LA Social Science Roundtable: Black Cultural Production in the Time of COVID-19

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LA Social Science invited three Los Angeles-based professors to join a roundtable discussion about culture during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Shana Redmond, UCLA Department of African American Studies and Global Jazz Studies Musicology, Dr. Safiya Noble, UCLA Department of African American Studies and Department of Information Studies, and Dr. Robeson Taj Frazier, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, came together to engage in a lively conversation about black cultural production and consumption. Discussion topics included D-Nice, Tik-Tok, Twitter, Instagram, and more.

 

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UCLA Professor Discusses Life and Work of Native American Artist Harry Fonseca

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In an informative video series by the Autry Museum of the West about Native American artist Harry Fonseca, UCLA Gender Studies Professor Nancy Mithlo and Harry Nungesser, Fonseca’s partner, discuss his life and work. Check out this series below.

Harry Fonseca: Coyote Leaves The Rez

Harry Fonseca: Coyote Green High Tops

Harry Fonseca: Coyote Wide-Eyed

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LA Social Science Summer Course Previews: African American Studies Presents “Reproducing While Black”

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As summer 2020 approaches, LA Social Science will be highlighting some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

The UCLA Department of African American Studies will be offering C191 – Variable Topics Research Seminars: “Reproducing While Black” (Mondays and Wednesdays 1:00pm-3:05pm) with Professor Ugo Edu. The course will “investigate the stakes of Black reproduction globally, strategies of resistance, and strategies for securing healthy and sustainable reproduction.”

For more information about this course, see the video below, and enroll HERE.

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LA Social Science Summer Course Previews: Gender Studies Courses Offered in Sessions A and C

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As summer 2020 approaches, LA Social Science will be highlighting some of the summer courses being offered within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA.

UCLA Gender Studies will be offering the courses listed below. Visit www.summer.ucla.edu to enroll or email shogan@gender.ucla.edu.

Session A (June 22nd – July 31st)

185: Special Topics: Feminisms Online!

Instructor: Taryn Marcelino – TR 8:30-10:35

Course Description: Through a framework of keywords such as access, analog/digital, celebrity, censorship, data, fan, posthuman and more, the course will explore issues of authorship, spectatorship, and the ways in which digital content (film, television, blogs, video, advertising) enables, facilitates, and challenges marginalizing social constructions in society. Through feminist critique, students will research and analyze how the internet creates and contests stereotypes and ideas of difference, including exclusionary representations of the human, with a particular focus on how digital technologies are transforming popular culture. A variety of UCLA Gender Studies Department faculty will participate in this class, contributing lectures and other course materials.

M111 Womxn and Film: Lesbian, Butch, Trans, and Queer Media Narratives

Instructor: Candace Hansen – TR 10:45-12:50

Course Description: Cinema and television helps us make sense of our place in the world. Often it is through this artform we are able to come to realizations about lives and identities, and even imagine realities beyond our own. Why is it then that mainstream narratives surrounding queer women and trans people are monolithic, tragic, and lack nuance? In this course we will explore the relationship between sexuality, gender, and cinema, interrogating issues surrounding agency, authorship, and the consequences of tropes for lesbians, bisexual women, butches, trans women, trans men, non-binary individuals, and gender non-conforming people. Focusing primarily on American cultural production, we will consider the ways that race, class, and other elements of identity intersect with and influence cinematic depictions of queerness. We will look at independent as well as mainstream cinema, tv shows, documentaries, art films, and other sources to attempt to track queer narratives through the lens of gender studies, and imagine what the future of representation and film making might hold.

Other Session A offerings include (Gender Studies Core Courses fulfill Diversity Requirement):

  • Gender 10 Intro to Gender Studies (GE) – Instructor: Dee Mauricio
  • Gender 102 Power- Instructor: Shawndeez Jadali
  • 101W Writing Gender: Indigeneity, History & Culture (Satisfies Writing II Req) – Instructor: Laura Terrance

Session C (August 3rd-September 11th)

M133C History of Prostitution

Instructor: Elizabeth Dayton – TR 1:00pm-3:05pm

Course Description: From a global historical perspective, this course will spotlight historical moments and figures within “the world’s oldest profession” to investigate how ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, empire, and globalization influence the dominant frameworks of prostitution policy. Beginning in antiquity and ending in the present day, we will trace changing attitudes towards prostitution from the vantage point of sex workers, moralists, medical authorities, and police officials. Course Topics will include: critical analysis of historical policies and attitudes towards prostitution (tolerance, regulation, criminalization, decriminalization); prostitution and the construction of empire(s) and borders (“white slavery” panic, trafficking policies, militarized prostitution & red-light districts); impact of pandemics/disease outbreaks on the sex industry (including syphilis, AIDS, COVID-19); and contemporary sex workers’ rights movements. The diverse contexts in which we will study prostitution may include but are not limited to: ancient Greece, medieval Europe, seventeenth-century Japan, London in period of Jack the Ripper, colonial India, and twentieth-century United States.

