Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

Another faculty who has been working on family life in Los Angeles for many years is ProfessorThomas Weisner Goint appointment with Psychiatry), who is currently collaborating on anexperimental study of children and parents in Head Start centers in Los Angeles; most of thefamilies are Latino. An early literacy curriculum was designed and implemented in randomlyselected centers here in LA. In some of those centers, there was in addition a homevisitor/intervention with a random sample of families. A third group of centers had business asusual. I and our research lab are analyzing parent qualitative interviews regarding horne dailyroutines and literacy experiences with families from each of these three groups. This is theEarly Literacy Study, funded by NSF in collaboration with USC and Florida State Univ.Weisner is also continuing a longitudinal study of families with children with developmentaldisabilities in the greater LA area. The families began the study in 1984 - 85 when theirchildren were ages 3-4 and we are continuing to keep in contact with the families. The focus ofthe study is on the accommodations made by families, the developmental progress of thechildren, and views of adolescents with disabilities about their lives. The CHILD Study, fundedbyNICHD.2) THE LIFE AND HISTORY OF COMMUNITIESProfessor H. Samy Alim is working with a team of graduate students who are members of theWorking Group in Hip Hop Cultural Studies in a project called The Black Los Angeles Project,which is housed in the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center. The project focuses on a number of HipHop communities in Los Angeles which are being studied from the point of view of the culturalproduction of "Blackness" and "upward mobility" in the city.Professor Kyeyoung Park has been documenting the relationship between the KoreanAmerican community and the African American and Latino Communities since the 1992 LosAngeles Uprising that followed the first trial of the police officers who arrested and beatmotorist Rodney King.Most of Adjunct Professor Tritia Toyota's research since the early 1980s has been concentratedin the widely dispersed and heterogeneous Asian American community in Southern California.More specifically, it is among post 1965 naturalized Chinese who have wrought enormouschanges not just demographically (Chinese are now the largest ethnic subgroup in AsianAmerica) but in terms of a reconfigured racial and political identity among Asian Americans.She is investigating how this is happening, how their transnational social connections are bothboon and curse, and what their U.S. citizenship looks like within a post modem and globalpolitics of belonging. Areas of research are Los Angeles County, the ethnoburbs spreadingeastward into the San Gabriel Valley into Riverside County and south into Orange County.Professor Susan Slyomovics has become fascinated by Middle East Americana! AmericanOrientalism in California and has started fieldwork in Riverside County, around Indio and the46