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Kelly Lytle Hernández and David Myers

History professors on New Yorker’s best books of 2022 list

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Kelly Lytle Hernández and David Myers

Kelly Lytle Hernández (left) and David Myers | UCLA; Scarlett Freund

Manon Snyder | 

Books authored or co-authored by UCLA history professors have been included on the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 So Far list: “Bad Mexicans” by Kelly Lytle Hernández and “American Shtetl,” co-written by David Myers.

“Bad Mexicans”

Kelly Lytle Hernández, the Thomas E. Lifka Professor of History and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, is a race, mass incarceration and immigration expert and an award-winning author. She is also the principal investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a data-driven project that uses police and jail records to examine costs and incarceration disparities in Los Angeles neighborhoods.

In “Bad Mexicans,” Lytle Hernández uncovers the story about a band of Mexican revolutionaries — headed by the radical Ricardo Flores Magón — that helped spark the Mexican Revolution and lead to the eventual ousting of President Porfirio Díaz in 1911. The subsequent impact of the revolution was massive, causing more than a million Mexicans to migrate north. Lytle Hernández emphasizes that “you cannot understand U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans.”

“American Shtetl”

David Myers is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History and director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. He has authored five books in the field of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, and is co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Myers wrote “American Shtetl” with Nomi Stolzenberg, a professor at USC Gould School of Law.

“American Shtetl” dives into the history of a separatist Hasidic Jewish group which built its own village, Kiryas Joel, in upstate New York. Myers and Stolzenberg explore how America’s political, legal and economic institutions created this ethnographic response. “‘American Shtetl’ provides an unambiguous historical refutation of the idea that liberalism renders meaningful community impossible,” according to the New Yorker.

This article originally appeared at UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

UCLA alumnus Yoon Jae (Eric) Lim

Yoon Jae (Eric) Lim ’16 named UCLA’s fourth Schwarzman Scholar

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UCLA alumnus Yoon Jae (Eric) Lim

UCLA alumnus Yoon Jae (Eric) Lim has been named a Schwarzman Scholar and will study in Beijing next year.

UCLA alumnus Yoon Jae (Eric) Lim ’16 has been named a Schwarzman Scholar, receiving one of the world’s most prestigious graduate awards. As part of a cohort of 151 distinguished young candidates selected from nearly 3,000 applicants worldwide, Lim will receive a fully funded scholarship to complete a one-year master’s degree and leadership program in global studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Established in 2016 by Stephen A. Schwarzman of Blackstone and inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship, the Schwarzman Scholars program seeks to prepare future leaders from a variety of fields and backgrounds to respond to pressing geopolitical challenges and to foster cross-cultural understanding between China and the rest of the world.

“I am excited and grateful for this amazing opportunity,” said Lim, who studied political science at UCLA and hails from South Korea and the U.S. “China has one of the world’s most developed fintech economies, its economy is largely cashless, and its technology ecosystem has grown at an incredible rate. My goal is to leverage the expansive Schwarzman Scholar and Tsinghua network to learn as much as I can about the technological innovation happening in China.”

As an immigrant, entrepreneur and product leader in fintech, Lim hopes to leverage financial technology to better lives. After graduating from UCLA, he cofounded the blockchain company DApperNetwork, building a community of students and mentors that have gone on to create enormous value in blockchain protocols and applications. Currently a director of product at Sure, a top 100 fintech company, he previously served as a crypto entrepreneur-in-training at FJ Labs. He is a Riordan Fellow with the UCLA Anderson School of Management and has served as an advisor to UCLA’s blockchain lab.

Lim is the fourth UCLA graduate to be named a Schwarzman Scholar. He will enroll in August 2023 as part of the program’s 2023–2024 cohort, which comprises candidates from 36 countries and 121 universities around the world. Each year, Schwarzman Scholars are selected based on a variety of factors including “their leadership qualities and the potential to understand and bridge cultural and political differences,” according to the program’s website; the program’s international network of scholars now includes more than 1,000 members.

“I’m proud to be a UCLA alumnus — the communities and education I got access to during my time as a student have been formative building blocks for me,” Lim said. “Many years ago, UCLA was a launchpad for my entrepreneurial journey, and I am excited to represent my alma mater at such a renowned program as I continue on that journey.”

For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Bridgerton cast photo

Women and people of color still less likely to helm big-budget TV shows

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Latest Hollywood Diversity Report from UCLA signals potential challenges ahead in writers’ rooms

Bridgerton cast photo

Netflix’s period romance “Bridgerton” enjoyed broad appeal among Asian, Black, Latino and white households in 2020–21; it also generated plenty of buzz on Instagram and Twitter. | Image credit: Netflix

Jessica Wolf | October 27, 2022

UCLA researchers see signs that could foretell a retreat in the industry’s gender and racial diversity — especially on big-budget shows and in writing positions.

That’s among the conclusions of a study of the 2020–21 TV season in the new Hollywood Diversity Report, which is produced by the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA.

“The next few years may be a true test of whether Hollywood is truly committed to the changes they promised during the nation’s reckoning on race following the murder of George Floyd,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, director of the initiative.

