Faculty Working on Truth in the Public Sphere
Nikki Barry
Nikki Barry (Shoshone-Bannock Tribes) is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice Education in the Department of Education at UCLA with an additional appointment in the Department of American Indian Studies. Nikki researches: (1) ways to support human relationships with lands and waters and (2) human reasoning and decision-making regarding environmental issues. Nikki earned her PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University, her MA in Teaching from Pacific University, and her BS in Sociology from Northeastern University. She is also a parent of four and a former secondary school teacher.
Kaily Heitz
Kaily Heitz is a Black Geographer bridging 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, Heitz’s 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.
Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo
Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo is an Associate Professor of Teaching at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health where she earned her PhD and MPH. She completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her research examines (1) how discrimination contributes to health disparities, particularly among the Latine community, (2) the health and social advantages of engaging community members in research and intervention processes, such as through the Promotor Model, and (3) interventions that incorporate virtual reality as a means of storytelling and healing. She has published her research in the American Journal of Public Health and coauthored a chapter in “The Cost of Racism for People of Color: Contextualizing Experiences of Discrimination” published through the American Psychological Association. She has been involved in several community-based programs and projects that bring services directly to community members and acknowledge the expertise of community members.
Sarah Roberts
Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is an associate professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019), was released in paperback with a new preface in 2021, and in translation in French (2020) and in Mandarin (2023). She can be seen in several feature-length documentaries, including The Cleaners (2018), for which her work served as inspiration.
Recent Truth in the Public Sphere Events
Workshop with Maya Indira Ganesh exploring the temporalities, ideologies, and materialities of AI at a moment of complex political reconfigurations.
Time haunts AI. An origin story in the summer of 1955 that has acquired the status of myth and fact; geopolitical races; the contradictions and entanglements of longtermist and accelerationist ideologies; law and regulation that fail to keep up; promised breakthroughs from the driverless car to superintelligence that fail to arrive, or seem eternally just around the corner. Computational time is also infrastructural: the lag in software updates pushed to the cloud and then to fleets of driverless cars and mobile phones (Mattern, 2017). Temporality works unevenly affording ‘just in time’ deliveries for the busy, but at the cost of bio-social control of delivery workers and on-demand mobility service providers (Sharma, 2014).
This workshop explored the temporalities, ideologies, and materialities of AI at a moment of complex political reconfigurations.
Streisand Lecture: The Truth About Freedom: How Lies Oppress and How Facts Liberate
The third annual UCLA Barbra Streisand Lecture hosted a public lecture and panel discussion featuring renowned historian Timothy Snyder, Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, and bestselling author of On Tyranny and On Freedom. Snyder’s talk, “The Truth about Freedom: How Lies Oppress and How Facts Liberate,” provided a humanistic and urgent defense of truth as the prerequisite for liberty. The event also highlighted the vision of the future UCLA Barbra Streisand Institute, with its foundational focus on Truth in the Public Sphere.
Past Fellows
2023-2024 Fellows
Magally ‘Maga’ Miranda Alcázar
Magally ‘Maga’ Miranda Alcázar (she/her) is a writer, researcher, educator and organizer based in Los Angeles. She is a PhD candidate in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Her work lies at the intersection of race, gender, labor, immigration and technology studies. Her research has been supported by the the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, the NASEM Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Maga was born and raised in Boyle Heights to immigrant parents from Michoacán and CDMX. She attended Pasadena City College and earned a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz with a double major in Feminist Studies (law, policy and social change emphasis) and Community Studies (economic justice emphasis) where she graduated magna cum laude in 2015.
Maga has written for Aztlán, The Nation, Verso, and New Left Review and the International Journal of Communication.
Nashra Mahmood
Nashra Mahmood is a 4th year doctoral student whose current research interests lie in theories of Affect, feminist critiques of ethno-nationalism, and critical media studies. Their previous research focused on feminized labor and unionization in North India’s informal economy. Their dissertation project is studying how media manipulation and communalist [dis]information in Indian media post-October 2019 has reconstituted national belonging. Nashra holds a BA in Economics and Gender Studies and a MA in Gender Studies.
Zizi Li
Zizi Li is an educator and researcher of media studies and digital cultures, with a special attention to (im)material labor and infrastructure via the study of influencer media. She inquires the relationships between media and extraction concerning the layered extraction of natural / human resources and racialized / gendered labor required by the operation of digital economy. Currently Zizi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation on influencer ecosystem uses fashion/lifestyle influencers and related vernacular social media genre / content (such as closet declutter and unboxing videos) to elucidate the connections between digital/media industries and commodity chains/networks. Zizi is trained in film studies, cultural studies, critical digital studies, feminist media studies / praxis, and transnational media. Her research and pedagogy are committed to the unpacking of entangled colonialisms as well as the building of transnational solidarity praxis and abolitionist decolonial care.
2022-2023 Fellows
Read their full bios on our blog.
Jessica Cattelino
Anthropology
“The Truth about LA’s Indigenous Waters”
Ananda Marin (Co-PI)
Education and American Indian Studies
“The Truth about LA’s Indigenous Waters”
Erin Debenport
Anthropology
“Gender, Revelation, and the Public Sphere: (Un)reliable Narrators, (Un)responsive Audiences, and the Power of Online Disclosures”
Ju Hui Judy Han
Gender Studies
“Transforming Feminist Activisms in Korea and the Korea Diaspora”
Gina Kim
Film, Television and Digital Media
“America Town”
Thu-huong Nguyen-vo
Asian Languages and Cultures and Asian American Studies
“Almost Futures: Vietnamese and Refugee Elusion of Humanist Sovereignty”
Ellen Scott
Film and Television
“Bitter Ironies, Tender Hopes: Black Women’s Film Criticism, Television Reflections and Media Activism”
Paula Tavrow
Community Health Sciences
“Crisis Pregnancy Centers in the United States: Effects of Gender and Race/Ethnicity on (Mis)information and Advice Given”
Jasmine Nadua Trice
Film and Digital Media
“Parallel Practices: Southeast Asian Film in the Capitalocene”
Research News
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Rosemary Grant2024-09-27 15:36:022024-09-30 15:26:407 Takeaways from our Reproductive Justice Research Roundup
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Rosemary Grant2024-07-20 12:53:452024-09-20 12:55:15UCLA Newsroom: CSWAC Member Sara Roberts on Election Misinformation on Social Media
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Rosemary Grant2023-09-15 08:33:422024-02-13 16:37:52UCLA Newsroom: Inaugural UCLA Barbra Streisand Center lecture examines truth in the public sphere