LA Social Science Presents “Conversations with Changemakers” Featuring Bryonn Bain and Rosie Rios

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By Lara Drasin

Bryonn Bain is a UCLA professor jointly appointed in the African American Studies and World Arts and Cultures/Dance departments, as well as a prison activist, spoken word poet, hip-hop artist, actor and author. He is the founder and director of UCLA’s Prison Education Program, which was launched in 2016 to create innovative courses that enable UCLA faculty and students to learn from, and alongside, participants incarcerated at the California Institute for Women (CIW) and Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall (BJN). 

Rosie Rios is the administrative director of UCLA’s Prison Education Program. 

Part 1 of the series will first focus on the interview with Professor Bain

LD:     What do you [Professor Bain] tell people you do when you first meet them?

BB:     It depends on the context. On this campus, I think students identify me first and foremost as a professor, and as the director of the Prison Education Program. But before I was any of those things, I was an artist; I was an activist; I was an educator. I really am excited about the intersection of those identities, where they come together and create sparks and possibilities for transformation.

I’m inspired by people who consider themselves to be change makers. I’m inspired by people like Robin Kelley, who recruited me to come [to UCLA]. Cheryl Harris. I’m inspired by folks who see that when you bring together ways of understanding the world that aren’t often put together, all these amazing possibilities exist.

I’m also the son of immigrants, from a little island in the Caribbean called Trinidad and Tobago. My father was a storyteller — he was a calypsonian — and so I have some of that in me. I’m a storyteller. It’s part of my artistry as a poet; as an actor; as a theater maker. That’s part of my identity.

My mother is a healer. She’s been a nurse for 40 years. I think from her as a healer, and having all these aunts who are healers, I was definitely inspired to be an activist and to use whatever skills and talents and time I have on this planet — between womb and tomb — to try to impact the lives of those around me. So I think that’s where my desire to try to make change happen through activism comes from. I think there’s an intersection between arts activism and education that is at the heart of who I am.

LD:     Tell me about your work within the different contexts, [Professor Bain].

BB:     We do a lot of work in correctional facilities. We have offered courses at two correctional facilities in California, and we’ve taught five courses between the women’s prison and the juvenile hall. At the end of this year, we will have taught seven more. In those spaces, we’re here to represent students and faculty, to create opportunities for incarcerated students and students at the university to engage in higher learning and education together. So, they see me as a professor.

When I’m in a performance space I’m an actor, I’m looking at scripts, and I’m just one of the folks in the room who’s trying to tell the story together. We’re storytellers.

We all have these different layers, right? It’s not just me, or just [Rosie Rios, Administrative Director of the Prison Education Program], or just you.

Kimberlé Crenshaw and W.E.B. Du Bois before her were onto something when they talked about a double or triple or multiple consciousnesses. It’s dealing with, for example, the NYPD who didn’t believe me when I told [the officer] that I was a law student; didn’t believe me when I told them that the Sony VAIO laptop I had in my bag was mine — not that I stole it — or the public defender who told me that rather than believing my resume, she was more inclined to believe that I had a lengthy rap sheet. I think if we look at each other as full human beings, we’re multidimensional. People are not like those old school TV sets, where you could change from one channel to the next. Our identities all flow into each other, right? And so we have to get comfortable understanding that people have these multiple parts to themselves.

Members of the UCLA Prison Education Program team. Front row: Dianna Williams, Daniel Ocampo, Lyric “Day-Day” Green-Brown, Rosie Rios, Joanna Navarro. Back row: Gabrielle Sheerer, Dominique Rocker, Bryonn Bain, Derrick Kemp.

 

“…I think we’ve become numb and desensitized to a lot of the suffering that’s around us, and I think art is one way to say ‘No, wake up.'”

— Professor Bain

LD:     How are the arts initiatives you bring to prisons received — not only by the students — but by everyone that you’ve had to go through in order to make this happen? Do you present it as a healing modality? How do you justify it to them when so many institutions still don’t take the arts seriously?

BB:     This is one of the few countries where the arts are not taken as seriously as the rest of the world takes it. And at the same time, we wouldn’t think about Los Angeles or California as being the same without Hollywood, right? So there is a certain amount of respect for the power of storytelling at some level. I think it’s also important for us to understand that there are other ways for the arts to live and to feed us. Prisons are a public health crisis for many reasons, one of them being that we have more people in prisons with mental health issues than we have in mental health institutions. So prisons are being used as a way to deal with mental health and public health issues that they are not effective at dealing with. Drug addiction is a disease — it’s a public health issue according to the Center for Disease Control — and we’re treating it like it’s a criminal justice issue by locking people up and denying access to what they need. And a lot of people still have access to many banned substances that are available in prisons. So I think we have to really expand our thinking about that. But I think the arts are a way to open people up to see things in different ways. There are many metaphors for art: art as medicine, art as healing, art as a weapon, a tool for resistance to fight oppression. There is no movement for justice that did not have the arts as a part of it.

