When even the carnage in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq struggles to stay in front-page view, who might recall that forced relocations and mass killings that likely fit the term genocide occur still in places like Darfur? And aren't such global tragedies always evidenced in multicultural L.A., where scholars struggle daily, for example, to chronicle how large groups of people piece back their lives after distant madnesses and madmen like Pol Pot destroy nations and ravage lands. In Dominguez Hills, experts have worked with the Cambodians who resettled in Long Beach to record their rebuilding in Southern California after the genocide in their homeland; they have built up an archive of thousands of photos and documents in Khmer and English, documenting the rise of Cambodia town and one of the largest enclaves of Cambodians outside of Asia. With grants and volunteer aid, they're not only compiling a book but also hope to mount online even more of their information about the Cambodians' genocide and diaspora. And, for an update on the grim doings in Sudan, it's worth checking out the more upbeat, individual story of what happened to at least one of the 'Lost Boys' from that riven, war ravaged nation.
Ah, the joys of site maintenance: With thanks to Joanie Harmon, of university communications and public affairs, multiple postings on activities in Dominguez Hills have been updated with now-working links. Also fixed: the one-time hyphen in Cal State got dropped in keeping with how other institutions in the system were named. FYI, so it will record on the site page for the institution, here's a list of postings affected:
Want a spotlight? Invoke 'Avatar,' surfing or Jimi Hendrix
Top-notch botany? Yaawn. Key library archives? Zzzzzzzzz. Luminous etchings? Hmm. Well, how about James Cameron's 'Avatar?' How about rock legend Jimi Hendrix? Or what about surboard-shaping master ... Who knows exactly how artistic, academic and intellectual endeavors catch fire in public consciousness. But sometimes it takes a nudge, wink or sly, um, marketing to get folks to notice what's going on:
In Riverside, Jodie Holt has done her thing for some time now, researching, according to her web site, the 'ecology and physiology of weedy and invasive plant species in wild lands and agricultural ecosystems.' But it wasn't her work on artichoke thistles or giant reeds that got her wide public attention, including a recent, lifetime honor from the San Diego Botanic Gardens. No, it seems that, as part of their fund-raising efforts, the horticulturalists to the south decided Holt's accolades were due for her labors and public outreach on Cameron's 'Avatar,' the box-office boffo movie for which she helped create and name plants for the fantastical planet and aided in the shaping of the central character played by Sigourney Weaver. The film will be re-released at the end of this month with added footage, the school notes, and Holt will discuss it, her role with it and her life as a path-breaking botanist in October in San Diego. That's Holt, shown at left, in a Becky Reeb photo with Julian Duval, president and CEO of the San Diego Botanical Garden.
On the Westside, the mastery of Jacob Samuel, a Los Angeles print star who has worked with a dazzling who's-who of the contemporary art world, has been on display in an exhibit that has highlighted both his artistry and his 'Outside the Box' approach to his craft. Among other things, Samuel (shown at left with artist Marina Abramovic) has so perfected his technique that, while he maintains his studio in Santa Monica, he has traveled the globe to collaborate with artists in far-flung sites in sometimes challenging creative circumstance. The list of those with whom he has made art is impressive. So, too, is his refreshing, relaxed views on his labors as a master printer, shaped, as he notes, by his Los Angeles life and surroundings. Including the ambience of the shore? And perhaps that's why on Tuesday night at 7, Scott Anderson, (shown at right) another legendary artisanal craftsman, turns up as part of the free, public lectures connected with Samuel's exhibition? Hmm. Anderson's spent two decades making his name as the crafter and shaper of surfboards.
In the Dominguez Hills, they're certainly making many purple-and-white Northwestern Wildcat alums of a certain age mighty happy by seeking to draw greater attention to the South Bay school's archival collections by putting up an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the death of pop star Jimi Hendrix. Not only does the display, featuring materials donated by South Bay historian James Osborne, try to spotlight the special, institutional holdings, it also aims to provide a greater context to the late, great rocker's career as a genuine pop icon and not solely as a great guitarist, as many have tried to re-characterize Hendrix, the curators say. Hmm, since many of those who were 'Experienced,' or strolling along the figurative 'Watchtower,' also might have been in a 'Purple Haze,' (a de facto anthem of the Evanston experience of an era), well, the refreshed biography of Jimi will be a needed blast from the past.
After his 17-year-old son Kwame was fatally shot in 2006 after a fight at a party, Richard Gordon, a Dominguez Hills professor of teacher education, has sought to honor his memory with, among other things, an annual dinner at the prep school the youth once attended. Gordon (shown at right) invites colleagues, many of them experts on mediation and curbing violence, to speak at what has become a forum for some insular folks to understand an all-too-common underside of life in the City of Angels. And while Times columnist Sandy Banks puts in perspective well the event's meaning to a community, the university posting about Gordon, the dinner and the compassionate folks he invited to the event at the Waldorf School in Altadena touches another kind of nerve. Yes, unfortunately, statistics say that crime and violence afflicts the young the most. But this reading underscores just how tragically prevalent are the experiences with shocking violence by people who also then struggle on to get an education, to teach and to help others.
Even as the Obama administration announced its new strategy to combat HIV-AIDS with a focus on high-risk groups, experts in Southern California have revealing new research about African American couples and intravenous drug users and the disease. In Westwood, Bruin scientists say they've seen promising results in promoting safer sex practices among black couples who have tested a culturally specific intervention program based in the African concept of 'Eban.' It symbolizes 'safety, security and love within one's family and relationship space,' researchers say, noting their program saw safer sexual behaviors in African American couples in which one partner is HIV-positive. Meantime, in Dominguez Hills, two psychology grad students, in examining the workings of 'clean syringe' programs that try to reduce HIV-AIDS infections among intravenous drug users, found geographical, attitudinal disparities among pharmacists who might be asked to sell safer needles to at-risk populations. While 74% of pharmacists in Los Angeles turned away suspected injection drug abusers seeking to buy clean syringes, only 33% of their professional counterparts in San Francisco did so, the researchers found, noting that the potential harm reduction (lessened risk of HIV-AIDS or Hepatitis C infection through shared kits) seemed vastly less persuasive in the Southland than the Bay Area.