The report did also find that shows with diverse casts — such as “FBI” on CBS, “Snowpiercer” on TNT and “Bridgerton” on Netflix — continued to draw large, diverse audiences.

But with programmers increasingly shelling out big bucks for high-concept shows, the UCLA report reveals that those opportunities weren’t equal for women and people of color — despite the fact there were more minority and women show creators across all distribution platforms than there were during the 2019–20 season.

“We saw an uptick in opportunity for people of color and women having their shows greenlit, which should be a marker of progress,” Ramón said. “However, when we examined the episodic budgets of all the TV series, we see a strong pattern indicating that shows created by people of color and women tended to receive smaller budgets than those created by white men, particularly in the digital arena.”

Nearly 1 in 2 shows for which white men were credited as show creators enjoyed a budget of more than $3 million per episode, but far fewer women or people of color reached that level.

In broadcast, 71.4% of show creators of color (both men and women) had per-episode budgets of less than $3 million; among white women creators, 86.9% did so; and among white men, just 58.5% worked with less than $3 million per-episode budgets. The discrepancies were similar for streaming and cable series.

Netflix’s “The Crown” and other high-profile projects continued to make streaming services the industry’s biggest-budget playground. There, too, white men show creators received the biggest sums for their projects.

Among streaming series, 21% of those created by white men enjoyed per-episode budgets of $7 million or more. Just 11.1% of streaming shows created by people of color had budgets in that range, and only 2.9% of shows created by white women did. (Disney+’s “WandaVision” was the lone member of that group.)

Overall, in the digital arena, a plurality of white women (42.9%) show creators had budgets between $3 million and $4.99 million; among people of color, the greatest number of show creators (66.6%) had budgets below $3 million per episode.

The report also tracks the gender and racial profile for those who held key jobs for 107 broadcast, 109 cable and 191 digital scripted shows from the 2020–21 season. Women made up 31.8% of show creators in broadcast, 31.2% in cable and 36.1% in digital. People of color held 13.1% percent of those roles in broadcast, 26.6% in cable, and 25.6% in digital. All six of those figures were improvements over the prior year, but they still fall short of proportionate representation for either group.

Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, and co-founder of the Hollywood Diversity Report, said there are ominous signs for the future of the industry’s diversity efforts.

“Diversity initiatives traditionally are the first to be sacrificed when there are economic downturns,” Hunt said. “We’re already seeing it start with cutbacks at Warner and HBO. But rolling back efforts before equity has been truly achieved for women and people of color would be a major miscalculation.

“Any cost-savings studios realize now will come at the expense of alienating increasingly diverse viewers who expect increased representation in their TV shows, and do not make good business sense in the long term.”

Over the course of 11 TV seasons, the report has repeatedly drawn correlations between shows’ ratings and the diversity of their casts and writers. For example, ratings in 2020–21 were highest for cable scripted shows with casts made up of at least 41% minority actors. In digital, ratings were highest for shows with casts that were 21% to 30% minorities.

Representation in writers’ rooms for both women and people of color improved in 2020–21. Women made up about 45% of writers, and minorities made up more than 30% of writers, both small increases from previous TV seasons.

But that progress could be tenuous given the TV industry’s continued shift to releasing more content on digital platforms, which typically have shorter seasons — and therefore fewer slots for all writers.

“Like other industry watchers, we are closely monitoring these trends and exploring what impact they might have on opportunities for women and people of color to tell authentic stories,” said Michael Tran, a UCLA graduate student studying sociology and a co-author of the report. “The racial and gender dynamics in a collaborative writers’ room have an enormous impact on the types of stories that are told.”

The Hollywood Diversity Report uses independently gathered information about the race, ethnicity and gender identity of actors, writers, directors and show creators. The Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, which was formed in September, is under the auspices of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The initiative will expand UCLA’s study of the entertainment industry to explore equity and access issues affecting industry workers with other underrepresented identities — based on their disability status, sexual orientation and religion, and how those identities intersect with race, ethnicity and gender.

“With a continued focus on workers’ rights, we are currently working with partners to examine ways to gather information and uncover the experiences of those from other underrepresented communities that are often overlooked,” Ramón said.

Other findings from the new report:

• Diversity of TV casts continued to improve, extending a longstanding trend. In the 2020–21 season, 34.9% of broadcast, 35.8% of cable and 30.7% of digital featured majority-minority casts.
• Women were well represented in lead acting roles on scripted shows on cable, as well as on digital platforms.
• Actors of color were underrepresented in lead roles on broadcast TV (just 27.4%), but were nearly proportionally represented — relative to the U.S. population overall — in lead roles on cable (39.6%) and digital (37.6%).
• Women of color made gains as writers for broadcast shows, holding 17.8% in 2020-21, up from 13.6% in 2019-20.
• A higher percentage of TV directors were women of color than in the previous year, across all three platform types.
• Social media engagement was highest for digital shows that had diverse casts. Netflix’s “The Chair,” Disney+’s “Loki” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and HBO Max’s “Hacks” all generated major buzz on Instagram and Twitter.
• Transgender and nonbinary actors had nominal representation. The report tracked five transgender and two nonbinary actors in broadcast shows; three transgender and five nonbinary actors among cable TV casts. In digital, just one transgender and seven nonbinary actors appeared across all shows tracked.

