disease Clinical Trials: A Matter of Science and Justice
PI: Jennifer Adrissi (Neurology)
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States. PD affects all races and ethnicities; however, disparities from diagnosis to management have led to inequitable distribution of disease burden with increased morbidity and worse outcomes in communities of color, especially the Black community. Compounding these disparities is inequitable access to PD clinical trials, limiting the generalizability and validity of research findings and creating a gap in our understanding of PD in the Black population. The proposed study will create a Black PD community advisory council and utilize a participant-centric approach to create two distinct products: (1) a conceptual model of contributors to PD clinical trial engagement in the Black community and (2) a novel, quantitative assessment tool that can be used by PD researchers to systematically evaluate and improve PD clinical trial recruitment and design to maximize trial inclusivity and accessibility for Black research participants.
Leave as luxury: A multi-method examination of the relationship between state level paid parental leave policies and postpartum mental health
PI: Dana Beck (Nursing)
Co-PIs: Kortney James (RAND), Lucinda Canty (Nursing)
Suicide is a leading cause of death after childbirth; structural solutions to address this crisis in the United States are urgently needed. 1 in 4 postpartum individuals return to work 2 weeks after childbirth. We hypothesize paid parental leave (PPL) might be associated with improved postpartum mental health. Surprisingly there is a paucity of data that examines the impact of PPL on the mental health of postpartum individuals, especially BIPOC low-wage earners. This study will provide a critically needed understanding of the impact of PPL on perinatal mood and anxiety disorder (PMAD) symptoms minoritized individuals experience through: (1) quantitative analysis of survey data from states with versus without PPL, and (2) qualitative analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews in a state with recent PPL implementation. This study will provide actionable PPL insights for employers, state and federal policymakers to enact social justice by implementing equitable PPL policies that address preventable postpartum mental health related disease and death.
Black Art Conservators Podcast
PI: Anya Dani (UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage)
Co-PI: Justin Dunnavant (Anthropology)
The UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage and the Black Art Conservators group will create a podcast through which to highlight the Black art conservator experience, community efforts to preserve Black cultural heritage, and solutions to the inequities in the conservation field. Black conservators are underrepresented in conservation, a field with a problematic colonial foundation. During the initial 3-episode series, Black caretakers, cultural heritage workers, conservators, and stakeholders will be in honest dialogue and share their reflections regarding the cultural heritage preservation field. Real solutions to the inequities plaguing the field will be explored. Capacity will also be built to expand the podcast and create additional future episodes that highlight the preservation work being done in Black community centers and museums, using specific examples. Their stories will be honored and uplifted while also expanding the traditional definitions of conservation.
Affective Engagements & Theatrical Encounters with the Politics of Reproduction in Brazil
PI: Ugo Edu (African American Studies)
This project is a work in translating social scientific research for non-academic publics, engaging in novel research dissemination techniques, mobilizing the arts to discuss the sources and consequences of racial inequities and social justice, and exploring options for combating racial inequities. This particular theatrical piece explores the general themes of aesthetics, affect, and is interested in enhancing our understandings, or at least engagements with the intersections of medicine, science, and the state in the regulation of women’s (with emphasis on Black women’s) reproductive and sexual health and lives.
A Framework for Self-Reflecting Machine Learning
PI: Deanna Needell (Mathematics)
Co-PI: Erin George (Mathematics)
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being applied nearly everywhere in today's society. As technological progress continues to be made, so does unfortunately the amount of catastrophic examples of its bias and lack of fairness and transparency. This leads to devastating outcomes that impact individuals drastically differently depending on attributes such as race, gender and more. Here, we propose a novel ML framework to address the main challenges in ML fairness, which we refer to as self-reflecting ML. The framework includes an automated analysis of fairness of the learning task's outputs, followed by a self-adjustment given that analysis. The term self-reflecting here refers to the framework's proposal to include both a fairness identification step as well as an adjustment based on that reflection. We propose ways to apply this framework to a variety of ML tasks, including non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and word embeddings.