Surprises still from the commencement-graduation season in Southern California? Try tales of the warrior-scholar, the prodigy and those who see long-denied justice.
In Exposition Park, the Trojans proudly conferred a master's degree on a student who, until he collected his sheepskin, not only had never stepped foot on campus but actually had been on military fronts during some of his time of matriculation. Capt. Matt Smith considered his academic options carefully before deciding that he would follow on his MIT bachelor's in physics with distance-learning at the Viterbi school, which just resulted in his earning his master's in electrical engineering. But even as he wrote papers, participated in online classes and discussions and occasionally called to chat with his profs and classmates, Smith also provided supporting military intelligence to his fellow warriors in Kuwait, then at Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. Though rocket- and mortar-fire provided some distraction during his studies, the officer says the spartan conditions of battle area service let him focus on his academics. He's back stateside but still in the service; he hopes after his military duty ends to apply his education to a career in medical physics, defense research or quantitative finance.
Medicine also is the aspiration of Sarita Mantravadi who at age 13 (!) just earned her bachelor's degree in biology. The home-schooled prodigy hopes to become a cardiologist or anestheseologist and will spend a little time upping her medical school admission test scores -- a 28 out of a possible 30 -- before she seeks her graduate education. Joining the Harbor City teen at the South Bay area ceremonies were twoJapanese American seniors awarded honorary degrees, long-awaited recognition for how the injustice of the World War II internment had disrupted the academics of the onetime Nisei students.
As politicians and policy-makers slash and burn social programs in their effort to stanch the flow of government red-ink, especially in Sacramento, an education professor in Irvine has some noteworthy research they might consider. He has examined the deep, sweeping data from a study that has followed more than 9,000 U.S. families and individuals for more than four decades. And, with colleagues, the researcher asked what would happen to kids younger than 5 if their parents got more annual income but nothing else changed in the picture -- mom and dad don't get more education, they don't alter their parenting practices, the family structure remains the same and genetic factors don't shift a whit. Well, look down the road and those youngsters show higher incomes and less use of food stamps (social programs) when they become adults, the researchers found, arguing for the importance of governmental efforts, if necessary, to supplement the incomes of families with youngsters to break a long cycle of potential poverty.
And speaking of funding arguments, the Cal State system, like its powerful siblings in the UC network, has been lobbying furiously to try to stem the budgetary bloodletting now under way in public higher education in California. Part of the latest campaign aims to show the economic impact of the various CSU campuses, and, finally, there are detailed, online break-outs on the hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs that can be linked to each of the institutions.
While the pyramids, pharoahs, dynasties and other doings of the ancient kingdoms of Egypt may hold most of the modern world still in its academic and popular thrall, a prof in Carson is waging his own battles to shine a light on the crucial role that a neighboring and neglected civilization played in shaping the world, including bolstering a once new religion called Christianity.
Salim Faraji, along with Stuart Tyson Smith, is said to be one of only two West Coast experts of note on ancient Nubia, the onetime African empire that stretched over what is now modern Sudan. He'll be among the select group of international scholars who will gather for a 12th time at the British Museum to present their latest findings on Nubia, an advanced civilization that he says traces through archeological findings to a time before and after the pharoahs of Egypt and that traded with ancients in India, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Rome. His scholarship keys in on the Nubian conversion to Christianity in the 4th and 6th centuries and how, with Egypt and north Africa, Nubia served as a cradle to growing religion. He notes the Crusaders' romantic, idealized attachment to their royal Nubian counterparts who fought with the Europeans; he says the West would have greater attachment and knowledge about the great and learned Africans except that French and British scholars fixated, instead, on their conquered holdings in Egypt.
While Rosie the Riveter and her pals pioneered paths for women in the era of heavy industry, a soon-to-retire group of women finally broke through big equality barriers by taking on and succeeding in nontraditional careers in various crafts and trades traditionally dominated by men, say researchers in the Dominguez Hills. They are tapping federal grants and slowly building an archive, online and in the physical world, of what, how and when women won their individual and collective battles to work in the trades, such as the electrical apprentice (as shown above, right). Scholars involved in the collecting of historical materials say they want their subjects to help shape their own record of their struggles and lives. They have, among other things, cooperated with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people in gathering oral histories and key materials.
Geez, after billions of years of evolution, one might think that the human species would have finished its struggles with and perfected one of its most basic, primordial drives and functions: sex. But Bruin researchers, based on scrutiny of one of the nation's largest health surveys, offer some deeeply disturbing news on how partners do some pretty brutal things to each other in relationships, straight and gay, with some 4 million Californians reporting they were victimized with physical or sexual violence by a spouse; 1 million said they were forced to have sex. More than a quarter of the incidences of 'intimate partner violence' involved gays and lesbians.Women suffer from it more than do men and those who are divorced and widowed are at high risk. Physical and sexual violence between partners is a bigger problem for African Americans, though Latinos are seeing it as a growing issue; it is lowest among those of Asian descent. Hmm, maybe if parents started early in talking with their children about sex, relationships and other deeply personal issues, would violence and other thorny concerns be eased? A Dominguez Hills researcher has won a state grant to study whether text messages to kids and parents might prompt some important talk about birds and bees and more.