Budget per episode of digital TV programs, segmented by race and gender of show creator; click each image for full description and download:

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

UCLA survey finds most teens reject glamorized lifestyles in entertainment media

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Less than 5% want to see aspirational content in TV or movies

Teens’ preferences for what they’d like to see in TV shows and movies have changed. 

Holly Ober | September 20, 2022

Key takeaways:
• Changing aspirations. Few Gen Zers want to watch shows about glamorized lifestyles.
• Real-world issues matter. Teens prefer content that deals with family dynamics or social justice.
• Positive storytelling, please. They want to see more hopeful, uplifting stories about people.

Not that long ago, teens binged on aspirational content, where the kinds of lives portrayed in “Gossip Girl” were what they wanted on their screens. But according to a recent study conducted by UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, teens today resoundingly reject those kinds of stories. Only 4.4% in a survey of 662 diverse teens said they wanted to see this kind of content, which the researchers labeled “aspirational.” Generation Z, born from about 1997 to 2012, wants to watch content that grapples with real-world issues (21%), such as family dynamics or social justice. When asked to cast their own characters, a majority of teens lean toward wanting a black male hero (23.6%) and a white male villain (34.9%). But they also want fun, escapist content (37.8%), and one of the most popular topics they would like to see is hopeful, uplifting stories.

“Hollywood has built its young adult content on the belief that teens want to see glamorous lifestyles and rich and famous characters, but our research suggests the opposite is true,” said psychologist Yalda Uhls, director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. “The majority of respondents in our study feel isolated and upset when media lack accurate identity representations. This is an important change that Hollywood needs to take note of.”

“American adolescents value media that reflects what they know about the real world, even while they prefer to see people that are different from themselves,” Yalda said. “Teens want their media to show a world characterized by genuine diversity and heartwarming experiences.”

What kinds of storylines does Gen Z want?

Hopeful, uplifting stories about people beating the odds and stories about people with lives unlike their own topped the list of topics they’d like to see portrayed in the TV shows and movies they watch, according to the study.

Other findings include:

• Friends and social groups, superheroes and parents all made the top five topic list.

• Mental health continues to register for teens, ranking No. 4 on the list. For LGBTQIA+ teens, this was one of the top two preferred topics.

• Both older and younger teens want to see more stories about family life, including relationships with parents.

• Partying and/or drugs and drinking came in second to last.

• Content about climate change came in last.

The study concludes that teens want to see authentic, inclusive and positive storytelling, and emphasizes a need for the entertainment industry to shift away from aspirational content that does not prioritize diversity. Teens’ rejection of traditionally aspirational content that valorizes higher social status and material gains may also signal a substantial shift in contemporary teens’ evolving definition of success that is different from previous generations. It also suggests that hopeful messaging could be used to engage teens with various subjects in the future, such as climate change.

“While we do not know why teens rejected climate change storylines, we believe that the portrayal of this issue is often negative and may feel overwhelming,” said Stephanie Rivas-Lara, research coordinator at the Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

The survey also asked respondents which media space does the best job at making them feel “seen.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority (55%) said social media was the space where they felt most authentic, with TikTok being the most popular social media platform.

“These findings raise the question about what factors from social media have successfully catered to teens’ need for authenticity, and how the definition of authenticity for social media versus TV shows and movies may have changed over time,” Rivas-Lara said.

The teens came from different social backgrounds and reflected a diverse mix of ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Respondents were almost evenly split between male and female, and about 6% identified as a different or no gender. Gender identity made a significant difference in who was cast as the hero with 83% of male teens choosing a male and 50% of female teens choosing a female. Teens who identified as white males were the only demographic to choose to cast white males as the hero.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

UCLA

$1.2 million from Kachigian family trust establishes UCLA lectureship in Armenian studies

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Armenian language scholar Hagop Kouloujian has been appointed to the position for a five-year term
Black-and-white portraits of Kachigian siblings

Left to right: Siblings George, Alice and Harold Kachigian | UCLA

Jonathan Riggs | July 21, 2022

Key takeaways:
   • Late siblings George and Alice Kachigian were longtime supporters of  Armenian scholarship at UCLA.
   • The inaugural lectureship holder, Hagop Kouloujian, seeks to revive Western Armenian by having students compose creative works in the endangered language.

The UCLA Division of Humanities has received a $1.2 million bequest from the estate of siblings George and Alice Kachigian to support the Armenian studies program in the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures. As part of the gift, the department created the Kachigian Family Lectureship in Armenian Language and Culture.

The inaugural holder of the lectureship will be Hagop Kouloujian, a UCLA scholar and instructor who specializes in Western Armenian, a language that since the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century has been spoken almost exclusively by people in the diaspora. Kouloujian was instrumental in having it designated an endangered language by UNESCO in 2010.