Anne Bogart talked about art as dealing with the world of aesthetics. And so when you think about what it means to be aesthetic, you think about what “anesthetic” or “anesthesia” is, right? Malcolm X talked about how when you go to the doctor what they do is put Novocaine in your mouth right so you could suffer peacefully, that you can actually bleed all over your mouth and they’ll tell you you’re just fine. So an anesthetic, or “anesthesia,” is actually about numbing your senses: making it so that you don’t see smell, taste, or touch with the same level of intensity. It puts your senses to sleep. So aesthetics should be the opposite of that. An aesthetic should wake up the senses. I think about art as being an alarm clock, waking up the senses to things that we may have become numb to. I’m from a city where 20 million people can walk down the street — and there’s lots of love in the boroughs — but there are certain parts of Manhattan that are not like the block I’m from in Brooklyn. Somebody can be dead on the street and 50 people could walk over the body before anybody even asks if you’re okay. So I think we’ve become numb and desensitized to a lot of the suffering that’s around us, and I think art is one way to say “No, wake up. Human beings who share your experiences, and your oxygen, and your water supply, and in many ways are part of the same organism, are going through and experiencing things that we need to be awakened to.” I think art has the power to do that, to wake us up to realize that we actually have work to do. The social sciences are a direct connection to the arts, because it’s one place you can go to actually dig into the reality of the world: to actually figure out what change has to happen based on the research that many of my colleagues here are doing.

LD:     That’s a good segue into my question about the arts and science. They’ve been separated for so long, even though we know that they’re not actually separate. I know that recently you received a joint appointment to the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. Do you know if there are a lot of professors on campus that have appointments in both a social or life science department and an arts department?

BB:     I heard of one other before me who was in Chicana/o Studies and also in World Arts and Cultures/Dance. But beyond that, I don’t know of any others. I know that Robin Kelley and Scot Brown are both African American Studies and History, and they also have an affiliation with the Global Jazz Studies program. Robin Kelley wrote the brilliant biography of jazz musician and legend Thelonius Monk, and Scot Brown does a lot of work around funk. So they have this connection between history, the arts and music that I think is really powerful.

Tricia Rose wrote one of the first scholarly books around hip-hop in 1994, Black Noise, and I had a chance to study with her at NYU as a grad student. I think my own experience was a little different because I identified as an artist. So while I wanted to study art to understand it, I also am a practitioner — I am a culture maker, a culture worker. It’s equally important to me to study the history, the culture, and the politics of the artistic media that I engage, and to develop my own craft.

I think there’s room for all kinds of art at all levels. But if we only have art that is about justice that is of a very low quality, we’re not helping the movement — we’re actually hurting the movement. So I try to challenge my students to explore terrain that they may have not experienced before, to think critically about the artistic practice and to think about the relationship between their art, the work they’re making and the world they want to build. I do that because I had amazing teachers and mentors who did the same thing with me. If you had to pay royalty checks for everything you take from your professor’s syllabus I would owe Lani Guinier a check every week. She is a brilliant, brilliant teacher who encouraged me to use collaboration in classrooms, to use creativity in the classroom, and to think critically in the classroom. So, those are things that are at the heart of how I connect to the arts and the social sciences.

 

“It’s a different time now and there is a whole lot that has not changed and needs to change. But I think our consciousness is expanding. I think the voices of people who were formerly incarcerated and are currently incarcerated are moving toward the center of the movement where they should be.” — Professor Bain

LD:     It seems like more people are accepting the fact that the stories we tell, including the media and entertainment we consume and create, are impactful in how they represent our lives and shaping who we are. Obviously, whenever there are these big shifts, we see it at different levels, and we sometimes see it commoditized or hijacked. What’s been your experience in observing this shift?

BB:     We’re in a time where there’s more of a movement to do many of the things that some folks realized need[ed] to happen 20 years ago, but there was no movement in place. Without a mass social movement, it’s very difficult to make change that is lasting, systemic and happens at an institutional level. So that is the biggest difference. I finished law school and I had a really unbelievable media platform: I had access to people who wanted to tell my story to 20 million people. And so because of The Village Voice and 60 Minutes, it was the strangest thing to really call out the NYPD and have, like, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley call me and offer me investment banking jobs. It was such an odd thing. I walked away from a lot of really lucrative opportunities — it just didn’t make any sense with my soul, you know? But I also realized that I could use some of that attention and energy to shine a light in other spaces that needed it more. So the show that I’ve created [“Lyrics from Lockdown”] just came out of touring in prisons around the country, and it emerged from me having a relationship with somebody who was put on death row at 17 — a man named Nanon Williams. “Lyrics From Lockdown,” the show, came from “Lyrics On Lockdown,” the tour, which hit 25 states around the country and ended up as a course in several states. The one I saw was first at Columbia, then NYU, The New School and Rikers Island. So seeing this sort of growth in attention to these issues over the last decade or two decades has challenged me to think about how to find ways to make sure that we’re shining the light in the right place.

