Sabina Juneja Garcia

Sabina will travel to Los Angeles to examine historical evidence of the communication between the citizen and the politician to control the shape of the physical landscape of Chavez Ravine. Chavez Ravine was once a thriving Mexican-American community removed for construction of a massive public-housing site yet today Chavez Ravine is home to Dodger Stadium. Using the papers of prominent politicians, Mayor Norris Poulson and City Councilman Edward Roybal, she will examine the campaign rhetoric employed by these candidates who were at odds on the issue of public-housing and the […]

Sirianand Jacobs

According to Franklin Becker, “the most functional buildings and environments can be highly symbolic, often in undesired and unexpected ways.” Using the window as a symbol imbued with strong cross-cultural meanings, Sirianand intends to explore current tensions between native Dutch and Dutch-Moroccan immigrants through their use of visible domestic space. She believes that the striking differences between the ways in which Moroccan immigrants and the ethnic Dutch conceive of this boundary between the public and private spheres illuminate the different ways they view the world. She also believes that Moroccan […]

Randeep Hothi

Morality, as a realm approached by philosophers to be captured by theory and grounded upon metaphysics, as the realm in which the good is discriminated from the evil or the bad by faculties of reason, is subverted by sublime gestures of the poet. These sublime gestures in the prose of Puran Singh have specifically subverted the ethical foundations of Brahmanism and Vedanta through the experience of the Sikh path. Randeep Singh’s research will delve into the Sikh experiences, in dialogue with the Western tradition of metaphysics, to provide some insights […]

Nicole Gordon

Current Bio: Nicole completed an MFA at UCLA in Film Production. She’s since been working in cultural programming in the non-profit sector: Palm Springs Int’l Film Society/Festivals, IKAR (ritual and advocacy), and now at Friends Of The Observatory, the non-profit fundraising and advocacy partner of Griffin Observatory in Los Angeles, CA Haas Scholars Project: The placement of a womans body attests to the gender dynamics of a film, so how do recurring spatial settings figure female characters into the collective national imagination? To address this question Nicole will conduct a […]

René Flores

Increasingly, Latino immigrants are steering away from large metropolitan areas, traditional immigration magnets, in favor of smaller, often rural communities. As Small Town USA is transformed by migration, the specter of xenophobia seems to lurk nearby. In recent months, dozens of towns have considered passing laws against undocumented immigrants ranging from criminalizing their labor (Escondido, CA) or penalizing their landlords (Hazleton, PA) to prohibiting their presence in public spaces (Springfield, TN). René will try to discover the factors that motivate the rise of xenophobic sentiments in small U.S. communities. He […]

Vi Do

Vi will investigate the nature of state led health care reform in America, focusing on the instrumental political actors that shape the debate. As federal level attempts to solve the problem of the uninsured have failed time and time again, policy innovations to address America’s broken health care delivery system have emerged from the states. The two critical examples are Hawaii’s Prepaid Health Care Act of 1974, which established an employer mandate for health insurance provision and Massachusetts’s newest reform, Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006, which introduced an […]

Ziza Delgado

My research analyzes the education reform that took place at UC Berkeley at the end of the 1960s to determine whether social movements such as the Free Speech Movement and Third World Liberation Front affected University curricula and pedagogy. Imperative to the research is a critical discussion of the power dynamic between students and the UC administration. I analyze the effect that the FSM had on curriculum reform, through the creation of a Free University and other experimental programs. The second component of my research looks at the historical context […]

Allene Cottier

Allene Cottier will conduct a comparative study of the various interpretations of the terms Sovereignty, Self-determination and Indigenous in discussions of American Indian politics. These are critical terms in current discussions of social justice. She anticipates that there will be a fundamental fracture in the use and understanding of these terms among governments and the legal and policy establishments on the one hand, and grassroots Native American communities on the other hand. She will compare the use of these terms (and the meaning behind them), in international legal forums, U.S. […]

Chad Vogler

Chad will travel to New York and New Haven to perform research on the unusual interracial collaborations and intercultural exchanges which occurred during the Harlem Renaissance, and this material will be used to compose a series of 25-30 poems. Inspired by recent critical discourses that redescribe modernism as a set of interracial dynamics, these poems will be composed from the perspective of a contemporary author imagining a bicultural past in modernity that potentially effaces the concreteness of the authors racial identity through his anonymity as the poetic speaker. The primary […]

Sabrina Carletti

Sabrina Carletti’s project will inquire into Japanese postwar calligraphy within the Zen’ei bijutsu (avant-garde) movement while focusing on the calligraphy of Morita Shiry_ (1926-1999), who brought radical changes to calligraphy practice by leading the bokujin-kai, or the Human Ink Society. Sabrina intends to depart from the familiar influence model of Japanese and Western avant-gardes by arguing for a more complex understanding of Zen in Japanese modern calligraphy. Sabrina will travel to Japan to study works by Morita at the Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto, and to New York […]