Spencer Orey
Spencer will travel to El Salvador this summer and conduct anthropological fieldwork focusing on the not-for-profit organization Pro-Búsqueda. Focusing primarily on reuniting children disappeared in the Salvadoran civil war with their biological families, workers at Pro-Búsqueda have not only helped to advocate processes of justice and repatriation but have also played an important role in lobbying for reparations legislation as well. Using ethnographic methods, Spencer will collect data through first-hand participant observation and interviews in order to examine the importance of finding and reuniting children in reconstructing civil society and […]
Shahrzad Abbassi-Rahbar
Thalassemia is a disease common to 60 countries worldwide, with high prevalence in Middle Eastern countries. The Iranian population consists of many who exhibit the beta-thalassemia hemoglobinopathy, which reduces red blood cells ability to carry oxygen, and even more who are carriers of this life-threatening disease. In the past, most of the children born with beta-thalassemia failed to survive during the first decade of life. Medical advances have recognized that placental and umbilical cord blood of a newborn is a rich source of blood stem cells, which can replace the […]
Keith Orejel
Keith will be traveling to Washington D.C. to do archival research at the Library of Congress and National Archives. He will be studying funerals in the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Scholars of the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras often focus on the institutions and individuals who fueled the creation of these social movements, while ignoring the role of culture and cultural politics in this process. Keith will attempt to study funerals as a way to look at how existing cultural rituals become transformed in periods of African American politicization. […]
Yu Lei
Nanocrystalline materials have shown promise in many applications, such as light-emitting diodes, solar cells, biomedicine, optoelectronics, etc. Shape-controlled nanocrystals are important because different geometries of nanocrystals possess various electronic properties which can be tailored to their application. In this project, Yu will conduct synthesis experiments of Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) by varying the amount of solvent. By analyzing nucleation kinetics in the synthesis of the CdTe, Yu hopes to develop a mechanistic explanation for crystal branching and increase the reproducibility of the tetrapods shape syntheses. Moreover, this approach to understanding CdTe […]
Alex Kogan
In the last thirty years, psychology has seen an explosion in research on love and interpersonal relationships. Much of the work, however, has focused on either mapping styles of love or the functionality of romantic love within the evolutionary and attachment traditions, leaving much of the terrain unexplored. Alex’s research aims to go beyond the current models, encapsulated by three prime objectives: 1) establish the difference between “to love” and “to be loved”; 2) garner initial support for the love processor model, which attempts to unify and expand love outside […]
Khatchadour Khatchadourian
Khatchadour will travel to Beirut, Lebanon this summer to study Armenian and Lebanese community formation. By conducting interviews and implementing professionally administered surveys, he hopes to gain a more insightful understanding of how each community views itself in relation to the other. Khatchadour will also meet with community leaders and politicians to assess the impact of communal relations on local politics. By analyzing the political, economic, and socio-cultural frameworks the Armenian community employs to express its uniqueness, Khatchadour hopes to comprehend assimilation and community development in the Lebanese context.
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 […]