I was able to actually bring some attention to Nanon’s case a year after we had the first public performances of the show. A federal judge looked at his case again and decided he should be released. Now the state of Texas appealed. He’s still locked up over 25 years for crime he didn’t commit, but we are closer than ever to getting some movement on his case. Folks like Bryan Stevenson went before the Supreme Court and argued in a case called Sullivan v. Florida that young folks we have locked up all over the country doing life sentences without parole, their brains weren’t even fully developed when they were charged for these crimes and marked for the rest of their lives. They should have the opportunity to actually have redemption. It’s not even second chances: in many cases, it’s first chances. Folks live in communities where the choices are not the choices folks have in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air and even Westwood, so that’s a big part of seeing this movement develop.

I feel like the folks that I’ve been blessed to work with have been a small part of building this larger movement because there weren’t editorials in The New York Times or the L.A. Times every week about mass incarceration. People weren’t even calling it “mass incarceration” or “hyper incarceration” or “racialized mass incarceration.” There was a network of folks — Critical Resistance through Angela Davis, a group called the Prison Moratorium Project, a group called the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights — who were talking about the prison industrial complex, connecting the dots and realizing that our communities are being devastated by the drug war, by aggressive paramilitary policing, and by the human caging that is still impacting us. But there’s at least a conversation and a movement. Black Lives Matter is in part to thank for the more recent wave of that. So I think that’s the biggest difference: we’re having this conversation in a larger context.

It’s a different time now and there is a whole lot that has not changed and needs to change. But I think our consciousness is expanding. I think the voices of people who were formerly incarcerated and are currently incarcerated are moving toward the center of the movement where they should be. Whereas 20 years ago, most of the policy that was being generated around prisons and policing was being driven by folks who had no experience in our communities, or any of these correctional facilities where our communities have been put in unprecedented numbers.

A larger movement requires a holistic approach to the problem. A larger movement is not about just folks changing policy, or changing legislation even. One of the things I learned in law school is that if you don’t change the hearts and minds of people, then you’ve got to send the National Guard to make sure that little black girls can go to school in the South.

LD:     I noticed that on the website for the Center for Justice, you say you’re “reshaping narratives through education, policy, research, advocacy, arts and culture.” Do you think that these are the channels through which we produce change?

BB:     I think those are our essential areas. I think it’s hard to make systemic change without those areas being considered. I also think, at this location, at this time and place, those are areas that you cannot leave out of the equation because we’re in a city that has an impact on global culture: you have to think about the arts and culture. Because we’re in a Tier One research institution, you have to think about research and education policy. You have to think about those things because of where we are in the world, this time and place. So we’ve been able to think about and begin forging collaborations across the campus that actually do that. Last year we offered a course called Legislative Theatre For Racial Justice, about using the arts to shape policy. We have collaborations with the folks in World Arts and Cultures/Dance, the team at the Art & Global Health Center, the Law School, and African American Studies.

We brought a Brazilian visiting scholar, artist, and theatre-maker, Alessandro Conceição, from Brazil to work with us at the juvenile hall and to develop theater scenes – Theater of the Oppressed. I was introduced to this in law school, because I had a brilliant legal professor [Lani Guinier] who knew that the law is full of theatrics. She knew that the drama’s in every courtroom. But she also knew, practically speaking, that if you were to actually challenge young law students to think outside the box to say, “Okay, well, how are they creating legislation in Brazil?” and to get folks to act out the social problems they’re experiencing, and to actually propose solutions — not just to talk about or write about the solutions, but to act them out and have a dialogue around them — that might be something we could really use. And when I saw that, a light bulb went on, and I said, “this is what I’m supposed to be using.”

So to go to Brazil with our colleagues in World Arts and Cultures/Dance in December and actually begin a relationship between L.A. and Rio, which we hope to build over time and eventually send students and faculty back and forth — it was powerful. We had students at the juvenile hall tell their stories; do poetry; do theater. At the end of the course, in collaboration with UCLA students, they presented those scenes to legal scholars, judges, law clerks, a legislative brain trust, the UN Special Rapporteur against racism, in order to share those ideas, have a conversation, and then voted on legislative proposals that, through a training we just completed here at the [UCLA] Bunche Center, we’re now going to actually take to Sacramento and City Hall and work to have their voices be heard when usually their voices are never part of the process. So there’s a larger movement that made that possible. It’s also an opportunity to think outside the box, and to think about how we use the arts, theater, poetry, policy, research, and education and link those so they’re not siloed off in ways that there are seen to be irrelevant to each other.

 

Read Part 2 HERE

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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UCLA California Center for Population Research Commemorates Its 20th Anniversary

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On October 11-12, 2018, the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) commemorated its 20th anniversary. Its first session on Thursday engaged population research in Los Angeles on families and neighborhoods, schools, eviction and homelessness, and social policy. The Friday research symposium showcased an accomplished and collaborative group of CCPR alumni from around the nation. This event highlighted the exceptional research of faculty and former students within the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA. For more information about the event, check out the CCPR Research Symposium_Final Schedule.