M107B. Studies in Gender and Sexuality. (5) Literatures of Resistance: Queer Punk As Method

(Same as English M107B and LGBT Studies M107B)

Instructor: Candace Hansen – TR 10:45am-12:50pm

Course Description: What does it mean when artistic work is world making? In Hansen’s M107B we will be thinking through queer punk as a method by looking at resistant literatures, things that are not just gay but queer, critical, and artful. In the true spirit of queer praxis, literature will not just be understood as written word alone in this course. Music, video, art, dance, performance, ritual, and collective experiences are all works of artistic merit and meaning, and contribute to a body of knowledge that shape queer and punk epistemologies and identities. We will read and analyze work from classic and contemporary creators, writers, musicians, skateboarders, zinesters, dancers, astrologers, and more to think about what it means to make queer art that is oppositional AND affirming AND community building. Work that is creating, critiquing, and negotiating power. Work that is responding to gaps. Students will write a paper and create an original work as part of their final grade.

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UCLA California Policy Lab Releases Report on the Impact of COVID-19 on California’s Labor Market

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New Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California Provides Detailed Snapshot of How COVID-19 is Impacting California Workers, Industries, and Counties

April 29th, 2020

A new analysis of initial Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims by the California Policy Lab at UCLA and the Labor Market Information Division at the California Employment Development Department provides an in-depth and near real-time look at how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting various types of workers, industries and regions throughout California. The policy brief “An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the COVID-19 Pandemic” was released today.

“It’s clear that California workers who are the least able to afford it are being the most impacted by COVID-19,” explains Till von Wachter, a co-author of the analysis, UCLA economics professor and faculty director at the California Policy Lab. “While the rise in initial UI claims and their potential implications for unemployment are alarming, we also see some positive signs: besides a slight leveling off of new claims in the most recent two weeks in April, we see a much higher percent of people claiming UI benefits are reporting that they expect to return to their former employers. Given these findings, policymakers should consider how best to support employers to stay afloat and rehire their employees, and how to target relief to the groups of workers who have been most severely impacted.”

Key research findings:

  • 90% of Californians who filed initial UI claims in the first two weeks of April reported that they expected to be recalled to their prior jobs, a substantial increase from the 40% of claimants who reported this before the crisis.
  • Younger, lower-wage, and lower-educated workers and women have been disproportionately impacted by unemployment in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in the labor market (in mid-March), among those in the labor force, 1 in 3 high school graduates, 1 in 4 aged 20-23, and 1 in 6 women filed initial UI claims.
  • Since mid-March 14.4% of the California labor force has filed initial UI claims. If none of these initial UI claimants have returned to work, this implies a rise in the unemployment rate to close to 20% from the 5.3% prevailing in mid-March.
  • Almost 1 in 3 workers in Food and Accommodations and 1 in 5 workers in Retail Sales filed new initial claims. Several other large sectors experienced substantial increases in initial UI claims since mid-March, including Health Care and Social Services; Manufacturing; Construction; Other Services; and Administrative Support, Waste Management, and Remediation.
  • All counties in California have experienced substantial growth in initial UI claims, but the rise has been more pronounced in several of the usually economically strong areas of the state, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Southern California.

This analysis will be updated on a weekly basis with new data on initial Unemployment Insurance claims to provide a timely and detailed analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on California’s labor market.

Methodology
The analysis is based on comparing initial unemployment insurance claims in February 2020 (before the COVID-19 crisis impacted the labor markets); the start of the employment crisis in mid-March (when initial UI claims increased dramatically); and more recently the first 11 days of April.

The analysis complements traditional survey-based indicators on the labor market, which have detailed information but large time lags and which are released not as frequently, and to weekly publications of the number of total UI claims, which have minimal time lags but which lack the detail available in this analysis.

Download the full report HERE.

Contact:

Sean Coffey: sean@capolicylab.org
(919) 428-1143

The California Policy Lab creates data-driven insights for the public good. Our mission is to partner with California’s state and local governments to generate scientific evidence that solves California’s most urgent problems, including homelessness, poverty, crime, and education inequality. We facilitate close working partnerships between policymakers and researchers at the University of California to help evaluate and improve public programs through empirical research and technical assistance.