“We are grateful for the kindness and visionary support of the Kachigian family,” said David Schaberg, dean of humanities and senior dean of the UCLA College. “Their generosity will contribute to the vitality of this endangered language and culture.”

Los Angeles, with the largest Armenian-speaking population outside Armenia itself, and UCLA are natural settings for such scholarship. Since the launch of the Armenian studies program in 1969, UCLA has been a destination for students interested in the field, and the creation of the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute in 2019 cemented the university’s leadership role in Armenian research and public impact programs.

Image of Hagop Kouloujian, UCLA’s inaugural Kachigian Family Lecturer in Armenian Language and Culture

Hagop Kouloujian, UCLA’s inaugural Kachigian Family Lecturer in Armenian Language and Culture | Courtesy of Hagop Kouloujian

Kouloujian’s ongoing Language in Action project at UCLA, funded by the Portugal-based Calouse Gulbenkian Foundation, exemplifies his “creative literacy” approach, which focuses on teaching students by encouraging their own creative output. His students have produced hundreds of pieces, ranging from creative works to nonfiction, with the goal of contributing to the vitality of Western Armenian language and culture.

In May 2022, for example, the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures held an event to celebrate the publication of “Girkov useloo, inchoo hos em?” (“To Say With Passion, Why Am I Here?”), a full-length volume of poetry written in Western Armenian by the late Tenny Arlen, a 2013 UCLA comparative literature graduate who learned the language and wrote most of the collection in Kouloujian’s courses.

Donors George and Alice Kachigian, for whom the lectureship is named, were active members and generous supporters of the Los Angeles Armenian community. Although they moved to Oregon 30 years ago following the deaths of their parents and brother Harold, they continued to support UCLA’s Armenian studies program throughout their lives, providing research funding for faculty in the divisions of social sciences and humanities.

Alice died in 2017, and after George’s death in 2019, the siblings’ estate left generous funding to the Armenian studies program and the department of neurology at UCLA.

“The Kachigian family were friends to all, donated to many causes and counseled anyone who requested their help. They lived lives of goodness and kindness,” said Rafe Aharonian, trustee of the Kachigian Living Trust. “George, Alice and Harold wanted to help the youth learn more about Armenian heritage, and courses like Dr. Kouloujian’s encourage connections between UCLA students of Armenian heritage who might otherwise not have met.”

The Kachigians’ legacy will live on in all those at UCLA and elsewhere who, through the family’s generosity, have developed a deep connection to and appreciation for Armenian culture and language, said Kouloujian, who will hold the lectureship for five years.

“My aspiration for this lectureship is to continue to enhance UCLA’s Armenian work with forward-looking activities and community impact projects that will help invigorate the future of this language and culture,” he said. “I want to share the enduring, evolving beauty and power of Armenian with as many people as possible.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more of Our Stories at the College, click here.

Image credit: UCLA

UCLA poised to become a world leader in hip-hop studies

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Building on decades of scholarship, the campus’s new Hip Hop Initiative will highlight the local and global impact of this Black art form
Collage image of the covers of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative.

A sampling of books on hip-hop and Black culture by UCLA faculty members who will play an integral role in the new Hip Hop Initiative. Image credit: UCLA

By Jessica Wolf

UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies today launched its wide-ranging Hip Hop Initiative, which will establish UCLA as a leading center for hip-hop studies globally by way of artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships and more.

Chuck D, the longtime leader of the politically and socially conscious rap group Public Enemy, is the program’s first artist-in-residence.

The initiative focuses on hip-hop as one of modern history’s most powerful cultural movements and most visible symbols of contemporary Black performance and protest.

“As we celebrate 50 years of hip-hop music and cultural history, the rigorous study of the culture offers us a wealth of intellectual insight into the massive social and political impact of Black music, Black history and Black people on global culture — from language, dance, visual art and fashion to electoral politics, political activism and more,” said anthropology professor H. Samy Alim, who is spearheading the initiative.

Co-leading the initiative with Alim are Bunche Center assistant director Tabia Shawel and Samuel Lamontagne, a doctoral candidate in the department of ethnomusicology.

The initiative is something Alim and his colleagues have been working toward for decades. It builds on the wealth of hip-hop scholarship produced at UCLA and across institutes of higher education since the 1990s and comes at a “convergence moment” when hip-hop music and culture have become dominant in the public sphere, as evidenced by the recent Super Bowl halftime show and the addition of break dancing to the 2024 Olympic Games.

“We’re also in a historical moment of hip-hop culture entering its ‘museum phase,’” said dream hampton, a writer and filmmaker who serves on the group’s advisory board.

Indeed, the Smithsonian Institution recently released a comprehensive hip-hop anthology, and museums like the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx and the South African Hip Hop Museum in Johannesburg are solely dedicated to the music and culture.

Shining a light on the West Coast and Los Angeles

With the launch of the initiative, UCLA becomes the first major West Coast destination for scholarly explorations of hip-hop culture, which allows for a deeper focus on hip-hop’s local development and impact, said Lamontagne, whose dissertation reexamines Los Angeles hip-hop history.