The California Center for Population Research (CCPR) was established in 1998 and has since, been a leading research center for research and training in demography. CCPR is comprised of over 90 active faculty researchers from an array of academic disciplines, such as epidemiology, public policy, economics, sociology, and public welfare. CCPR researchers span several schools, including the College of Letters and Sciences, the Division of Social Sciences, the School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, and the School of Public Affairs, as well as academic departments within UCLA.

 

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UCLA Professor Frasure-Yokley Discusses Her Electoral Research on MSNBC — Watch Video Here

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On October 8, UCLA Professor Lorrie Frasure-Yokley and UCLA LPPI policy fellow Celina Avalos were interviewed by MSNBC reporter Katy Tur. Check out the video HERE.

Learn more about the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) HERE.

Learn more about Professor Lorrie Frasure-Yokley and her research HERE.

Learn more about Celina Avalos’s work on BruinsVOTE! HERE.

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UCLA Professor Menjivar Scheduled to Speak at DWC Congressional Briefing on 10/11

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On October 11, Professor Cecilia Menjivar will discuss asylum protections for immigrant women fleeing violence at this congressional briefing organized by the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime (DWC).  For more information, see below and visit the DWC website.

Congressional Briefing: Translating Research to Policy
Improving Justice for Women and Girls
Thursday, October 11, 2018 | 9:30am – 12:30pm
Rayburn Office Building, Room 2237, Washington DC

 

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What Does the L.A. Valley Girl Stereotype Say About Language and Power?

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By Tyanna Slobe

PhD student, Linguistic Anthropology, UCLA

‘Mock White Girl’ (MWG) is a concept that I started developing in my MA thesis in Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and began formulating into an article when I came to UCLA, where I received valuable feedback from several faculty members in UCLA’s Department of Anthropology and Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture (CLIC), as well as feedback from UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women. I use the term to describe performances that parody a linguistic style ideologically associated with a stereotypical, upper middle-class, white girl in the U.S. I got the idea for this research one day while ordering a latte at a hipster Boulder café, after I told the barista my order and he repeated it back in an exaggerated ‘girl’ sounding voice. While he was clearly joking, I realized that he was mocking something related to gender, maybe age, and a particular speaking style, and I became interested in the stigma at root of his mocking performance.

This research, recently published in the journal Language In Society examines how the linguistic, embodied, and social features of MWG are taken up and (re)produced by different social actors across various cultural contexts. Performances are invoked through hyperbolic use of a bunch of linguistic and stylistic variables, including things like uptalk, vocal fry, dynamic intonation, texting language, blondeness, and objects associated with material consumerism, like Starbucks and iPhones. The persona is widely-circulated in U.S. pop culture, and the relevant linguistic variety is often associated with the ’80s and ’90s Valley Girl from Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, represented in cult classic films, such as Clueless and Legally Blonde. While this particular stereotype may be iconic of LA and California, the persona has transcended the Valley and is associated with cosmopolitan white femininity all over the US. She does not “live” anywhere in particular; instead she is more recognized through elite institutions and social practices, like Starbucks and shopping.

MWG is grounded in linguistic anthropological research that uses mock as a framework for understanding code switching, social meaning, and power first proposed by Jane Hill in her work on Mock Spanish.[1] Hill defines Mock Spanish as a practice where dominant groups (in this case white, monolingual English speakers) appropriate Spanish words/phrases into their talk for added humor or other social meaning, which, in effect, racializes Latinas/os and perpetuates negative stereotypes of the Spanish language and its speakers as ‘not serious.’ More recently, linguistic anthropologists have explored how mock-like practices are also used in ways that challenge hegemonic power relations, rather than only reinforcing them. MWG is situated in both of these bodies of work. While it’s something that can be used to make fun of voices—like in my encounters with so many hipster baristas—it still draws from a linguistic style associated with a relatively privileged segment of the population: white girls and women. In MWG performances, the mocked linguistic variety is closely related to Standard American English, and its speakers live in a society where white femininity is overrepresented in media representations of girlhood, which normalizes these girls’ experiences at the expense of all other forms of girlhood. For these reasons, it’s important to consider the diverse cultural contexts in which MWG performances occur.

I highlight three genres of MWG performances from videos found on YouTube and Vine. The first, Savior MWG, involves middle-aged white women who use MWG as a means of positioning girls’ voices as sounding unprofessional, inauthentic, and annoying. Here, MWG performances stem from middle class anxieties about girls’ ability to achieve socioeconomic stability in male-dominated corporate spheres. The second genre involves the viral YouTube videos Shit White Girls Say, wherein girls of color use MWG to draw attention to and parody racist things that white girls frequently say and do. In these examples, mock is a resource used to humorously call out white racism. The last genre examines videos made by teenage boys on Vine who use MWG to cast the mocked persona as superficial, irrational, and comical in ways that position teenage girls’ homosocial peer groups as vapid, and thus illegitimate sites of sociality.

