Racial Injustice

In 2020, as part of UCLA’s efforts towards racial equity, the Fiat Lux program encouraged faculty to offer diverse seminars focused on understanding, unpacking, and ameliorating racial injustice. Read the Chancellor’s Message for more on UCLA’s efforts to confront and address racism, discrimination, and bias.

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Winter 2021 Spring 2021

COVID-19: The Archaeology of Diseases and Pathogens: Understanding Pandemics

Instructor: Stephen Acabado

Subject Area: Anthropology

Course Description: As the world faces the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, a new “normal” is being defined for socialization, transportation, supply chain, among other things. However, the archaeological and historical records have documented multiple pandemics, such as the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Bubonic Plague in the 1th century, and the Justinian Plague in the 6th century. These global infections have affected human populations but has also given us a glimpse of how humanity respond to such pressures. In this seminar, we survey some of the pandemics to understand how human behavior contributes to the spread of diseases. We also look at how humans take care of the sick and how these diseases changed the way we live. Students are expected to actively participate in and lead discussions.

COVID-19: Language and Linguistics in Time of Coronavirus

Instructor: Hongyin Tao

Subject Area: Asian

Course Description: The Coronavirus pandemic has brought about fundamental changes in languages of the world: from the politics of the term for the virus itself, controversial slogans such as “social distancing” (as opposed to “physical distancing”), the surge of terms such as PPE, to “lockdown” being selected as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2020. This seminar explores the role language plays in politics, social life, public health, international relations, among others, during the ongoing pandemic. Analyses of linguistic phenomena from a range of Asian and other language will be grounded from sociolinguistic and critical discourse analytic perspectives for a deeper understanding of the way language is deployed and reflects social changes in times of crisis. At the same time, practical issues such as how to effectively mobilize community responses with language for public health at large societal scales and the impact of the pandemic on the industry of language education, etc., will also be explored.

COVID-19: Kindness in Science: Diversity, Health Disparities, and Greater Advancements

Instructor: Jorge Torres

Subject Area: Chemistry and Biochemistry

Course Description: Exploration of kindness in science and the impact of kindness on improving diversity of the scientific workforce, on addressing health disparities and making greater scientific advancements. We will discuss how lack of kindness can lead to failure to recruit underrepresented students and train them for biomedical careers; how lack of a diverse biomedical workforce has contributed to health care disparities, with focus on racial Covid-19 health disparities; how kindness can address long-standing inequalities that are exacerbated by Covid-19; and how kindness can help improve communication and collaboration across disciplines and groups around the world to spur innovation and discoveries related to the pandemic. An aim of this course is to gain appreciation for the impact kindness can have on personal lives/careers, the lives/careers of others they come in contact with throughout their scientific/medical training, the lives that their science/medical training and research careers will touch, and how kindness can help build a more just and humane world.

COVID-19 and Its Aftermath: Implications for Gender Dynamics and Sexuality -- Sex and Gender in the Aftermath of COVID-19

Instructor: Martie Hasleton

Subject Area: Communication

Course Description: COVID-19 radically changed the way we socially interact and the challenges we face. This class will focus on how the pandemic has affected gender dynamics, including implications for sexuality. One issue has become clear: women, in particular, are shifting toward greater attention to family and a reduction of time spent working. As women become more financially dependent on partners, who are typically male, gender norms begin to shift toward more “conservative” family structures, with women doing work in the home and men as breadwinners. We will explore the implications of this shift and others related to COVID-19 for gender equality, changes in moral norms, and a looming “baby bust.”

COVID-19: Missing Women -- Facts and Controversies

Instructor: Adriana Lleras-Muney

Subject Area: Economics

Course Description: In highly-cited piece, economics Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen documented that in certain countries mortality rate of women is abnormally high, resulting in deficit of about 100 million women around world. Discussion of various theories on why differences in survival by gender exist; and extent to which these differences are driven by biology, socioeconomic conditions, and discrimination. Students think about possible role of government interventions aimed at lowering gender health disparities. Seminar will also consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19: The Ethic of Care and Covid-19

Instructor: King-Kok Cheung

Subject Area: English

Course Description: The course explores how the ethic of care can be fostered in virtual and actual communities to combat Covid-19 and its fallout vis-à-vis international and interpersonal tensions. This ethic, which encompasses neighbor love, compassion, and empathy, has been inculcated in multiple religions and philosophies including Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, classics (Marcus Aurelius), and existentialism (Arendt, Camus, Frankl). Course will supplement this ethic with the notion of self-care, which is imperative in braving covid 19. The readings of the course focus on literary and journalistic pieces written in the wake of a pandemic (real or imagined), natural disaster, or a family member’s terminal illness: Haruki Murakami’s “Honey-Pie,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “I’d Love You to Want Me,” Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City, and Chang-rae Lee’s “Coming Home Again.”