The Labor Market Information Division (LMID) is the official source for California Labor Market Information. The LMID promotes California’s economic health by providing information to help people understand California’s economy and make informed labor market choices. We collect, analyze, and publish statistical data and reports on California’s labor force, industries, occupations, employment projections, wages and other important labor market and economic data.

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Community Partners in the News: UCLA Alum’s LRW Group Contributes to LA County COVID-19 Study

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LRW Group, a local marketing services firm and UCLA Division of Social Sciences community partner, was a key contributor to the Los Angeles County COVID-19 study that sought to find the true spread of the virus in the county through serological testing. Led by UCLA alum, chairman and CEO Dave Sackman, LRW Group partnered with USC and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health by identifying and recruiting a representative sample of LA residents to participate in the study. The findings released last week suggest infections from the new coronavirus are far more widespread, and the fatality rate is much lower here in LA County than previously thought.

LRW Group formed a partnership with the UCLA Division of Social Sciences in 2019. The partnership created a dedicated UCLA staff position tasked with recruiting undergraduates and graduate students for paid summer internships in data science. The initiative will support a proposed major in Data and Society in the division and feature support workshops and roundtables in social data science, as well as guest lectures by LRW leadership and employees.

According to Dean Darnell Hunt:

“LRW’s commitment will seed our efforts to establish a pipeline of underrepresented students into the new Data and Society major we are developing as part of the division’s larger big data initiative. Along with this generous and important contribution, LRW also has pledged to offer paid internships to some of our most promising students, creating an opportunity for them to envision future careers and gain workplace experience that enhances their academic pursuits at UCLA.”

 

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Dr. Lal Continues His Essay Series on the Historic Parallels Between Past Plagues and the Current Pandemic

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Professor Vinay Lal, UCLA Professor of History and Asian American Studies, has an informative blog titled, “Lal Salaam: A Blog by Vinay Lal.” Recently, he has written “a series of articles on the implications of the coronavirus for our times, for human history, and for the fate of the earth.”

You may read his earlier essays on LA Social Science. The following is an excerpt of Part 1 of his sixth essay, “A Global Plague, Political Epidemiology, and National Histories,” (April 27, 2020), in the series:

COVID-19 has made diarists of many of us, but the Englishman Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was, to use a contemporary expression, far ahead of the curve.  Pepys, who lived through the Great Plague that struck London in 1665-66, as well as the Great Fire of London that over the course of five days in September 1666 gutted the old City of London, was a prodigious keeper of a diary that remains unrivalled in its depiction of the daily life of a well-heeled and influential man living in times of turmoil and pestilence.  Pepys might well have been writing about the pandemic that has crept upon us:  there is an uncanny resemblance to our times in his observations of how an epidemic insinuates itself among a people, the measures that were undertaken to effect its containment and mitigation, the pallor of death that hangs over an entire society when plague strikes, and what a plague brings out in a people and a nation.

Samuel_Pepys

Portrait of Samuel Pepys in 1666 by John Hayls

Pepys commenced his diary on January 1, 1660, and on 19 October 1663 first mentions the plague as having reached Amsterdam.  The following year, on June 22, Pepys recorded that there was “great talk” at the coffee-house which he was fond of frequenting of “the plague [which] grows mightily among them [the Dutch], both at sea and land.”  On July 25th, his visit to the coffee-house yielded “no news, only the plague is very hot still, and increases among the Dutch.” What impresses most thus far is that there is no intimation of the plague coming to the shores of England:  perhaps the island was shielded, after all, from every pestilence coming from the continent.  The Dutch and the English had been at war in 1652-54, and another conflict was looming on the horizon between the two naval powers competing for trade, overseas colonies, and supremacy on the seas.  There is thus something of a suggestion of the Dutch being the source of many of England’s troubles:  if they had already brought the plague of war, another form of pestilence seemed to be at hand.  Pepys, a Member of Parliament and Chief Secretary to the Admiralty whose reforms would play a significant role in transforming the English navy, to the extent that the Royal Museums Greenwich website states that he is “often described as ‘the father of the modern Royal Navy’”, would also have known that the plague sails with ships—and that England was not likely to be spared.

To read the rest of the essay, click HERE.

To read, Part II “The Pub Crawl and the Sprint of the Virus: Britain, COVID-19, and Englishness” (April 28, 2020), click HERE.