Each genre of MWG involves a different moral stance relative to the white girl persona, and these stances vary depending on a performer’s experiences with, and ideologies about, white girls. The ways that white girls in the U.S. are interpreted and evaluated varies significantly among different segments of the population, and MWG gives insight into this phenomenon. My article thus stresses the importance of taking an intersectional approach to studies of linguistic variation and social meaning.

 

Tyanna Slobe is a PhD student in Linguistic Anthropology at UCLA. Her dissertation research, funded by the National Science Foundation, compares how teenagers in public and private Chilean high schools come into linguistic practices associated with different class and political identities. She also has a major side interest in how ‘teenager’ emerged as a social category in the U.S. through 20th century media representations that primarily portrayed the experiences of upper middle-class, white girls, which is how this work on MWG originated.

[1] Hill, J. (2008). The everyday language of white racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Celebrating Reverend Lawson’s Enduring Contributions at UCLA

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By Kent Wong

Director, UCLA Labor Center

Rev. James Lawson Jr., a nationally known and celebrated leader of the civil rights movement, turned ninety years old on September 22.

The UCLA community has been very fortunate to have Rev. Lawson as part of our teaching faculty for the past sixteen years. His course, Nonviolence and Social Movements, is always popular with students. In 2016, the UCLA Labor Center published a book on his life and work, Nonviolence and Social Movements: The Teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson Jr.

Rev. Lawson was a close friend and colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, and Rev. Lawson’s work in the civil rights movement is well documented. He was a leading force in the Nashville sit-in movement, in the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, and in introducing the philosophy of nonviolence to a new generation of civil rights leaders. However, his role in advancing social justice movements in Los Angeles is less well known.

After moving from Tennessee to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Rev. Lawson served as pastor of the Holman United Methodist Church for twenty-five years. He was also a founder of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), which brings together clergy and lay leaders of all faiths with laborers, immigrants, and low-income families in the cause of a just economy. Through CLUE, Rev. Lawson influenced a new generation of religious leaders who actively participate in Los Angeles’s social and economic justice movements.

For many years, Rev. Lawson also led an emerging group of social justice leaders, known simply as the Holman Group, which included María Elena Durazo, Gilbert Cedillo, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Karen Bass, long before any of them were elected to public office. The Holman Group introduced these and many other social justice leaders to the philosophy of nonviolence and social change. To this day, Rev. Lawson continues to convene nonviolence workshops with labor and community practitioners. He has worked with hotel workers, janitors, and home care workers to advance nonviolent, direct-action campaigns that helped transform the Los Angeles labor movement.

This year marks not only Rev. Lawson’s ninetieth birthday but also the fiftieth anniversary of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, where Dr. King was assassinated after Rev. Lawson called upon him to come support the workers.

To celebrate Rev. Lawson’s enduring contributions, the UCLA Labor Center and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment will launch the UCLA Lawson Legacy Project this November, when Rev. Lawson receives the UCLA Medal, the university’s highest honor. The UCLA Lawson Legacy Project will establish an annual Lawson Lecture on Nonviolence beginning in 2019 and an annual scholarship to a deserving UCLA student engaged in the theory and practice of nonviolence. More details about the UCLA Legacy Project will be released at irle.ucla.edu soon.

 

Kent Wong is the director of the UCLA Labor Center, where he teaches courses in labor studies and Asian American studies.  He previously served as staff attorney for the Service Employees International Union. He was the founding president of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the founding president of the United Association for Labor Education, and currently is vice president of the California Federation of Teachers.

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A Case for Teaching Critical Media Literacy

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By Rhonda Hammer, Lecturer, UCLA Department of Gender Studies

We are in the midst of a Digital Revolution that many scholars find comparable in scope to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, which transformed the Western world.

Indeed, it was not so long ago that the Internet and social media were heralded as revolutionary social justice resources for new dimensions of participatory democracy, which allowed for marginalized and oft-suppressed voices to be heard in a public forum.

Yet, as revelations of large scale manipulation emerge post-2016 US presidential election including disinformation, surveillance, data collection and microtargeting by marketers, data resource corporations, political organizations and foreign governments, it becomes increasingly evident that there is an urgent need for courses which teach or incorporate critical media/digital studies.

Loosely defined, critical media literacy involves teaching students to think critically about “the ways media texts are produced, constructed and consumed” as well as to provide skills that help them recognize messages encoded in media/digital texts, many of which are not consciously perceived. (source).

For example: many scholars clearly demonstrate that certain media representations of different groups of people can reinforce negative stereotypical values.  These images can be communicated or enhanced in film or television not only by the script and casting but also through production techniques such as lighting, shot framing, music and sound effects (to name a few).

With that in mind, it seems evident that critical media literacy should be essential to contemporary education, including K-12 college and university curricula. And it is this need which best describes the perspective of a newly-revised Gender Studies undergraduate course I teach on “Media: Gender, Race, Class & Sexuality.”