Eyewitness Testimony of Holocaust Survivors

Instructor: Todd Presner

Subject Area: German

Course Description: In collaboration with Jewish Family Services, UCLA Hillel, and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies, this course offers students the chance to talk with and interview Holocaust survivors. We will carry out the class via zoom with about 18 survivors who have agreed to talk with UCLA students over the course of the quarter (every other week). The instructor will offer an overview of the Holocaust and provide students with knowledge about the history and role of eyewitness testimony in understanding the Holocaust. We will also make use of audio-visual testimonies through the USC Shoah Foundation and some of their new, interactive, digital testimonies.

COVID-19: Social Justice, Health Equity and Immigrants in the time of COVID-19

Instructor: Michael Rodriquez

Subject Area: Global Health

Course Description: Global health places priority on improving health and achieving health equity for all people. This seminar will focus on immigrants to understand the role of social justice in promoting the right of everyone to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as established in World Heath Constitution of 1948. Discussion of social inequities experienced by immigrants and others, incorporating concepts such as reproductive justice, effects of racism on health, and redlining as social determinant of health. Discussions will include topics such as contraception, nutrition, mental and physical health in the context of COVID-19. Students will gain perspective on how policies and their environment can shape individual health choices. This seminar will also highlight accomplishments of current and past UCLA faculty related to research, teaching, and/or service, that have been made to promote social justice and health.

The Social World of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Instructor: Teo Ruiz

Subject Area: History

Course Description: This is a close reading of Jane Austen’s great novel, Pride and Prejudice. While discussing the novel’s emplotment and characters, we will pay special attention to the clues it provides about social relations, place of women, education, and the importance of property and rank in late 18th and early 19th centuries England.

Plato’s Republic: Utopias in the Ancient World

Instructor: Teo Ruiz

Subject Area: History

Course Description: This is a close reading of one of the most fundamental texts in western culture, Plato’s Republic. Emphasis will be placed on issues of gender equality and social organization.

Fostering Kindness to Self & Others: Cultivating Music & Cultural Understanding

Instructor: Lily Chen-Hafteck

Subject Area: Music

Course Description: Research has shown that music has the capacity to promote empathy and cultural understanding and that learning songs from foreign cultures can result in students developing more positive racial attitude towards people from those cultures. Therefore, music can be a powerful means of helping people to develop awareness, understanding, and consequently, respect and kindness for people from other cultures. In this course, we will explore the relationship between music and culture, and discuss the effects of music in enhancing cultural understanding and positive racial attitude. Students will share their musical and cultural backgrounds, and make music together through Soundtrap, a digital audio workstation (DAW). All students in the class will become a community of learners, learning from each other and working together. Students are expected to develop understanding of each others’ music and culture through the music projects, which will then foster kindness among themselves and possibly towards other people from diverse cultures that they may encounter in future.

R&B, Power Pop, "Opera" and Punk - The Who in the 60s and 70s

Instructor: Brian Kim Stefans

Subject Area: Musicology

Course Description: We will listen to and discuss the music of the seminal British pop band The Who, one of the three major British Invasion bands of the 60s along with the Beatles and Rolling Stones. The Who exploded onto the scene with their single “My Generation” which – with its kinetic drumming, percussive bass lines, feedback-ridden guitars and lyrics stating “I hope I die before I get old” – is said to have prefigured 70s punk. But even before then, The Who translated Black American soul and R&B (Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding) for UK pop audiences better than anyone. Later, the band expanded their musical vocabulary to explore humor (often bawdy), avant-garde music (such as “minimalist” synthesizers) and the “rock opera,” notably in Tommy. We will use The Who to trace the early history of rock music, asking: how was Black American music appropriated into white pop? what is the link between fashion (in their case “Mod”) and music? what political/spiritual content can a pop lyric have? where exactly do “destruction” and “creation” meet in art; and what does the music mean for today?

COVID-19: Pandemic! The collision of science, politics, and ethics

Instructor: Susanne Lohmann

Subject Area: Political Science

Course Description: This course explores the ethics of pandemics, with a focus on the clash of science and politics. Exploration of normative and empirical ethics using surveys and online games. Normative ethics includes empathy (good thing or bad thing for public policy?); who shall live and who shall die (ventilator triage); the implicit value of a human life (COVID-19 vs. the economy); justice-fairness concerns (disability, race, essential workers, the elderly); scientific uncertainty and disagreement (Great Barrington vs. John Snow declarations); the regulation of risk (vaccine trials). Empirical ethics includes empathy (instinctual or cultivated?); evolutionary psychology of risk; terror management theory; the social construction of nature; cross-cultural differences; party-political disagreement; the politicization of science and the scientization of politics; pandemic denialism and conspiracy theories; institutional failures (the nursing home hellscape); what went wrong?! (the Johns Hopkins Global Health Index Oct 2019 ranked the US number one in pandemic preparedness).

