Black Feminist Community at UCLA: Scholars, Spaces, and Support

Black Feminist Community at UCLA: Scholars, Spaces, and Support

/ by

By Ria Rao, CSW|Streisand Center Student Worker 

In honor of Black History Month’s 100th anniversary and this year’s theme, “A Century of Black History Commemorations,” we are highlighting the inspirational Black feminist scholarship and organizing across campus. From the UCLA Black Feminism Initiative to faculty leaders shaping conversations in information studies, public health, environmental justice, art history, and engineering, UCLA is home to dynamic work grounded in Black feminist and Black queer frameworks.

UCLA’s Black Feminism Initiative

The CSW|Barbra Streisand Center supports the Black Feminism Initiative, an initiative that supports interdisciplinary research in an intentional effort to honor and encourage Black feminist thought and political transformation. Through emphasizing Black feminist and Black queer analytical frameworks, challenging state and interpersonal violence, and engaging everyday forms of Black feminist assembly, the Black Feminism Initiative is able to support intellectual work that centers Black feminist frameworks. Their specific offerings include graduate research, faculty-graduate workshops, and public programming events. Black Feminism Initiative Fellows support this work and contribute meaningful research to Black feminist frameworks of analysis.

AY 2025-2026 BFI Fellows: 

  • Nohora A. Arrieta Fernández, Assistant Professor on Afro Latin American studies at the Spanish and Portuguese department at UCLA is also former Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Her current research focuses on the aesthetics and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in the Americas and she has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora. Her scholarly publications have appeared in Transition, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, in the United States, and in multiple journals in Brazil and Colombia.
  • Ayasha C. Guerin (they/she) is assistant professor of intersectionality and practice-based research and media making in the department of World Arts & Cultures/ Dance. They are an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research and creative practices center socio-ecological histories,connecting human and animal experience through questions of relational reciprocity, care and companionship across Black diasporic contexts and anti-colonial struggles. Their work joins important intellectual developments to think through Native American and African American experience, human and species distinctions, and settler colonialism and antiblackness together.
  • Kaily Heitz, an assistant professor and Black geographer, conducts research that bridges Black feminist interventions and insights into the lived experience of Blackness, Urban, and Geographic research on the relationship between race, political-economic structures of inequality, and spatial justice. Specifically, her work examines the way that Black anti-displacement activist organizations and community-based development groups respond to inequitable city planning by utilizing a cultural framework that represents the experience of place-specific racialization.
  • Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). As an ethnographer, she studies the social and environmental justice concerns of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over the aims and strategies of green redevelopment and her other publications include research of urban and regional relations, ethnography, and global networks.

CSWAC FACULTY

The CSW Advisory Committee (CSWAC) is made up of feminist scholars working in various fields from gender studies to public health to film and television. Specifically, many CSWAC members contribute to Black feminist research and initiatives. A few people to highlight: 

    • Safiya Umoja Noble is a BFI Faculty Affiliate, Associate Professor of Information Studies and is Co-Director (with Sarah Roberts) of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2).  She is the author of  books including Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). Her academic research focuses on the internet and its impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. She is regularly sought out for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including Rolling Stone, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of network news and podcasts.
    • Courtney S. Thomas Tobin is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and the Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence at the Fielding School of Public Health. Her research examines the social, psychological, and biological (i.e., biopsychosocial) pathways to health and longevity among Black Americans. As a trained medical sociologist, Dr. Thomas Tobin integrates traditional sociological theories and feminist frameworks with perspectives from public health, social psychology, medicine, and the biological sciences to better understand the causes and consequences of long-standing Black-White differences in health. Dr. Thomas Tobin’s program of research makes conceptual and empirical contributions to psychosocial pathways to embodiment, health risks and resources across the life course, and racialized stress and coping processes among Black Americans.
    • Ugo Edu is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and a medical anthropologist who works at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The “Family Planned”: Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. 
    • Tiffany Barber is an Assistant Professor of African American Art whose works spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize and before joining the Department of Art History at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. 
    • Regan Patterson is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research spans environmental justice, air pollution, sustainable transportation, and transportation equity through a social framework. Patterson’s recent notable works include “What the Abundance Agenda Could Mean For Equitable Transformation” featured in Streetsblog, “Freeways and floodwaters, UCLA Researchers model climate risks of highway expansion” featured in UCLA ITS, and “Almost Half of Americans Breathe Unhealthy Air” featured in the NY Times. Patterson’s powerful and innovative work earned her the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars and continues to make important contributions through the Engineering Environmental Justice Lab.

UCLA STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS

Student organizations at UCLA have platformed Black feminist initiatives and contribute meaningful work to supporting Black feminist scholars.

  • Afrikan Women’s Collective provides a safe space for women who identify with the Afrikan diaspora to join together and discuss topics and issues relevant to women of Afrikan descent. The Afrikan Women’s Collective also strengthens social ties, fosters individual excellence, and promotes achievement for black women in the community on the campus of UCLA and beyond.
  • BlaQue is a student organization under the Queer Alliance and Afrikan Student Union that focuses on issues within Afrikan-Amerikan Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Same Gender Loving communities.
  • The Womyn of Color Collective is dedicated to creating a safe space and a community within the UCLA School of Law where the unique experiences, opinions, challenges, and successes of women and women of color are shared, discussed, and developed. They are a collective of individuals who identify as women, women of color, or allies and are open to all people ready to engage in an open and honest dialogue about race, gender and the law. 
  • FEM, UCLA’s feminist newsmagazine since 1973, is dedicated to the empowerment of all women, the promotion of human rights, the recognition of gender diversity, and the application of intersectional feminism. FEM celebrates women’s right to equality in all aspects of life and appeals to an audience that believes feminist ideology is still necessary to defeat sexism. We will offer a wide range of timely features, opinions, and news pieces that tackle gender issues in relation to sexuality, race, class, and popular culture. 

UCLA Black Feminist Support

Ria Rao is a junior at UCLA studying Cognitive Science and Statistics & Data Science. She has been involved with UCLA student media organizations UCLA Radio and FEM News Magazine, and now serves the CSW|Streisand Center as a Student Worker.