Assessing Transportation Barriers to Maternal Care for Black Birthing People in Los Angeles County
PI: Regan Patterson (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Transportation is a well-documented barrier to healthcare access, including maternal healthcare. Transportation barriers lead to rescheduled or missed appointments with health providers. Delayed or missed care contributes to Black women in the US being more than three times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women. The objective of this project is to investigate the role of transportation barriers on access to maternal healthcare for Black birthing people in urban and rural communities of Los Angeles County. A survey will be conducted to help better understand the relationship between transportation and access to maternal healthcare in the County, which is essential to closing racial disparities in maternal health and reducing mortality rates. Results will inform a local intervention to improve access to maternal healthcare for Black women in the area
Asian Americans on Screen
PI: Renee Tajima-Peña (Asian American Studies)
How did screen portrayals of Asians/Asian Americans evolve from early silents such as Thomas Edison’s 1902 Hindoo Fakir to Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022? The Golden Screen (working title) is inspired by the forthcoming book of the same name, and will be a first documentary series to explore themes of race, representation and resistance in screen images of Asian Americans over the last century, framed by the stories of the creators and performers who seized the image as their own. The research and development of the project will also involve the exploration of ethical considerations and formal possibilities of artificial intelligence in documentary filmmaking, including using AI tools to visually imagine layers of personal history and archival material. AI not only opens exciting creative possibilities, but also raises ethical questions related to copyright and artistic propriety for documentary filmmaking.
Racial Self-Awareness: Development and Validation of a Racialized Stress Scale among Black Americans
PI: Courtney Thomas Tobin (Community Health Sciences)
Population health research has progressively recognized anti-Black racism as a fundamental determinant of health inequalities that patterns health risks and resources across cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and individual levels. Nevertheless, the specific ways that minoritized racial status influences the health outcomes of Black Americans remain poorly understood, in part, because we currently lack the appropriate tools to assess these relationships in population-based surveys. This project explores how the synergistic influences of racism and the increasing diversity of communities and social institutions contribute to racial self-awareness (RSA) among Black Americans. Often thought of as “the stress of being Black in White spaces,” RSA is the racialization process through which Black Americans recognize and respond to the social and psychological implications of their minoritized racial status within majority contexts. The proposed research aims to develop and validate survey items to quantify the prevalence and consequences of RSA among nationally-representative samples of Black Americans.
The Good Trouble With Black Boys - Race, Gender, and Reimagining Youth Power in the Carceral State
PI: David Turner (Social Welfare)
Youth Organizing as a tool for social change has helped to not only change material conditions in some respects, but it has also equipped youth with the critical tools needed to engage in long term social movement building. This study focuses on youth activism and the political engagement of Black young men and boys. More specifically, this study focuses on the experience of Black young men and boys in community based programs that engage in racial justice-based activism and community organizing. Expanding upon interviews from 22 Black male youth activists, 19 interviews with youth workers who engage Black male youth, and five
years of field notes as a community organizer working with five community based organizations in Los Angeles, this study elevates the political imaginaries that Black young men and boys adopt based on their political activism and how they were educated in community based organizations.
2022
Reparative Public Goods and the Future of Finance
PI: Hannah Appel (Public Affairs / Anthropology)
Exploitative financial relationships subtend trans/national inequities including racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and climate catastrophe. The Future of Finance project starts from the premise that other worlds are possible, and they will require other financial systems, institutions, and relationships. This project asks, what will those look like and what is required to enact them?
Next Generation Lakota: A Community-Engaged, Indigenous Sign Language Revitalization Project
PI: Tria Blu Wakpa (World Arts and Cultures | Dance)
This community-engaged research project consists of (1) a focus group conducted via a two-week Lakota spoken and Indigenous sign language culture camp for Lakota children on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in Summer 2023 (2) the first children’s books on North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), the lingua franca in North America prior to English, and (3) a series of scholarly articles about this community-engaged work, including writings which articulate how this project has social justice possibilities and might be applied to other contexts. This project counters settler colonial policies and practices, which have often sought to assimilate Native Americans—and Native children in particular—in part by prohibiting them from speaking and signing their languages. The project fulfills an important gap in the current scholarly and mainstream discourses, which often overlook North American Hand Talk, and rectifies misconceptions that relegate Native peoples, languages, and practices to the past.
Twin Pandemics, Intertwined (Interdependent) Solutions: Support for Mitigating Racism and Vaccine Hesitancy
PI: Tiffany Brannon (Psychology)
Co-PI: Riley Marshall (Psychology)
The proposed research examines the potential that solutions aimed at mitigating one pandemic—systemic racism—can also foster positive consequences tied to another, related pandemic—COVID-19. It tests the primary hypothesis that antiracism support can be associated with benefits across racial/ethnic groups—namely, less vaccine hesitancy. It examines two aspects of interdependence—social motives and prosocial intergroup attitudes— as theoretical mechanisms that can allow antiracism support to foster lower vaccine hesitancy. Building on preliminary evidence, the proposed research tests the primary predictions across two programmatic studies. Proposed Study 1 will examine antiracism support using county-level predictors tied to Black Lives Matter support (indexed in 2020) and associations with county-level vaccine hesitancy and vaccination rates (indexed in 2021 and 2022). Proposed Study 2 will test whether messaging that affirms antiracism support on county-level Health Department websites is related to county-level vaccine hesitancy and vaccination rates (indexed in 2021 and 2022).