“Our goal,” he said, “is also to advance the legacy of UCLA by producing original, creative, public-facing, social justice–oriented work and building bridges between academia and the community by discussing the implications of scholarly research and how it can serve Black and brown communities in Los Angeles.”

The concentration of world-renowned scholars of hip-hop at UCLA makes the campus uniquely suited to lead hip-hop studies, both locally and globally, into the future, Shawel noted.

“At this moment, the UCLA Bunche Center has a critical mass of highly regarded, innovative faculty who, in some instances, have been writing about hip-hop culture for over four decades, exploring its musical, social and political impact around the world, from South Central to South Africa,” she said.

The Hip Hop Initiative’s advisory board includes some of the nation’s leading hip-hop artists and thinkers, like hampton, Chuck D, Joan Morgan, Davey D and UCLA alumni Jeff Chang and Ben Caldwell, who will serve alongside UCLA professors Cheryl Keyes, Bryonn Bain, Adam Bradley, Scot Brown, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Robin Kelley, Kyle Mays and Shana Redmond.

Image of Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA.

Left to right: Hip-hop legends Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli, curator and journalist Tyree Boyd-Pates, and UCLA’s H. Samy Alim at an event at the California African American Museum co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA. (March 11, 2020) Image credit: HRDWRKER/Courtesy of California African American Museum

Hip-hop studies: Growing from UCLA roots

One of the pioneering academics in the field, Keyes is a professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and chair of the department of African American studies. Nearly two decades ago, a group of graduate students set up an informal hip-hop research group with Keyes as their guide. In 2005, Alim organized their efforts into the formal Hip Hop Studies Working Group at UCLA, which has become a space for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and advanced undergraduates to explore methodological and theoretical issues in the study of hip-hop culture.

“It’s been incredible to witness and mentor so many students as they reach into the histories and experiences of the communities that gave rise to hip-hop,” Keyes said. “There’s a richness and depth and context that are yet to be discovered and revealed, and this initiative will support much more of that.”

Students have also benefited from the working group’s ongoing speaker and event series, which has recently featured hip-hop icons Rakim, Chuck D and Talib Kweli at the California African American Museum and a film screening and discussion with rapper and filmmaker Boots Riley at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

In addition to supporting the efforts of the Hip Hop Studies Working Group, the Hip Hop Initiative will include a wide variety of programs, including:

  • Artists-in-residence
    UCLA will host hip-hop artists whose work foregrounds issues of community engagement and social justice. Chuck D, who begins his UCLA residency this week, will participate in a series of on-campus events that bring together artists and members of the community.
  • Global community engagement
    Community-based projects include the Hip Hop High School–to–Higher Education Pipeline, the Hip Hop Disability Justice Project (with the Krip-Hop movement) and a long-standing project exploring hip-hop as culturally sustaining pedagogy in Spain and South Africa.
  • Book series and publications
    The initiative will expand the University of California Press Hip Hop Studies Series, which is edited by Alim and Chang along with leading hip-hop intellectuals Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill and others. The second book from this series, “Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape” by Bryonn Bain, hits bookstores this spring. The initiative will also support the work of emerging scholars through manuscript-development workshops.
  • Postdoctoral fellowships
    The initiative will support a research position intended for hip-hop studies scholars whose work seeks to improve the conditions of Black life. Scholars will be housed in the Bunche Center.
  • Hip-hop lecture series
    Public-facing lectures will feature cutting-edge hip-hop scholarship presented by international scholars.
  • Oral history and digital archive
    UCLA is the first institution on the West Coast to develop an archive dedicated to the study of hip-hop in Los Angeles, which has long been a major hub for hip-hop cultural production and the hip-hop industry. Faculty and staff involved in the initiative have begun a community-based oral history and digital archive focused on preserving the history of West Coast hip-hop.

Read more on UCLA Newsroom and UCLA Magazine about hip-hop studies at UCLA:

► Teaching rap lyrics as literature

► Cheryl Keyes hits the right notes with Smithsonian anthology

► Are major labels passing up profits by playing to racial stereotypes?

► Bryonn Bain: ‘Lyrics from lockdown’

► Beat scholars

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”Courtesy of Universal Studios

People of color helped keep movie business afloat during pandemic

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UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report emphasizes importance of minority audiences

Image of actor Vin Diesel with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.”

Actor Vin Diesel, left, with director Justin Lin on the set of “F9: The Fast Saga.” The movie, which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority, was the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office. Image Courtesy of Universal Studios

By Jessica Wolf |

A large percentage of the movie business’s box office revenue and home viewership was driven by consumers of color in 2021, according to UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report. The report examines the 252 top-performing English-language films — based on box office receipts and streaming data — during the second year that the COVID-19 pandemic forced movie studios to adopt unconventional release strategies.

The report tracks progress for women and minorities in acting, directing and writing roles, and analyzes audience segments by race and ethnicity, focusing on Asian American, Black, Latino and white audiences, and age, focusing on viewers 18 to 49.

Published twice a year — with one analysis of movies and another for TV — the Hollywood Diversity Report has consistently shown increases in the percentages of women and people of color in key jobs in front of the camera. Researchers have also tracked sustained, albeit stubborn, growth for women and minorities in Hollywood writing and directing jobs.