Although I have taught this course for many years, it was only last year that a media production component was implemented largely due to newly available resources through UCLA’s innovative College Library Instructional Computing Commons (CLICC). Not only were camcorder kits made available for check-out by the students, but they also now have access to the extraordinary services of Vince Mitchell, the primary producer and director of UCLA’s on-campus media production center, Studio 22.

During the 2018 winter quarter, Vince and members of his capable student staff conducted weekly workshops as part of the class, teaching the students basic production and post production skills to empower them to plan and construct their own short group media projects.

Given that most of the students had no previous production experience (save for some DIY or high school projects) the final short video programs – which were screened during exam week – were remarkable. Students were broken up into nine group based on their topic interests and asked to produce a 5-10 minute long documentary-style video, critically examining some dimension of media culture and the politics of representation (how marginalized and dominant groups of people are represented in media).

The documentary themes were topical, relevant and reflected student interests in a variety of topics including Representations of Black Masculinity in Hip Hop Music Videos and Social Media and Feminist Voices and Representations of Latina Women and Stereotypes of Asian Portrayals. Here is a link to the media projects produced in this class, which are described and can be publicly viewed online.*

The enthusiasm and pride the students take in these productions was evident during the final screening of their media projects at the end of the course and proved to be an empowering experience for all involved. I hope that other faculty will consider including critical media literacy and/or media/digital instruction and  productions in their classes and take advantage of the resources and facilities of CLICC and Vince Mitchell of Studio 22, whose services can be scheduled through Jessica Mentesoglu, Head of Digital Initiatives & Information Technologies Operations Services at UCLA Library. They can both assist in designing highly relevant media-related resources or assignments for your courses.

 

*Caroline Kong, Instructional Technology Coordinator for Social Science Computing (SSC) set up and designed this accessible, user-friendly website as well as the course’s Moodle page.  For assistance with Moodle pages you can contact her.

Dr. Rhonda Hammer is a Lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies; the Graduate School of Education, Social Science & Comparative Education; and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research is in the areas of critical theory; media/cultural studies; critical media literacy; and the politics of representation in film, television, new media, feminisms and engaged pedagogy. She has published numerous articles, chapters and books on these subjects, including her co-edited 2009 anthology, Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches, which describe and analyzes dimensions of contemporary media, consumer, and digital culture. 

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When They Call You a Criminal

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By Rosie Rios, Administrative Director, UCLA Prison Education Program

“We, the people.

We are not criminals.

I am not a criminal.

I am Arlena.

I am beautiful.

I am stardust.”

                                                                                         — Arlena (Sankofa Student)

This summer I had the privilege of co-facilitating the Sankofa Summer School for Girls at Barry J. Nidorf (BJN) Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, California. Every day for two weeks Professor Lauri Mattenson and I went to BJN to discuss and analyze the book, When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, with girls between the ages of 14 and 18. We began each class with a movement icebreaker. The dancing one was their favorite. We then sat in a circle, read our community agreement, which was created and signed collectively on the first day of class as a promise to our commitment to respect one another, and then opened up the space with the question, “What stood out to you the most from the reading?” This was by far my favorite part of the class because I had never seen so many students raising their hands up all at once, eager to share what they had learned!

Our daily conversations touched on the topics of identity, trauma, conditions in underserved communities like the ones that helped raise us, police brutality, drug addiction, womanhood, and the theme of our class: looking back in order to move forward. We laughed and we cried; most importantly, we created a sacred space.

As we neared the end of the course, the girls decided that just like Patrisse, they too could use their writing to share their stories, be heard and feel understood. Each word in the letter was carefully chosen to not only convey their message, but also to express that they are frustrated and tired of living such a precarious life.

On August 29th, 2018, they wrote the following letter:

People here before us,

We need you to listen and understand that we are not criminals. We ask that you don’t judge us and that you get to know us. Not all of us come from houses with white picket fences and rich neighborhoods. We come from the ghetto—where we grew up exposed to gangs, prostitution, drugs, and police brutality. Where you never have the chance to truly live, just survive. We never had the chance to be kids. Some of us just need guidance, a mentor who genuinely loves us and exposes us to the right paths in life. We ask that you take a moment to sit back and understand our experiences.

As you come to work with us, we want you to listen, be patient, and not pity but empathize with us. 

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely, 

UCLA Sankofa Summer School For Girls

Unit T/V

 

To get involved with UCLA’s Prison Education Program, attend the upcoming orientation this Friday, September 28, from 9 AM to 12 PM in the Ackerman Viewpoint Conference Room on Level A. RSVP here.

For more information about the UCLA Prison Education Program, visit http://www.uclaprisoned.org/ and follow them on Twitter @uclaprisonedu.

Members of the UCLA Prison Education Program team. Front row: Dianna Williams, Daniel Ocampo, Lyric “Day-Day” Green-Brown, Rosie Rios, Joanna Navarro. Back row: Gabrielle Sheerer, Dominique Rocker, Bryonn Bain, Derrick Kemp.