The Geography of Race, Poverty, Crime, and Policing
PI: Felipe Goncalves (Economics)
Co-PI: Emily Weisburst (Public Policy)
Interactions with the criminal justice system are highly disparate across race and class. Despite decades of research and a clear understanding of the existence of aggregate disparities in the criminal justice system, relatively little is known about the nature of these disparities at the local level. Our study fills this gap by examining the role that neighborhoods play in generating race and class disparities in exposure to crime and policing. This study will use newly constructed micro-data on 911 calls, crime reports, and arrests from hundreds of cities to answer central questions on the geographic concentration of crime and policing and the relationship between neighborhood demographics and the criminal environment.
UC Sentencing Commission
PI: Grace Kyungwon Hong (Center for the Study of Women)
The UC Sentencing Commission is a partnership between UC faculty and students and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners that examines racial disparities in lengths of criminal sentences across the state of California and the differential impacts of long-term sentencing by race on incarcerated individuals and their families and communities. The commission researches under-studied mechanisms that extend sentences for racialized populations and produces reports and policy recommendations for legislators, lawyers, organizations, and individuals working for racial justice in the criminal legal system.
Body motion as the interracial glue: intersecting neuroscience and digital media
PI: Marco Iacoboni (Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences)
Co-PI: Jenna Caravello (Design Media Arts)
Biases toward racial outgroups, specifically those levied against Black-Americans, comprise some of the most harmful societal divisions. One theory for the origins of these biases is based on self-similarity, that is, how racial outgroups are perceived more dissimilar from oneself. To date, these studies have experimentally manipulated physical differences, such as skin color, which in reality are unchangeable and explicit. Moreover, many of these biases occur implicitly, without awareness. We propose a collaboration between systems-neuroscience (Iacoboni and Kadambi) and design media-arts (Anderson and Caravello) to test whether more implicit metrics that render the motion of outgroup members self-similar, reduce implicit biases. To assess the neural mechanisms underlying these biases, non-invasive brain stimulation will temporarily reduce activity in two brain regions involved in self-other processing. Findings from this work have important implications for implicit bias understanding and introduce a starting point for interventions aimed at reducing internalized biases using innovative metrics.
In the Heat of the Moment: Assessing Bias in First Responders’ Perceptions of and Decisions for Black and Latinx Youth Experiencing Psychiatric Emergency
PI: Anna Lau (Psychology)
Co-PI: Yuen Ho (Psychology)
In the last decade, psychological crises for racial/ethnic minority youth have increased by 500% (CDC, 2020).Simultaneously, evidence of racial and socioeconomic bias in healthcare is mounting and reveals that Black patients are described with more stigmatizing language (e.g. Sun et al., 2022). Within mental health systems, first responder perceptions of youth dangerousness and decisions about involuntary restrictive care may be subject to racial and socioeconomic bias. This study will apply text mining to field documentation of emergency mental health encounters (n=32,217) in Los Angeles County to (1) Evaluate whether first responder reports include more stigmatizing language (e.g., dangerousness, culpability, menace) in describing Black and Latinx versus White youth as well as youth in low-opportunity neighborhoods; and (2) Determine if first responder biases contribute to disproportionate involuntary detainment. This study applies novel methods to reveal processes that may perpetuate racism in systems intended to help youth in crisis.
The Returned Gaze: Indigenizing Native Film
PI: Nancy Marie Mithlo (Gender Studies)
Native film production has emerged over the past twenty years as a powerful representational tool for Indigenous presence-making. Counter to prevailing public opinion however, the simple presence of American Indian content in visual media does little to alter ingrained bias, and may increase conventional narratives of diminished worth.[1] “The Returned Gaze” proposes a mini-film festival of shorts by Native women filmmakers exploring land-based pedagogies, a Native youth writing exercise and the development of a visitor response survey. Public outreach in tandem with institutional partnerships inform our collective efforts to build and sustain a critical dialogue addressing the anti-racist potential of Native cinema in a time of increased media scrutiny.
[1] Mithlo, Nancy Marie and Aleksandra Sherman. 2020. “Perspective‐Taking Can Lead to Increased Bias: A Call for ‘Less Certain’ Positions in American Indian Contexts.” Curator : A Quarterly Publication of the American Museum of Natural History. 63, no. 3: 353–369.
