Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

APPENDIX C: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF LOS ANGELESOne of the strengths of our department is that in addition to doing cross-cultural research,which is expected of anthropologists, many of our faculty and students also carry out aconsiderable amount of fieldwork in the greater Los Angeles area. Most importantly, many ofour faculty and students are engaged in doing research not only "in" Los Angeles, but"of" LosAngeles, documenting the vast cultural and socio-economic diversity of the city, which offerssocial scientists countless opportunities for emiching our understanding of social and culturalchange, conflict, marginalization, immigration, inequality, integration, learning and schooling,political activism, medical institutions, mental illness, the culture of media production andmedia consumption, family life, material culture, the interpenetration of work and leisure. Someof these projects have obvious media appeal and have been featured on local or national radio,television, or in the popular press. Others are less appealing to a wider audience. But they allshare a commitment to using research to connect to the larger community within which UCLAis located.The work done by our faculty, current students, and recent graduates have here been organizedinto four research themes:(1) Everyday Life of Families;(2) The Life and History of Communities;(3) Media, Entertainment, and Aesthetics; and(4) Medical Institutions, Medical Encounters, and Social Welfare.1) EVERYDAY LIFE OF FAMILIESSince the year 2001, the UCLA Sloan Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) - directed byProfessor Elinor Ochs in collaboration with a large research team that includes faculty, postdocs,graduate students, and undergraduates - has documented the everyday worlds of parents and childrenin Los Angeles as they attend to the needs of family, horne, school, and workplace. CELF conducted aninterdisciplinary study of the quotidian experiences of 32 working families, capturing a "week in thelife" with a richness of detail unprecedented in the social sciences. Work-family researchpredominantly has relied on self-report methods (such as surveys, interviews, and daily diary studies)to gather information about family members' feelings and behaviors. CELF expands past research witha corpus that includes ethnographic video recordings and timed tracking observations of familymembers; floor plans, photographs, and narrated video horne tours depicting families' materialenvironment; daily diaries of mood, work, and school experiences; interviews on ~amily routines, socialnetworks, health, education, and work; questionnaire measures of psychological wellbeing; andsampling of stress hormones. To address the socio-cultural underpinnings of working family life inLos Angeles, CELF has established parallel research projects in Sweden (sCELF) and Italy (iCELF).Scholars across these three sites have merged their data sets to analyze the similarities and d:i£ferences44