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LA Social Science Presents “Conversations with Changemakers” Featuring Dr. Karen Umemoto

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Dr. Karen Umemoto is a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and the Luskin School.  She is also a UCLA alum, who has some big plans as the new Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.  We recently met up with Dr. Umemoto to learn about her experiences growing up in LA and how that has shaped her work to affect change in her home city.

LASS:     Thank you for joining us today. Please tell us about yourself.

KU:         I’m a third-generation, Japanese American, born and raised in Los Angeles. I’m a proud Bruin, having started my college education here at UCLA and then returning for my master’s degree in Asian American Studies, and then returning now, after 22 years of teaching at the University of Hawaii. I’m happy to be back.

LASS:     I know you did some really important and impactful community-based research work while you were there. Can you talk about that and how you’re bringing that work to UCLA?

KU:         Yes, I have a strong interest in community-based development and I worked primarily with Native Hawaiian communities over the past 22 years while in Hawaii. I was heavily involved in building community-university partnerships, some lasting the entire two decades. I gained a lot of lessons there, about how people at the university can engage with communities in a way that is empowering for them, that is mutually beneficial in terms of a co-learning process, and that leaves a long-lasting, positive impact in communities. I’d like to apply that through my position as a faculty member, as an instructor, and as the Director, here at UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

LASS:     What plans do you envision for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center?

KU:         As the new Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the Asian American Studies Center, I’m working with our staff and faculty to launch a couple initiatives in the spirit of being relevant to the world and to our communities. One is a digital media initiative. We’ve gained a lot of knowledge and we’ve collected a lot of primary source materials over the course of the last 50 years since we were established. I see our role as helping to push that out to the public over the next 50 years. We’ll continue the research and collection of historically important collections, but I really see the need to utilize the latest technologies and digital media to make this knowledge in Asian American and Ethnic Studies more accessible to the public and to the world.

The second initiative is focused on public policy. Though there is important work on Asian American and Pacific Islander policy issues being done at many universities, I’d like to see UCLA play a role in collaborating with others to further policy relevant research on Asian American and Pacific Islander populations. We have the critical mass of applied researchers here at UCLA. We have good models for policy centers that we can learn from. And, we have the strong infrastructure of UCLA and its standing in the public to be able to mobilize research efforts to make an impact on issues affecting our communities both in the realm of national public discourse and in local policymaking.

LASS:     What about your own personal research interests?

KU:         I’m working on several book projects, one based on the juvenile justice research and reform work I did in Hawaii and another on the history of urban renewal in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.  I’m also very interested in race relations in Los Angeles, which I’ve done research on in the past.

To me, community development issues and race relations are very interconnected. I grew up in Gardena in the 1970s, which was named the most diverse community in the country at that time. And the 1970s was one of the most prosperous times in Southern California. Race relations was relatively positive compared to other places and other periods. So I grew up in somewhat of a bubble, thinking that race relations with as good everywhere else. And when I left Gardena, I realized that it wasn’t.

Fast forward to graduate school when there was growing controversy over the concentration of liquor stores in South LA, many of which were Korean owned. And there was the horrific incident in which Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by a Korean American grocer, which was a precursor to the civil unrest in 1992. I remember sitting in my dorm room when the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating were acquitted. And I watched my community and my city go up in flames.  I had already been planning to study racial conflict at that time, but this sealed it.

So, when I returned to Los Angeles to do my dissertation work, I was really committed to understand racial conflict—how it escalates and how we could better handle it. But I was looking for a way to study day-to-day racial conflict, not necessarily explosive incidents, because it’s the day-to-day conflicts that then build up to these explosive moments. The most violent form of everyday racial conflict at that time was interracial gang violence, so I ended up studying a gang war between the Culver City Boys and the Shoreline Crips. I did a three-year ethnographic study of the gang war, which resulted in a book called The Truce: Lessons from an LA Gang War.

I think that many of the lessons from that gang war and from police and community responses to it are still very relevant today. I think we see a lot of problems today that stem from that same phenomenon where people are not able to see the world from other people’s point of view and work more collaboratively to address controversies that lead to racial tensions.

“I’m reminded of the period of history where my parents were incarcerated in US concentration camps during World War II. I think about all of the things that lead up to their incarceration and you see many of the same things happening today—the untethering of discourse from material realities, the demonization of different people from the top echelons of government.” – Dr. Umemoto

LASS:     So what types of challenges do you see out there and how do you hope to address it?

KU:         I think there are three major challenges many others here at UCLA, and I, are concerned about. One is the growing wealth gap and economic inequality of opportunities, between the haves and have not’s.

The second is the lack of better opportunities through which individuals and communities can engage in the civic decision making processes in ways that build capacity and lead to greater social justice.

And third, I think because of the tenor of national politics and national political discourse, we have a problem of people at the very top levels of government playing up racial divisions and implementing policies that target people of color and demean people of color and instill fear in communities of color.

I’m reminded of the period of history where my parents were incarcerated in US concentration camps during World War II. I think about all of the things that lead up to their incarceration and you see many of the same things happening today—the untethering of discourse from material realities, the demonization of different people from the top echelons of government. It’s the demonization of entire groups of people by those in the top levels of government, and the fanning of fear amongst the majority population about these groups, tapping the economic precarity that people feel, that leads to tragic consequences for the most vulnerable.

LASS:     So with all that in mind, what’s the impact, through your own work and through the Center, that you’re hoping to make?

KU:         I think one way that we can contribute to addressing these problems is to push out Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies—disseminating knowledge and educating students and the broader public about Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other historically marginalized communities. If we can nurture greater empathy, greater understanding, and greater respect towards all populations across society, then and only then is civic democracy and greater societal justice possible.

LASS:     With that in mind, any parting words?

KU:         Just that this is the only job I would have moved back home for. UCLA is the only university that I would have been interested in. I’m a strong believer in public education. I’m a product of the LA Unified School District. I’m a product of the California State University system and the University of California system. I think we play such a critical role in educating the next generation of thought leaders, changemakers, and citizens of the world who can make a positive impact. I think this is the right place to be at this time.

LASS:     That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your work and experiences with us.

 

Dr. Karen Umemoto was interviewed by Mike Nguyen, an assistant editor and contributor to LA Social Science.

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Fear Is a Party Animal

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Credit: Getty Images via Inc.com

By Sarah Gavish, UCLA Master of Social Science ‘18

In an era where adult Americans consume 12+ hours of media per day, the relationship between media and public perception has never been more complex – or fascinating.  Does media actually have potential to shape our perceptions?  If it does, how, and why?  Some studies claim that the news media is responsible for stoking our greatest fears.  I interrogated this claim, as well as existing literature and research methodologies, with the following questions:

  1. To what extent do Americans consume news media that caters to their fears?
  2. What are the factors that may influence this relationship?

My investigation began by looking at the top 10 fears in America as reported by Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears in 2017, a random sample of the fears and anxieties of the US population.  The ranking top 10 are listed below listed below:

  1. Corrupted government officials
  2. American Healthcare act/Trumpcare
  3. Pollution of Oceans, Rivers and Lakes
  4. Pollution of Drinking Water
  5. Not having enough money for the future
  6. High Medical Bills
  7. The US will be involved in another World War
  8. Global Warming & Climate Change
  9. North Korea using weapons
  10. Air Pollution

I examined the relationship between these fears and news consumption habits, considering individual consumption of three of the top news networks in the United States: MSNBC, Fox News and CNN.  Immediately I found that higher levels of fear of the Survey’s top 10 were associated with higher consumption of MSNBC and CNN, while lower levels of fear of these topics were associated with higher consumption of Fox News. To me, this very interesting finding begged further investigation.

Let’s consider timing: The 2017 Survey of American Fears was deployed and compiled in June of 2017, within six months of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, conservatives and Republicans watch more Fox News, while liberals and Democrats watch more MSNBC and CNN.  With that in mind, the study yielded two additional relevant findings: conservatives and Republicans (who watch more Fox News) say that they have little to no fear of the top 10 issues.  Liberals and Democrats on the other hand – who watch more MSNBC and CNN –  say they are afraid or very afraid of all of these things.

What we can determine, then, is this simple idea: both the news media and our fears are not only politicized, they’re partisan. 

It is important to note that conservatives and Republicans are not necessarily without fears altogether, is it simply that the top 10 fears in America in 2017 more closely mirror those of liberals and Democrats..  Further research might dive more deeply into the Survey’s sampling methods, or the sample population’s characteristics to understand if there were other socioeconomic or influencing factors pointing to specific fears, beyond political leanings.

I would hypothesize that there is an entirely separate set of politicized fears held by conservatives that are in turn stoked by the programming they regularly watch – namely, FOX News.

The screaming presence of division across party lines in our media and our fears is no coincidence, especially if you consider the content put out by these networks. Using keywords from the daily News Minute put out by the Associated Press and UCLA’s NewsScape database, I found that CNN, which bears a significant audience overlap with MSNBC, showed the most coverage of the top 10 fear topics. Fox News showed far less and, in some cases, the least.

I consider the results of my research a sincere call to action for conscious news consumption.  The “fact” of the matter is, if you watch, read, or listen to the same news sources all the time, it is very likely that you’re operating in a political echochamber of your own thoughts and fears.  It is important as individuals and as a society to recognize that our fears can be shaped by the news we consume, and that the news we consume is often airing topical programming that caters directly to our fears.

 

Sarah Gavish is a social scientist interested in solving humanity’s problems through conversation, collaboration, and an eventual upheaval of unquestionably flawed cultural institutions.  She also likes to meditate, cook, argue, and read books.  Sarah is not on social media and is happy to explain why (you shouldn’t be either) if you email her.

 

 

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