Global Migration

Instructor: Roger Waldinger

Subject Area: Sociology

Course Description: Introduction to study of global migration through speaker series sponsored by Center for the Study of International Migration. This set of interdisciplinary talks focuses on wide range of migration issues, whether related to U.S. or international aspects of phenomenon; and engaging with issues related both to migration policy and research. Speakers range from highly prominent scholars to younger researchers working at cutting edge. Study offers excellent opportunity to gain first-hand exposure to key policy and scholarly debates on immigration. Students meet with speaker for 30 minutes after each presentation. Presentation typically lasts 30 minutes and is followed by 45 minutes of questions and answers.

Asian American film festival: Cinema, migration, social justice (Skoll SIE)

Instructor: Sean Metzger

Subject Area: Theater

Course Description: What is the relationship between cinema, immigration, and social justice? In this class we use the Center for Asian American Studies festival as a case study. We will discuss the logistics of organizing such an event, including the competing interests of multiple constituencies (the different ethnic groups that constitute Asian America, the needs of festival programming and of an academic institution). We will discuss the content of the films as well as their distribution and reception. Students will attend screenings and panels with both professors and some of the on- and off-screen talent responsible for creating the films. Because of the schedule of the festival, we will meet during the quarter at irregular times during week 2 (introduction and planning session) as well as weeks 7 and 8 (Feb 15-28 for screenings and related panels). The festival organizers have planned 6 sessions over these weeks (including panels as well as screenings of shorts, documentaries, and narrative features) on topics including LGBTQ intersections, environmental justice and Hollywood. Study affiliated with Skoll Center for Social Impact Entertainment.

Nonviolence and Women’s Self-Defense

Instructor: Frances Olsen

Subject Area: Law (Undergraduate)

Course Description: Examination of theories of nonviolence and politics of women’s self-defense. How can women most effectively protect themselves against violent attacks without contributing to, or themselves buying into, patriarchal valorization of violence? Nonviolence can be profoundly transformative, as in American and British suffrage movements, Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British in India, and American civil rights movement. When is nonviolence practical and effective, and what alternatives are most effective for women? Can a small woman actually fend off a larger, stronger man? Or does that work only in choreographed martial-arts demonstrations or occasional Hollywood movie? If self-defense is practical, why isn’t it routinely taught to women (and children); and how persuasive is the claim that women’s self-defense training doesn’t support but instead effectively challenges patriarchal violence? Men and women welcome to enroll.

Writings of Abraham Lincoln

Instructor: Daniel Lowenstein

Subject Area: Honors

Course Description: Abraham Lincoln is widely known as one of America’s greatest presidents, the man who held the Union together and emancipated slaves. Although many are familiar with his Gettysburg Address and perhaps his Second Inaugural Address, fewer know him as one of the greatest prose writers in the history of the English language. In this Fiat Lux seminar, we will study some of his greatest speeches and other writings, and in the process learn something of the fascinating events leading up to the Civil War.

Nursing Homes and COVID-19 -- An International Study of Long Term Care

Instructor: Kathleen McGarry

Subject Area: Economics

Course Description: The pandemic obviously had a devastating effect on the nursing home population in the United States. What did the situation look like globally? How are the elderly faring and what will happen with caregiving going forward? Will more resources be directed towards improving conditions in nursing homes? Or will adult children sacrifice their own time and careers to replace the formal sector previously employed to provide long-term care?

In this course the students will work with the instructor to select a handful of countries to examine the effect of Covid-19 on the frail elderly population, the general structure of long-term care, and the spill-over effects that caring for parents may have on outcomes for their adult children.

COVID-19: Cultivating Cultural Understanding through Music during the Pandemic

Instructor: Lily Chen-Hafteck

Subject Area: Musicology

Course Description: We are currently facing an unprecedented crisis. The pandemic has led to a rising racial discrimination and anti-Asian sentiment due to the origin of the virus in China. The Black Lives Matter movement has raised our attention to the inequalities that racial minorities of our nation have been facing for centuries. More than ever, we need to learn to understand and appreciate each other’s cultural backgrounds, and to be kind to each other despite our differences.
During the pandemic, we watched people singing from their balconies and families making music from videos. Music has provided a means of emotional expression and brought people in quarantine together. Research found that music has the capacity to promote empathy and cultural understanding. In this course, students will share their musical and cultural backgrounds to deepen understanding of each other. They will express their feelings on the current crisis through making music. They will come to realize how music can enhance awareness and understanding of people from diverse cultures.