The Racialized Impacts of Law Enforcement Helicopter Surveillance in Los Angeles, 2011-2021
PI: Nicholas Shapiro (Institute for Society and Genetics)
Co-PI: Gina Poe (Integrative Biology and Physiology)
Helicopter noise and surveillance pattern life in LA in a way that has been felt by millions yet the impacts of this surveillance system are insufficiently documented. We will leverage public records, and field recordings to conduct a geospatial data analysis of the negative health and mental health impacts of law enforcement helicopter surveillance. Through these methods we will study the spatial patterning of helicopter surveillance in Los Angeles County to assess its consequent psychological, biological, and social impacts on differently racialized and classed people and neighborhoods. This research is produced via a UCLA collaboration with Stop LAPD Spying, a community-based organization that is a leader in researching and communicating issues related to law enforcement surveillance in Los Angeles.
A Maternal Health Crisis in the United States: Identifying the Structural and Social Factors Associated with Perinatal Depression among Women of Color
PI: May Sudhinaraset (Community Health Sciences)
Co-PI: Rashmi Rao (Obstetrics and Gynecology)
Women of color, including Black, Latinx, and Asian women, face disproportionate risk of pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality. Growing evidence pinpoints racism as a cause of these inequities, which persist even when women have access to prenatal care and adequate socioeconomic resources. Chronic marginalization resulting from structural and interpersonal racism not only undermines clinical care during pregnancy, but it also heightens risk of perinatal depression. There is a critical need to center women of color’s voices and to understand the social and structural factors associated with perinatal depression. Additionally, strategies are urgently needed to improve the quality of perinatal depression (including screening, referrals, and perinatal mental healthcare). This community-engaged, qualitative study, led by women of color, will develop a Community Advisory Board (CAB) and identify the structural and social factors associated with perinatal depression and quality of perinatal mental healthcare.
2021
Protecting Black Electoral Power During 2021 Redistricting
PI: Matt Barreto (Political Science)
The United States is entering what could be the most racially discriminatory redistricting cycle since the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 (Li 2021). Without the federal protections of the VRA in place, the current redistricting landscape poses to threaten Black political representation in the United States for the next decade by dismantling Black-performing electoral districts. Our project serves as a scientific and legal intervention, answering the questions: (1) to what extent are Black performing congressional, state, and local electoral districts at risk of being dismantled as result of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling, and (2) in what ways can legal theories surrounding Section 2 of VRA be employed to protect Black political power and representation during the 2021 redistricting cycle?
An investigation of the racial disparities in the benefits derived from local and state seismic risk mitigation programs
PI: Henry Burton (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Numerous past earthquakes have highlighted the risk to older residential woodframe buildings both in terms of human lives and the financial well-being of communities. Homeowners can incur tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and most do not have insurance to cover repairs. Given the proportion of high wealth that is embedded in home equity, an earthquake that causes significant damage or the destruction of single-family residences in black communities could lead to further increases in the current wealth gap. This racial and social justice seed grant will be used to examine the distribution of older single-family residential wood-frame building seismic retrofits in Southern California and compare the overall rate and associated risk with that of black communities. The goal is to elucidate the challenges (and associated consequences) faced by black communities in realizing the benefits of local and state seismic risk mitigation programs.
Coping with Uncertainty in the Midst of a Pandemic: Experiences of Ethnically Diverse Young Adults
PI: Sandra Graham (Education)
Capitalizing on a longitudinal sample, the current proposal is designed to qualitatively study the ways in which racially/ethnically diverse young adults are coping with three pandemic-related challenges: (1) social isolation, (2) economic downturn, and (3) heightened awareness of systemic racism and threats to democracy. We propose to conduct semi-structured interviews on a subsample of 100 young adults, selected from a larger sample of 2,000 participants (based on gender and race/ethnicity) followed since the beginning of middle school. The proposed qualitative data will complement quantitative analyses of developmental trajectories across the transition into young adulthood by providing in-depth insights into how female and male African American, Asian, Latinx and White young adults make meaning out of their experiences. The interviews focus specifically similarities and differences in needs and resources related to (1) social connectedness, (2) educational and career decisions, and (3) heightened racial injustice and political unrest.
