Three CSWAC Members Awarded Chancellor’s Arts Initiative Grants
Three CSW Advisory Committee (CSWAC) members were awarded Chancellor’s Arts Initiative grants at UCLA. Michelle Liu Carriger, Ursula Heise, and Gina Kim were among the diverse range of projects supported by the Chancellor’s Arts Initiative grants, highlighting the importance of the arts in addressing complex societal issues.
Michelle Liu Carriger, an assistant professor of musicology, received a grant for her project titled “Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics.” Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics will present and perform novel approaches to questions of sustainability by intersecting contemporary concerns about plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean with the history of tea ceremony histories in Japan and beyond. Through hiring local artists, working with graduate and undergrad students and student groups on campus, and engaging with UCLA initiatives in sustainability, Japanese studies, and theater and performance, the project will culminate in a campus tea ceremony-inspired art performance, a companion cookbook and co-authored publication, bringing the local community into visceral contact with our current location at the edge of a shared ocean of peril and possibility.
Ursula Heise, a professor of English and environmental humanities, was awarded a grant for her project titled “Grand Theft Eco: Environmental Futures of Los Angeles.” This animated video series modeled after the story world from “Grand Theft Auto V” invites reflection and discussion on the entanglements of social justice and environmental crises. “Grand Theft Eco” is comprised of three 30-minute animated “machinima” videos about environmental change and its consequences for a major metropolis. Working against mostly apocalyptic or dystopian portrayals of environmental futures in current fiction and film, the series will reflect a new vision of ecological futures in Los Angeles. “Grand Theft Eco” tells three stories about Los Angeles in 2050 under conditions of climate change. The premise is that major problems such as the transition to renewable energy, river revitalization, and biodiversity loss have been addressed. But social and racial inequalities as well as conflicts between public and private ownership of resources remain and need to be negotiated with continuing environmental adaptation.
Gina Kim, a professor of film, received a grant for her project “Macroaggression.” This research-based feature film project is based on the Atlanta Spa shooting incident in 2021. By cinematically reconstructing the day of the incident and retelling the course of the violence from the women’s point of view, the film will reveal the intersectionality of Asian women’s sexuality and how it is inseparable with anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. due to the history of fetishization and feminization of the “other” (Asian) in a colonial framework. The grant enables the filmmaker to embark on the necessary in-depth research associated with the history of anti-Asian violence in the U.S. as well as the personal and intimate stories of the victims.
