Judith Baca, acclaimed muralist, arts activist and professor in the UCLA César E. Chavez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies as well as the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, has been named the 2015 USA Rockefeller Fellow, Visual Arts, by United States Artists (USA).
The notion of boys’ and girls’ schools conjures rosy images of elite private institutions, but the history of single-sex education in the United States is rife with misguided prejudice.
For the second year in a row, no non-white actor was among the 20 acting nominations for the Academy Awards. NPR’s Kelly McEvers talks about the awards and Hollywood’s struggles with diversity with Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
For more than a year, this country has witnessed an extraordinary display by young folks protesting our nation’s racial disregard toward and violence against black bodies. Police brutality is being captured with greater frequency on cameras, proving true what black folks have complained about for decades.
As the public grapples with images of violent extremism advocated by the Islamic State group, UCLA students have developed a website and social movement aimed at slowing its spread by countering recruitment strategies.
Steven Nelson recently joined a long line of respected Africanists who have led the African Studies Center at the UCLA International Institute. And as its new director, he is working to cultivate a sense of community among faculty and students on campus with an interest in Africa.
A UCLA alumna who has spent much of her life galloping around the globe has given $100,000 to establish an endowment in support of graduate student travel in the UCLA College’s Department of Anthropology.
Dorothy Jewell, who graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, said that she hopes the Dorothy H. Jewell Graduate Student Travel Award Endowment will help students experience cultures outside their own.
“The experience of immersing oneself in various cultures is what anthropology is all about,” Jewell said. “We can’t be ethnocentric.”
Specifically, graduate students in biological, linguistic and sociocultural anthropology will be given access to the travel stipends, allowing them to deepen their research beyond campus.
“UCLA is a highly rated institution that through its concentration on research makes our world better equipped to meet the future,” Jewell said. “I’m proud to help students prepare for that future.”
Jewell, who as a non-traditional student enrolled at UCLA when she was 55, had already travelled to around 80 countries before deciding to pursue her undergraduate degree.
After living in parts of Europe and Africa for months on end, including the time she slept under a eucalyptus tree on a Moroccan beach for seven months, two UCLA professors advised her to move beyond her community college courses and pursue a degree in anthropology at the university.
“I had already been living this anthropological experience,” she recalls them telling her. “They recommended I make the anthropology direction more official.”
Jewell always had an adventurous spirit. Following high school, she left her native Canada for what she thought would be a brief tour of Europe then never looked back. She met her late husband – also a UCLA graduate – in Norway when he was working on location for Disney, and they eventually settled in Los Angeles for his work in the film industry and hers in the travel business. Having discovered the riches that come with experiencing other cultures, Jewell continues to explore the world. Her next destination is Tanzania.
“Travel is an important part of my life, partly due to this nomad aspect of my personality that seemed to manifest itself when I left Canada,” Jewell said. “I originally went to Europe and Africa for six months and it turned into five years. And ever since, I’ve had to have my travel fix.”
Jewell’s gift will now make those experiences possible to emerging anthropology scholars at UCLA.
“Seeing firsthand how other cultures and societies function is a vital part of being a successful anthropologist,” said Nancy Levine, professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology. “Ms. Jewell’s gift ensures that a new generation of anthropologists will emerge with the experiences needed to develop impactful and meaningful research.”
In a study exploring racial bias and how people use their mind’s-eye image of an imagined person’s size to represent someone as either threatening or high-status, UCLA researchers found that people envisioned men with stereotypically black names as bigger and more violent.
UCLA alumna Christine Simmons, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Sparks basketball team, welcomed new African-American students to UCLA at the 10th annual Black Convocation and urged them to tap into opportunities afforded by their enrollment and serve interests beyond their own.
Associate professor of history Kelly Lytle Hernandez has won the 2015 Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award from the Pacific coast branch of the American Historical Association. The award recognizes the most deserving contribution to the Pacific Historical Review, a publication of the University of California Press.
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