Urban Humanities Initiative

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Urban Humanities Initiative

UCLA's Urban Humanities Initiative is a interdisciplinary program integrating interpretive approache
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As the world grows increasingly urban, so grows the imperative to more fully comprehend the space of our collective life. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the context of intensely interactive, rapidly expanding cities of the Pacific Rim. The Urban Humanities Initiative offers an emerging paradigm to explore the lived spaces of dynamic proximities, cultural hybridities, and networked interconnec

tions. The complexity of such spaces calls for new intellectual and practical alliances between environmental design and the humanities and for the advanced tools that each brings to bear on its objects of investigation. Urban Humanities integrates the interpretive, historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design, to document, elucidate, and transform the cultural object we call the city.

03/17/2021

TW: immigration trauma & death

This week we are featuring “ÁGUILAS,” a documentary co-directed by UHI Core Faculty member Maite Zubiaurre and the winner of Big Sky Film Festival’s 2021 Mini-Doc Award!

Maite’s co-direction of Aguilas was inspired by her research into forensic empathy, “a newly coined term that stands for consciousness-raising activism and compassion-triggering artistic practices around migrant suffering and migrant death,” which emerged as part of a UHI seminar. Watch the ÁGUILAS trailer at the link in bio, or read more below.

“Along the scorching southern border in Arizona, only an estimated one out of every five missing migrants is ever found. ÁGUILAS is the story of one group of searchers, the Águilas del Desierto. Comprised largely of immigrant Latinos, once a month these volunteers — construction workers, gardeners and domestic laborers by day — set out to recover the missing, reported to them by loved ones often thousands of miles away.”

03/03/2021

This week’s must read - “City analog: scavenging sonic archives and urban pedagogy” in the Review of Communication Vol 20(4): (Re)Sounding Pedagogies; authored by UHI Alums Jacqueline Jean Barrios and Kenny Wong (Tokyo ‘17 and Alumni Salon organizers). Learn more at the link in bio!

Pictured: Community annotations feathering a thick map with Post-it notes relate remembered city sounds upon students’ scavenged archive and data on damages in the 1992 civil unrest.

Abstract: In this essay, we describe a pedagogy for teaching and studying literature and cities through the embodiment of an urban sound scavenger. Extending Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ragpicker to poetically assemble disparate urban imaginaries, we explore how two linked teaching projects set in Los Angeles, CA, demonstrate listening bodies coconstituting both literary texts and urban environments.

Credit:
Jacqueline Jean Barrios & Kenny H. Wong (2020) City analog: scavenging sonic archives and urban pedagogy

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@ Los Angeles, California

Address

1317 Perloff Hall, Room B215
Los Angeles, CA
90095

Website

http://www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu/

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