 

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LA Social Science Student Research Spotlight: Black Feminine Erotic Activism

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Dominique Rocker is finishing a Master of Arts in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. Examining the writing and narrative resistance of Black Panther women in the 1970s, her work seeks to disrupt the prison industrial complex through the nexus of education, artistic outlets, and divingly feminine erotic healing. She will be continuing graduate work in the Department of History at Rutgers University, Newark in the Fall of 2020.

Read the following essay to learn more about her fascinating research and thesis:

The erotic, as described by Audre Lorde, is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” It is a “deeply female and spiritual plane.” In a society historically and contemporarily constituted by the socio-political suppression of and control over Black women’s desire, agency, and feeling, the radical and often covert, intangible space between the self and the “chaos” of emotion is a “well of replenishing and provocative force” that holds the potential for radical change, perhaps outside the realm of legibility of the state. My scholarly endeavor is to uncover moments of agency in which Black women of the Black Power Era rooted their activism, whether consciously or not, in Lorde’s articulation of the erotic.[1]

As their partners and brothers were assassinated and jailed, as they themselves faced death penalty sentences, Black women in the late 1960s and 1970s engaged in political action, and used writing and storytelling that centered a divinely feminine power to create momentary visions and versions of freedom.

Activists such as Ericka Huggins used the erotic to discover “how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”[2] At the heart of my work is a curiosity not only about the hidden stories and resistance strategies of radical Black women in male-dominated spaces, but a desire to center emotion, sensuality, and joy as tools of survival for activists as well. This project this requires multidisciplinary training as well as mixed methodologies, specifically archival data, oral history, and Black feminist theories of kinship and the erotic.

As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in historical methods and cultural analysis, my work is rooted in counter-hegemonic orientations of history, the archive, resistance, and pleasure. My Master’s Paper explores the political murder & conspiracy trial of former Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins through an intersectional lens and takes into consideration both the narrative put upon her and the one she constructed for herself, a framework generally missing from work on this case. This research project centers the social, legal, and personal experience of Ericka Huggins as documented in newspaper archives, trial transcripts, and interviews to examine the ways in which oral history and personal storytelling through poetry written during incarceration can be pathways for personal and ideological abolitionist struggle. Huggins’ narrative resistance on the witness stand during her trial and in her poetry from prison offer meaningful insights into alternative modes of resistance and freedom-making. Considering the erotic as a powerful and “deeply female and spiritual plane,” my work renders politically engaged Black women visible and centers their survival and resistance through feeling.[3]

This work asks us to shift our understanding of historical moments, of police state violence and surveillance, and most intimately, of the meaning of freedom itself. Most importantly, for me, that has meant a centering of the divinely feminine erotic power that flows through the resistance work and the writings of some of the Panther Party’s less visible but most valuable: its women. When we begin to complicate the lens through which we understand the Black Power Era and the Black Panther Party, we can begin to uncover the nuances of not just revolution itself, but of the human experience of being Black and woman and poet and revolutionary.

[1] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 53-59.

[2] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic.”

[3] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 53.

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LA Social Science Presents “Conversations with Changemakers” Featuring Dr. Efrén Pérez (Video)

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As the Director of the UCLA Race, Ethnicity, Politics and Society (REPS) Lab, Dr. Efrén Pérez is facilitating cutting-edge research that examines how racial diversity impacts politics. One of his lab’s current projects is an examination of how the identity of People of Color informs political attitudes and what the specific identity means to those who identify as Latinx. The REPS Lab acts as an incubator for rigorous social science research that also provides graduate students and affiliated faculty with a quality data collection platform that is publicly accessible. Overall, the REPS Lab trains and prepares graduate students for a career as a social scientist. Dr. Pérez states that the purpose of the lab is to “facilitate research that can have an impact not only on the person’s own career, but on the world outside the confines of UCLA.”

 

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Pandemics Past and Present: One Hundred Years of California History

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The UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy (LCHP) has released their latest research report, titled Pandemics Past and Present: One Hundred Years of California History. Particularly timely in light of Los Angeles Times coverage on this topic, this report features original research about the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, the AIDS/HIV crisis of the 1980s, and subsequent Influenza outbreaks. To read the report, click HERE, and for key takeaways, click HERE.

True to LCHP’s mission, this report uses an examination of the past to help guide us in our present moment of crisis. As governments and communities across the world are grappling with the COVID-19 crisis, researchers Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Jessica Richards, and Talla Khelghati uncover instructive lessons about government responses, public reactions, and economic consequences of past pandemics.

LCHP has also released an accompanying episode on their new podcast, “Then & Now,” featuring a conversation with the report’s authors. Listen to the podcast HERE.

Through their report and accompanying podcast episode, LCHP seeks to provide useful context and guidance during this crisis.

 

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