Each year the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center funds research dedicated to finding solutions to the most vital social issues facing people of all genders. We fund faculty and student research , as well as events, programming, and publications that distribute their work to a wider audience.
“Beyond the Wheel: Historicizing Race, Gender, and Automotive Insurance in California”
This research examines the historical evolution of automotive insurance redlining and mobility-justice movements in California, highlighting how early auto-related development and lending practices made car insurance particularly significant. Supported by the CSW | Streisand Center, it reveals how race and gender intersect in insurance discrimination, with women of color disproportionately affected, offering new insights into the uneven impacts of mobility on marginalized communities.
“Regency Noir: Romance, Race, and Jane Austen”
Leigh-Michil George’s research examines “Regency Noir,” a subgenre of Regency romance narratives that reimagine the historical record to center Black women’s lives and desires, contrasting it with the often colorblind portrayals in traditional adaptations of Jane Austen’s work. Through analysis of texts like Bridgerton, Island Queen, and The Long Song, George argues that Regency Noir offers a liberating lens of fugitive relief, shifting the focus from a white female gaze to a Black female gaze to provide restorative representations that reckon with history’s erasures.
“Working to Unmaster a Grammar for Land and Body: Black Feminist Approaches to Somatic Pedagogy”
This project examines how Black feminist texts and decolonial somatics inform contemporary artistic practices that seek to liberate both land and body from historical and ongoing violence. Through practice-based research at The Liberated Planet Studio, the work explores how collective movement, creative pedagogy, and relational awareness can inspire new habits and communal care, addressing racial, gendered, and environmental injustices.
“Taking the Reins, Documentary Feature”
Taking the Reins is a feature-length documentary that examines the unique figure of the “cowboy” in the world’s popular imagination, exploring how marginalized Americans—often excluded from national narratives—are reinventing and reclaiming performances of “cowboy” to demand inclusion in our country’s story. From a gay rodeo in Texas, to a Black horse ranch in Compton, Los Angeles, to a woman who reenacts Calamity Jane for tourists, the film delves into the enduring hold of the cowboy archetype on global culture, its multifaceted dimensions, and its reclamation by the very communities to whom it originally belonged.
This project is a collaboration with the Marshallese Educational Initiative (MEI), a nonprofit in Springdale, Arkansas, focused on a community-engaged effort that includes research, outreach, and a published study on gender-based violence (GBV), violence against girls and women (VAG/W), and intimate partner violence (IPV) in the Marshallese diaspora in Northwest Arkansas, which has the largest Marshallese population in the continental United States. Through partnerships with organizations like the Northwest Arkansas Women’s Shelter, and with leadership from Marshallese women in MEI’s Women’s Advocacy Program (WAP), the project aims to increase access to justice, raise awareness, and promote women’s empowerment while also documenting and including the Marshallese LGBTQ2S+ community in this work.
“Speaking Tradition & Gender: Repetitions of Care across Vietnamese Generations and Diaspora”
This interdisciplinary research project examines the transmission of gendered discourse through Vietnamese sayings, folk verses, and proverbs, exploring how these cultural practices have been passed down across generations, particularly from mothers to daughters, around marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. By drawing on archives and oral histories from both Vietnam and the diaspora, the project investigates the intersection of gender and tradition, focusing on language transmission and community knowledge, while also exploring the role of these practices in female networks of care, problem-solving, and preserving collective identity.
Brazil has one of the world’s highest rates of homicide against LGBTQ+ individuals, with transgender women experiencing the highest rates globally. LGBTQ+ individuals face significant discrimination and harassment across various domains of life, including healthcare, housing, legal recognition, and employment, while many cases of violence go unreported due to stigma and fear. Our participatory action research (PAR) study aims to center the voices of LGBTQ+ individuals in southern Brazil who experience multiple forms of marginalization, honoring their everyday resistance and resilience while addressing the urgent need to promote their wellbeing in a context characterized by traditional gender roles and hypermasculinity.
“Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media”
This project, “Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media,” examines the relationships between race, technology, and media cultures through the phenomenon of watching racial violence in 20th and 21st century American culture. This interdisciplinary study theorizes a new genealogy between spectacular anti-Black violence across new forms of media, arguing that racial violence is instrumentalized as a type of social and cultural beta-testing for new media’s value and “newness,” while challenging techno-utopian narratives and unveiling how watching racial violence is a collective and habituated social practice critically informed by cultural memory, media technologies, and the historical and social architectures of spectatorship.
“Refugees and Feminists: Affective Politics of Transnational Solidarity”
This research examines the affective politics of transnational solidarity between refugees and feminists, focusing on feminist activists in Turkey who work with Syrian refugee women to nurture empathy, trust, and intimacy while addressing apathy, mistrust, and detachment. This ethnographic study, situated in Turkey—home to the world’s largest refugee population and a vibrant feminist movement—seeks to illuminate how transnational feminist activism mobilizes affective and material flows to forge solidarity in an atmosphere saturated with nativist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, misogynist, and anti-feminist sentiments, offering insights into fostering intersectional solidarity beyond our contemporary global moment colored by xenophobic public feelings and the political regimes they embolden.