Chart showing that The largest single category of films considered in this report includes those that were released solely on streaming platforms12 (45.6 percent), which is down from the share of streaming-only films considered in the previous report for 2020 (54.6 percent). By contrast, only 17.9 percent of films were released solely in theaters in 2021.13 Meanwhile, 20.2 percent of films were released both on streaming platforms and in limited theaters,14 while 13.1 percent were released both on streaming platforms and widely in theaters.15 Finally, only 1.6 percent of films were released both theatrically and through transactional video on demand,16 and 1.6 percent were released on streaming after a modified theatrical release window (45+ days).17

The report’s authors noted that 2021 was the first year since they began tracking such statistics that the majority of Academy Awards went to films that were directed by people of color and featured minority actors in lead roles. And the year’s third highest-grossing film at the box office was “F9: The Fast Saga,” which featured a cast that was more than 50% minority and was directed by Taiwanese American filmmaker Justin Lin. Sixty-five percent of opening weekend ticket sales for “F9” were to minority audiences, the highest figure among all films in the top 10.

The report tracks the numbers of writers, directors and actors who identify as Asian American, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern/North African, multiracial and Native American. People in those groups make up 42.7% of the U.S. population, and they form an important consumer bloc for entertainment, including movies.

For six of the 10 top-grossing films that opened in theaters in 2021, people of color accounted for the majority of opening-weekend U.S. ticket sales.

The report also analyzed box office performance based on the diversity of the movies’ casts — whether minority actors made up less than 11% of the cast, 11% to 20%, and so on, up to 51% or more. The study revealed that films with 21% to 30% minority actors had higher median global box office receipts than films in any other tier. That echoed a pattern since the report began tracking box office performance in 2011.

The report also found that, as in previous years, films with the least diverse casts (11% or less minority) were the poorest performers at the box office.

Chart showing that Median global box office peaked for films with casts that were from 21 to 30 percent minority in 2021 ($107.4 million). Twenty-five films fell into this cast diversity interval, including Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($501.0 million), A Quiet Place Part II ($297.4 million), and Cruella ($233.3 million). In a year in which theater attendance began to rebound after a COVID-decimated 2020, theatrically released films with relatively diverse casts again outshined their less-diverse counterparts at the box office. Indeed, the 14 films with the least-diverse casts (less than 11 percent minority) were again the poorest performers in 2021. “Last year, every time a big movie exceeded expectations or broke a box office record, the majority of opening weekend audiences were people of color,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, a co-author of the report and the director of research and civic engagement for the UCLA College division of social sciences. “For people of color, and especially Latino families, theaters provided an excursion when almost everything else was shut down. In a sense, people of color kept studios afloat the past couple of years.

“Studios should consider them to be investors, and as investors, they should get a return in the form of representation.”

Overall, 43.1% of actors in the movies analyzed by the report were minorities. That’s more than double the percentage from 2011, the first year of data collected by the authors, when 20.7% of actors were minorities. And 31.0% of the top-performing films in 2021 had casts in which the majority of the actors were minorities.

“Minorities reached proportionate representation in 2020 for the first time when it comes to overall cast diversity in films, and that held true again in 2021,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of the social sciences at UCLA and co-author of the report.

Hunt said the phenomenon is probably due in part to the greater number of movies that are initially released on streaming services: Of the films analyzed in the report, 45.6% were released on streaming services only.

Chart showing that During the second full year of the pandemic, the volume of major films released via streaming platforms continued to increase, from 87 films in 2020 to 164 in 2021. Again, for all groups, median ratings were highest for relatively diverse streaming films in 2021. That is, for viewers 18-49 (3.08 ratings points) and Black households (12.49 ratings points), ratings peaked for streaming films with majority-minority casts. Seventy-two films fell into this cast diversity interval in 2021, including: Raya and the Last Dragon, Coming 2 America, Vivo, and Mortal Kombat. For viewers 18-49, though, it should be noted that streaming films with casts that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority came in a close second (2.94 ratings points). For White (5.10 ratings points), Latinx (7.34 ratings points), Asian (5.90 ratings points), and other-race households (5.48 ratings points), streaming films that were from 21 percent to 30 percent minority also enjoyed the highest ratings in 2021. Examples of the 36 films that fell into this diversity interval include: Don’t Look Up, The Boss Baby: Family Business, and The Suicide Squad.

“We do think this dual-release strategy is here to stay,” Hunt said. “And it could have a lasting impact on diversity metrics in front of and behind the camera as studios think about how to finance content for different platforms.”

For example, the report found that women and people of color were far more likely than white men to direct films with budgets less than $20 million.

“A small production budget usually means that there is also little to no marketing and studio support, unless it’s from a production company known for making art house films,” Ramón said. “And that makes it more difficult for filmmakers to get the next opportunity if their films have to fight for attention.”

Hunt said studios are likely to bank on big-budget tentpole movies and sequels as traditional box office drivers, even as they continue to experiment with release platforms and adjust the amount of time between films’ theatrical releases and their arrival on streaming services or on DVD or Blu-ray.