A daily diary study of online racism and risky alcohol use among Black and Asian emerging adults
PI: Brian Taehyuk Keum (Social Welfare)
Employing an Ecological Momentary Assessment design, this research aims to examine the risky alcohol coping behaviors associated with online racism among Black and Asian emerging adults (18-24) and potential modifiable mediators and moderators of the risk. These risks may be particularly salient for Black and Asian individuals given the ongoing online exposure to anti-Black and COVID-19 related anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States. The proposed research has three aims: (1) Identify the relationship between online racism and alcohol use severity; greater exposure to online racism would predict increases in alcohol use severity, (2) Test modifiable mediators as potential mechanisms of this link; exposure to online racism → greater rumination → greater racism-related vigilance → greater loneliness/stress → greater alcohol use, and (3) Identify moderators that may buffer the direct and indirect effects of online racism including online support seeking behaviors and social support at interpersonal and organizational levels.
All Bruins Belong: Addressing Inequities Through Positive Academic Engagement
PI: Adrienne Lavine (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)
Throughout 2020 and into 2021, underrepresented minority (URM) students have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, economic downturn, racial (in)justice, and race-based violence. These experiences magnify existing inequities and can create felt differences in courses and campus activities. They can be mitigated, however, by increasing the sense of belonging as part of the UCLA community. The current project will explore two related questions: (1) what are the sources of racial inequities in courses and (2) what are the elements that allow students to thrive. It focuses largely on classroom experiences, as courses can create a bridge between public life and a student’s academic world. Through focus groups with students and one-on-one interviews with faculty, this project will identify strategies that encourage critical thinking and respectful dialogue to increase the sense of belonging within the UCLA community.
The Evolution of Black Neighborhoods: Fifty Years of Spatial and Economic Mobility
PI: Michael Lens (Urban Planning)
This project will systematically summarize the spatial and demographic context and evolution of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the United States. Beginning n 1970, which is a key inflection point for the Black neighborhood in several ways, I define the universe of Black neighborhoods at that point in time, use sophisticated spatial and demographic methods to categorize their characteristics, and summarize their trajectories over time. While this begins as a historical examination, the purpose is to address contemporary policy debates in housing, segregation, neighborhood effects, and race. The work completed during this grant period will provide a foundation for the second stage of this project that seeks to better understand the conditions under which Black neighborhoods flourish and fail.
GIS for Community Health: A community-led research and service-learning project
PI: Aradhna Tripati (IoES)
A South LA community-based organization, Esperanza Community Housing, would like to partner to research an environmental injustice which disproportionately affects BIPOC and low-income populations. GIS for Community Health is a community-led and co-generated project for community members and youth to learn GIS to collect data to document air pollution and subsequent health impacts as a result of nearby urban oil drilling and other pollutants in their neighborhood, and UCLA students, staff, and faculty to train in ethical STEM, environmental justice, and GIS. Participants from both groups will collaborate on data collection, analysis, and evaluation, and support community organizers access to tools that highlight local pollution sources, health outcomes, and impacted populations. In addition to developing research capacity at UCLA and in South LA, participants will prepare a confidential report for the community on the work, and offer to present at a town hall to discuss next steps.
The Role of Los Angeles County Group Homes in the Foster Care to Incarceration Pipeline
PI: Alicia Virani (Criminal Justice Program)
In calendar year 2020, there were almost 30,000 law enforcement contacts with youth in group home placements. Foster youth placed in group homes are 2.5 times more likely to end up in the juvenile legal system than youth placed with foster families. In California, group homes have undergone significant changes to become more trauma informed and less reliant on law enforcement, yet they continue to be an entry point to the juvenile legal system. Our project will determine (1) the legal mechanisms and incentives that encourage group homes to rely on law enforcement; (2) the frequency and type of calls group homes make to law enforcement agencies in LA County; (3) how these practices affect youth of color residing in these group homes; and (4) recommendations to promote alternatives to policing in these spaces.
DOUBLE JEOPARDY: Experiences of Sexual Violence and Anti-Asian Racism Among University of California Students from Asian and Pacific Island Communities
PI: Jennifer Wagman (Community Health Sciences)
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, violence targeting the Asian population has been gaining significant public attention. However, rarely do people recognize the long history of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia against this population. Specifically, the intersectionality of racism, sexism, and xenophobia and its impact on this population’s sexual violence incidence remains understudied. Here we propose a two-phased transmedia research project. We aim to recruit students from ten UC campuses who experienced sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH) to first join a qualitative project. Interviews will be conducted to explore their experience of SVSH and help-seeking behaviors, especially amid the pandemic. In the second phase, we will utilize photovoice and transmedia storytelling approaches to construct a shared narrative of healing from SVSH. Results will be presented to the public in forms of publication, policy report, art exhibition and short documentary to raise the awareness of racial and social justice for the Asian population.
