The UCLA Asian American Studies Department, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), are very pleased to announce their conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Asian American Studies at UCLA — “Power to the People”: 50 Years of Bridging Research with Community. 

We hope you can attend as diverse and inter-generational communities are brought together to appreciate the legacies, genealogies, and futures of Asian American studies and communities. We hope you connect with many people and organizations at the event.  With community engagement at the heart of the field, we strive to strengthen the connection between the university and community-based organizations. We encourage you to discover how to bridge research and theory with our communities, as well as how to find ways to engage with current movements and issues.

Also, be sure to check out “UCLA: Our Stories, Our Impact,” a multimedia traveling exhibit sharing the stories of Bruins who have advanced equity and equality in America, that will be shown in the lobby of the Tateuchi Democracy Forum as well as in UCLA Luskin Commons Room 3383. Learn more about the exhibit at “Our Stories, Our Impact.”

Let us continue to build the power of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and work towards our collective futures – rooted in our histories, furthered by our communal experiences and research, and strengthened by our visions of social justice.

For more information on the conference, including registration, please visit aasc.ucla.edu/aasc50/conf19/.  The event is free and open to the public.  Space is limited, so be sure to register before the conference is full.

Dr. H. Samy Alim, David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and the Founding Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), along with his co-PI Dr. Django Paris (University of Washington, Seattle), recently received a $1 million grant from the Spencer Foundation. They will conduct a four-year project exploring the implementation of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. The project is one out of only five to receive funding from the foundation’s most ambitious grant making program, the Lyle Spencer Research Awards for large-scale research projects.

Alim, Paris, and postdoctoral researcher Casey Wong (UCLA) will work with four sites across the United States, Spain, and South Africa to learn with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Pacific Islander and immigrant communities about how they are enacting CSP in contexts dealing with the legacies and contemporary realities of settler colonialism and gentrification. Through the project, the team will seek to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an approach that seeks to sustain communities of color as part of an educational justice movement that sees cultural practices as strengths to be fostered rather than as deficits to be erased through schooling.

The grant extends the conceptual and empirical work shared in their highly influential volume, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (Teachers College Press, 2017), which brought together an intergenerational group of prominent educators and researchers to explore critical teaching approaches that perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation.

L.A. Social Science congratulates Professor Alim and his colleagues!

The UCLA Department of Communication is now accepting applications for its new Ph.D. program!

Please check out this descriptive video, where you will learn about the work faculty and graduate students do in the following areas:  Communication & Cognition, Political Communication, and Interpersonal Communication.  Also, you will learn about the department’s Television News Collection.  Then, go visit their website, https://comm.ucla.edu/ for more information.

The National Science Foundation has issued a nearly $1 million grant to a group of racial and ethnic politics researchers from across the nation led by UCLA’s Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies, and Matt Barreto, Professor of Political Science and Chicana and Chicano Studies.  It will help support the groundbreaking Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, known as the CMPS, which looks to bring together young scholars and expands the number of ethnic and racial groups participating in a national survey. In its fourth installment, the CMPS will examine the 2020 election.

In a UCLA Newsroom story, written by Jessica Wolf, Professor Frasure-Yokley stated, “We accomplished what we set out to do, which was radically expand opportunities, especially for those early in their career or who are working at smaller or minority-serving institutions, to conduct research and even more importantly – publish their research, which is necessary to advance one’s academic career. And now, with stronger infrastructure provided by this major NSF grant, we can focus on expanding those opportunities even more.”

L.A. Social Science would like to congratulate both Professors Frasure-Yokley and Barreto and their research team. Read the entire UCLA Newsroom story HERE.