Among the 2021 films released to streaming services, those with casts in which a majority of actors were non-white enjoyed the highest ratings among viewers aged 18 to 49 and in Black households. Seventy-two films with majority-minority casts were released on streaming in 2021, including “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Coming 2 America,” “Vivo” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Chart showing that Among the White,24 Black, Latinx, multiracial, and MENA directors helming 2021 films, women lagged far behind men. Only among Asian and Native directors did women approach or reach parity with their male counterparts in securing these important positions.

“In 2021, diversity in front of the camera did not equate to more opportunities behind the camera for filmmakers who are women and people of color,” Ramón said. “They continue to receive less financing, even when they make films with white lead actors. Most of these filmmakers are relegated to low-budget films. For women of color, directing and writing opportunities are really the final frontier.”

Of the filmmakers who directed the movies analyzed in the report, 21.8% were women and 30.2% were people of color. Among the screenwriters for those films, 33.5% were women and 32.3% were people of color. Diversity in both jobs increased incrementally from 2020.

Out of the 76 minority directors of 2021’s top films, just 23 were women. And among Black, Latino and multiracial directors, at least twice as many were men as women in each racial or ethnic classification.

Although there was gender parity among Asian American and Native American directors, the overall numbers of directors from those groups were very small: just 17 Asian American directors and and just two Native American directors were represented in 2021. Among white directors, 32 were women and 143 were men.

The authors counted one trans woman among the directors of the 2021 films they analyzed.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Department of African American Studies launches ‘Celebrate Us’ speaker series with talk by Kyle T. Mays

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At the close of Black History Month, the UCLA Department of African American Studies launched its new “Celebrate Us” lecture series, which focuses on topics that explore and celebrate Black life. On February 28, 2022, inaugural speaker Kyle T. Mays joined a virtual audience to discuss “Afro-Indigenous Relations from Black and Red Power to Contemporary Popular Culture,” based on themes explored in his recent book:

Mays, a Black and Saginaw Anishinaabe scholar, teaches African American studies and American Indian studies at UCLA. His book, “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States,” is a groundbreaking intersectional study of U.S. history, racism and Afro-Indigenous solidarity.

Darnell Hunt, dean of the UCLA Division of Social Sciences, introduced the series. “Our motto in the social sciences division is ‘Engaging L.A., Changing the World,’” Hunt said. “Lecture series like ‘Celebrate Us’ contribute to the dialogue and positive impact we hope to see in the world by helping us make sense of the dynamic changes affecting the Black community today.”

Department chair Cheryl L. Keyes, also a professor of African American studies, ethnomusicology and global jazz studies, led the event, which was co-sponsored by UCLA American Indian Studies.

Learn more at the UCLA Department of African American Studies website.

UCLA, Howard University launch summer program on race, ethnicity and politics

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The new UC-funded Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will support young scholars in this burgeoning academic field
Image of Mark Sawyer

The program’s namesake, the late Mark Sawyer, was a professor of political science and African American studies at UCLA and a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics.

By Jessica Wolf 

The first-ever Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will bring four undergraduate fellows from Howard University in Washington, D.C., to the UCLA campus this June for an immersive six-week academic research program that explores the crucial role of race, ethnicity and politics in society.

The multiyear program, a collaboration between faculty from UCLA’s political science department and Howard, is funded by the UC–HBCU Initiative, which seeks to boost the number of undergraduate scholars from historically Black colleges and universities who enroll in and complete advanced degree programs at University of California campuses.

Named for the late UCLA professor Mark Sawyer, a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics, the newly launched summer institute will be led by UCLA’s Lorrie Frasure, an associate professor of political science and African American studies, and Natalie Masuoka, an associate professor of political science and chair of the Asian American studies department. Their Howard counterpart is Niambi Carter, an associate professor of political science and director of graduate studies.

“Our objective is to create an inclusive and supportive environment for students to develop their skills in research methods and design and to encourage participants to see themselves as confident and qualified applicants to an advanced degree program in political science,” said Frasure, who also serves as vice chair of graduate studies in political science.

Fellows in the program will focus on race and ethnicity as a central category that informs political processes in the United States and will help produce research that spotlights the underrecognized political role played by African American and other communities of color. The scholars will familiarize themselves with empirical research methods through innovative workshops and participate in seminars that explore theories of U.S. racial and ethnic politics, specifically Black politics.

The four undergraduate scholars selected for this summer, all of them political science majors entering their senior year at Howard, are Justina Blanco, Havillyn Felder, Donroy Ferdinand and Yasmine Grier.

Carter said the partnership between UCLA’s political science department and Howard’s program in Black politics provides an ideal opportunity for some of Howard’s best and brightest students to work on cutting-edge research while carving a pathway to graduate studies and professorships.

“I am excited that our students get to experience a different campus and different approaches to political science. I am also expecting UCLA to learn a lot from our students, whose worldview has been shaped in really important ways by Howard University and our motto, ‘Truth and Service,’” Carter said. “This partnership helps both our campuses achieve our shared goals of producing bright scholars who will bring all of who they are to the classroom and in their approaches to studying some of the biggest issues in political science. We look forward to creating lasting, deep connections and looking for other places to connect our campuses.”

