2022-2023 Barbra Streisand Fellowship Recipients

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the inaugural Barbra Streisand Fellowships!

The Barbra Streisand Fellowships are composed of grants of up to $20,000 for faculty working on the topic of “Truth in the Public Sphere.” We encouraged applicants to define this topic as broadly and expansively as possible, including questioning and critiquing, as well as examining, the concepts of “truth” and “the public sphere.” An explicit connection to the study of feminism, gender, sexuality, and/or women was required. Projects that also centered analyses of race, settler colonialism, and/or empire were given priority.

Jessica Cattelino

The Truth about LA’s Indigenous Waters

Jessica Cattelino received her PhD from New York University. She is a scholar of indigenous sovereignty, the cultural politics of nature, and everyday American political processes and imaginations. She is author of High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008), which examines the cultural, political, and economic stakes of tribal casinos for Florida Seminoles, and which won the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize (for best book published in the previous two years) from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Her current research, which tells human stories of ecological restoration, examines the cultural politics of water in the Florida Everglades. She is completing a book on this topic, Water Ties: An Everglades Ethnography. Cattelino has also collaborated on a related anthropological and photographic exhibition and is part of a large National Science Foundation Long-term Ecological Research project on the Florida Everglades. At CSW, Cattelino has served as the principal investigator on a multi-year research project titled “Gender and Everyday Water Use in Los Angeles Households.” The project has investigated the important but understudied role of gender—as it intersects with race and class—in residential water use in Los Angeles, with the goal of creating culturally acceptable pathways to reduce residential water use and increase use of greywater and other sustainable sources. She has also served on the CSW faculty leadership team in various roles over the past several years. Currently, Cattelino serves as Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, the vehicle through which faculty share in the governance and operation of the university.

Ananda Marin (Co-PI)

The Truth about LA’s Indigenous Waters

Ananda Marin is an assistant professor in the Department of Education and faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tongva territory). As a learning scientist, she uses video-ethnographic methods and participatory design research to explore questions about the cultural nature of cognition and development. A primary goal of her work is to broaden conceptualizations of learning and teaching in ways that are consequential to the communities she partners with. To do this, she draws upon Indigenous ways of knowing and sociocultural theories to: (1) develop research on learning across a variety of activities including the everyday and the professional and (2) co-design learning contexts with communities that are in right relations with Indigenous lands/waters. Within these research strands she examines the multiple ways that multigenerational groups of people coordinate attention and observation in order to participate in joint activity, collaborate, and improvise. She also engages in micro-ethnographic analyses of the moment-to-moment unfolding of interaction, accounting for the role of relationality, embodied movement, and place in science-related education and teaching/learning more generally. She has widespread experience designing and learning with communities to cultivate educational contexts that create conditions for more equitable futures.

Erin Debenport

Gender, Revelation, and the Public Sphere: (Un)reliable Narrators, (Un)responsive Audiences, and the Power of Online Disclosures

Erin Debenport is Associate Professor and Vice Chair for graduate studies in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the interim director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. A linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on issues of literacy, secrecy, knowledge circulation, and ethics, she works with several Indigenous Pueblo Nations on ongoing language reclamation projects. She holds a PhD in linguistics and an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Lewis & Clark College.

Ju Hui Judy Han

Transforming Feminist Activisms in Korea and the Korea Diaspora

Ju Hui Judy Han (she/they) is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in gender studies at UCLA, where she conducts research and teach courses on religion, power and (im)mobilities, LGBTQ+ politics, transnational feminist activism, and comics. Her publications appear in numerous journals and edited books in both English and Korean, and she is currently writing about “queer throughlines” and protest repertoires. As part of the Korean Studies Distinguished Speakers Bureau for the Association for Asian Studies, she regularly gives invited talks and public presentations to scholarly and community-based audiences.

Gina Kim

America Town

Professor Gina Kim (film, TV, and digital media) is one of the few South Korean filmmakers to produce works in Hollywood and her home country. Her award-winning films reimagine cinematic storytelling across different genres and platforms, developing a unique transnational perspective centered on female protagonists. Her five feature-length films and works of video art have screened at more than 150 prestigious international film festivals and venues including Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance, as well as such arts venues as MoMA and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Thu-huong Nguyen-vo

Almost Futures: Vietnamese and Refugee Elusion of Humanist Sovereignty

Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương is Associate Professor in Asian languages and cultures, and Asian American studies at UCLA. Her forthcoming book explores how ideas of the human and progressive historiography are used to organize capitalist extraction and political violence affecting people in Vietnam and the diaspora, and how they respond through street protest, work, visual art, literature, and commemoration. Her other research projects explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, activists.

Ellen Scott

Bitter Ironies, Tender Hopes: Black Women’s Film Criticism, Television Reflections and Media Activism

Ellen Scott is Associate Professor and Associate Dean at the School of Theater, Film, and Television, UCLA. She is author of Cinema Civil Rights: Race Repression and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (Rutgers, 2015) and is working on two books: Cinema’s Peculiar Institution, a history of the representation of slavery on screen, and Bitter Ironies, Tender Hopes, which explores Black women’s film criticism from the dawn of cinema until the first Black woman made a feature film in 1980.

Paula Tavrow

Crisis Pregnancy Centers in the United States: Effects of Gender and Race/Ethnicity on (Mis)information and Advice Given

Paula Tavrow is the director of UCLA’s Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health and Adjunct Professor in the community health sciences department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She was the founding co-director of the Center of Expertise in Women’s Health and Empowerment at the University of California Global Health Institute, which she led for seven years.  She was also the director of six Women’s Health and Empowerment Summer Institutes in Los Angeles, Nairobi, and Gaborone.  Dr. Tavrow’s current research interests center on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, coerced sex, intimate partner violence screening, early marriage, and the quality of healthcare services.  Prior to coming to UCLA in 2002, Dr. Tavrow was the Deputy Research Director for the global Quality Assurance Project based in Bethesda, Maryland, where she oversaw operations research projects in eight African countries.  She also worked as a USAID contractor for nearly ten years in Zaire, Somalia, Tanzania and Malawi.  Dr. Tavrow received her AB (magna cum laude) from Harvard-Radcliffe College, her MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and her MSc and PhD from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Jasmine Nadua Trice

Parallel Practices: Southeast Asian Film in the Capitalocene

Jasmine Nadua Trice is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Film, Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila Film Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is currently working on a second book project on spatial practices in Southeast Asian film organizing, coauthored with Dr. Philippa Lovatt of the University of St. Andrews. The book is based on a collaborative project undertaken with the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas.