Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

girls in downtown Los Angeles and working class-upper middle class girls in a progressiveschool on the West Side of Los Angeles, Goodwin has been able to show how rather thanavoiding conflict, girls actively seek it out. The moral universe that girls create, and in whichthey hold their peers (including boys) accountable, contradicts stereotypes that have dominatedmuch work on female moral development.Professor Karen Brodkin has been conducting research on political activism in Los Angeles fora long time. Rutgers University Press just published her book Making Democracy Matter: Identity& Activism in Los Angeles, a study of the "nineties generation" of activists in labor andimmigrant worker organizing in Los Angeles. The book asks what makes a social movement amovement and argues that activists remake political selves, create new practices and visions ofdemocracy, and that this is at the core of the signature energy by which we recognize socialmovements. She has also collaborated with UCLA graduate Cynthia Strathrnann for a projecton union organizing and the struggles that ensue when management hires anti-unionconsultants to keep unions out of negotiations. Brodkin is also working on a book dedicated toan environmental justice movement in South Gate, led by high school students, which blockedbuilding a power plant during California's energy crisis. Its analytic focus is on the role of raceand race-avoidance in progressive politics.Professor Jeanne Arnold has directed field research on the archaeology of the NativeAmericans of coastal Southern California, particularly the Channel Islands, since 1980. Shehas investigated the political evolution of complex hunter-gatherers, the emergence of largescalecraft production systems, and the role of sophisticated watercraft and intensIve exchangenetworks in the region. Dozens of UCLA graduate and undergraduate students have beeninvolved in the field and lab research, including 8-10 theses and dis~ertation projec.ts. A numberof graduate students have worked on Professor Arnold's project for their MA (John Dietler,Anthony Graesch) or for their PhD research (Ray Corbett, Terisa Green, and Anna Noah).Graduate student Julie Bernard's dissertation explores issues of native Californian resistance,persistence, and culture change in the Mission period through the study of three sites in theErnigdiano (Wand) Chumash region. The south-central California interior became a refuge formission runaways during the Historic era, and the archaeological study of extant and newlyformed villages in this area allows us to gain insight into the lives of people whoescapedhistorical documentation and forged new lives, social groups, and cultural identities in arapidly changing environment.For her MA research, graduate student Eleanor Carter did participant-observation in aCongolese church community and carried out extensive ethnographic interviews with fourCongolese families, documenting their collective memories of exile, focusing on Congoleseparents' and children's description of family, migration, and relationships among differentgenerations.48