As part of the mission of the UC–HBCU Initiative, the University of California will waive application fees for alumni of the initiative’s programs — including the Sawyer Summer Institute — who apply to any of the more than 700 academic graduate programs at the UC’s 10 campuses. Those admitted to advanced degree programs will be eligible to receive competitive funding packages.

The field of race and ethnicity politics at UCLA today serves as a model for universities across the nation, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mark Sawyer, Frasure said.

Sawyer, a professor of political science and African American studies who died in 2017, co-founded the race, ethnicity and politics program in UCLA’s political science department in 2006 and was instrumental in establishing the campus’s department of African American studies in 2015.

“Professor Sawyer is remembered as an outstanding scholar and a committed mentor and teacher,” Frasure said, “but he is most remembered as a visionary builder of lasting institutions.”

UCLA’s political science graduate program is currently one of only a handful in the U.S. to have established racial and ethnic politics as an institutionalized field of study, and its political science department boasts one of the largest concentrations of faculty engaged in the specialty.

► See UCLA’s recent study of how attitudes toward politics and policy vary among racial groups.

The Sawyer Summer Institute will also benefit from programmatic partnerships with UCLA’s department of African American studies, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Academic Advancement Program.

“We’ve assembled an incredible team of scholars and programs for this first year of the initiative,” Masuoka said. “We are eager to welcome these young researchers to UCLA but also look forward to learning from them. We have an opportunity to consider how their experiences and ideas can inform novel and innovative research questions.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Illustration of rat near Hollywood signAmisha Gadani/UCLA

Intricacies of L.A.’s urban ecosystem are focus of new UCLA podcast

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Illustration of rat near Hollywood sign

The podcast’s premiere episode explores the conflict between people’s attempts to battle one species, rats, while preserving another, mountain lions. Image by Amisha Gadani/UCLA

By Jonathan Van Dyke

Not all of the celebrities in Los Angeles are humans.

Just witness the excitement around sightings of the city’s famous wild animals. One recent Los Angeles Times headline read, “Famed mountain lion P-22 makes dramatic appearance in Beachwood Canyon backyard.”

But even Angelenos who are fascinated by the big cats of the Santa Monica Mountains might not realize that the animals are threatened by factors that seem totally unrelated to their natural habitats. For example, what if the rodenticide being used to fight rat infestations in Los Angeles neighborhoods might ultimately harm P-22 and his running mates?

That’s the topic of the first episode of “The Labyrinth Project,” a new UCLA podcast available now on Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon and Stitcher. Through six episodes, the series engages listeners in a range of ecological conundrums, all of which are as interconnected as the city’s vast natural ecosystems.

Its creator is Christopher Kelty, a UCLA anthropology professor and member of the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. Kelty’s Labyrinth Project research initiative inspired the podcast, and his work is funded in part by the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge.

“People see nature in different ways, and with different stakes,” he said. “Some people want to conserve nature in a certain way, other people want to exploit it and others are afraid of it. We wanted to really explore that idea.”

The premiere episode explores the conflict between people’s attempts to battle one species, rats, while preserving another, mountain lions. Studies by UCLA researchers and others have shown that rats killed by pesticides wind up in the food chain that ultimately leads up to bobcats and mountain lions, which can damage their immune systems and alter their genetics.

“We could ban the poisons, but the question remains: Do we want to live with rats? Should we be changing our relationship to rats as well as mountain lions?” Kelty said. “This podcast is an attempt to say that if you focus problem by problem, you won’t see the bigger picture. We’re trying to bring the bigger picture into focus in a way that’s easy to grasp. And we’re asking listeners to take a step back, and maybe to not have a strong opinion immediately.”

The podcast is written and produced by Kelty and five UCLA undergraduates and graduate students. Future episodes, which will be released each Monday, explore stories around coyotes, feral cats and the pressure people can feel from being bombarded with messages about living sustainably.

“I really delved into my own feelings about trying to live a sustainable lifestyle,” said Emma Horton, a third-year undergraduate student majoring in human biology and society, and a co-producer of one episode. “I found what I call ‘sustainability guilt practices’ all around me, and I realized there are these subtle forms of shaming consumers into living environmentally conscious lives, even though a lot of it is really out of reach for the average person.”

The team represents a wide range of academic interests. Spencer Robins, for example, is a doctoral candidate in English, with a focus on environmental literature.

“If you go out into Los Angeles and start talking with people who really know and care about the natural world here, you’re going to meet really wild characters with wild stories,” he said. In the Labyrinth Project, those characters range from trained scientists to a family that feeds a coyote at its front door to members of a satanist cult that morphed into the no-kill movement in Los Angeles.

For Chase Niesner, a graduate student in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the project drove home the interconnectedness of a wide range of issues.

“What this project is really about is understanding and respecting the complexity of the urban ecosystem, and understanding that if you pull one thread, it changes everything else,” he said. “In urban ecology, you really can’t think of any one conversation separately from the others.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.