Category: Humanities

Our Impact on the Earth

“Mother Nature is not happy right now and she’s trying to tell us, in many ways,” says Kimberly Prather, Professor of Climate, Atmospheric Science, and Physical Oceanography at UC San Diego.

New weather patterns and events are causing concern but how do we know these changes are caused by human activity? Climate scientists are looking at trends over time to determine our impact on the planet.

Prather discusses recent CAICE studies aimed at advancing our understanding of how the oceans influence human and planetary health including novel experiments being conducted in a unique ocean-atmosphere simulator.

Watch — How Do We Know Humans are Impacting the Health of Our Planet? – Exploring Ethics

Searching for Autism in our Social Brain

All animals need to know and communicate with their own, so evolution has developed in every brain the ways we all recognize and socialize with each other.

But while other brains are social – no other brain is as social, or can do what the human brain can – and as far as science knows – it also seems that no other brain can suffer from conditions like autism. Are these two fortunes somehow linked?

That is a question that many are asking, including Alysson Muotri’s lab at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. They are using brain organoids to unravel this mystery, but where do they start looking for the root causes of these conditions?

Enter Katerina Semendeferi, noted biological anthropologist, whose experience conducting neuroanatomical comparisons of our primate predecessors, as well as typical and atypical human neuroanatomy, is helping to focus the search for causes of atypical behavioral conditions like autism and Williams Syndrome. Her work has pointed to neuroanatomical differences, on scales from whole brain structures, down to individual neurons and the genetics of neurodevelopment.

She reveals what she has found, and how this helps the Muotri Lab’s studies with brain organoids in the search for autism in our social brains.

Watch — Searching for Autism in our Social Brain

Gifts of Stories

The biannual Faculty Research Lecture at UCLA has presented the work of the university’s most distinguished scholars since 1925. Its purpose is to recognize their superb achievements, and give the campus and the greater community an opportunity to gain a new perspective on scholarly achievements and the viewpoints of the faculty honored. UCLA History Professor Brenda Stevenson delivered the 127th lecture, a talk titled “The Gifts of the Storyteller.”

She talks about growing up in Virginia listening to her mother’s stories of their enslaved ancestors. As a scholar of slavery and the Antebellum South, some of our country’s most painful moments and eras, she found little documentary evidence of women’s lives. She had to become an investigator, following leads and bits of information to get to the stories told through the ages.

In this lecture she shares the stories of three women from different classes. Her careful listening over the years has unearthed fascinating stories about the women and the time in which they lived.

Watch — Gifts of the Storyteller with Brenda Stevenson – UCLA Faculty Research Lecture

Understanding the African American Freedom Struggle

The Greensboro sit-in was a seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement. Four young black men, students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, sat down at a segregated lunch counter and refused to leave. Their protest sparked a wave of sit-ins around the country. Building on the momentum, students at nearby Shaw University, formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Three years later, the SNCC organized the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream Speech.”

At the time of the sit-in, Waldo Martin was just eight years old, living in Greensboro. But, he knew something big was happening. Martin would go on to study at Duke University and earn his PhD at UC Berkeley, where he is now the Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History & Citizenship. In a recent talk on campus, Martin details the history of the African American freedom struggle, and how the Greensboro sit-in built upon a rich history of black youth activism that continues to this day. He also examines how, “African Americans have globalized their freedom struggle by intimately linking it with the freedom struggles of peoples of color around the globe.”

Watch — Deep Soul: Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles and the Making of the Modern World with Waldo Martin

Pivotal Events

In the early hours of April 20, 1989, 28-year-old jogger Trisha Meili was assaulted and left for dead in Central Park. The ensuing media frenzy instigated a public outcry for swift justice. Within days of the attack five African-American teenagers implicated themselves, after hours of psychological pressure and aggressive interrogation. The teens were tried as adults and convicted despite inconsistent and inaccurate confessions, DNA evidence that excluded them, and no eyewitness accounts connecting them to the victim. The convictions were vacated in 2002 after incarcerated serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime and DNA tests confirmed his guilt. The men subsequently filed civil lawsuits against the City of New York, the police officers, and the prosecutors involved in their case. A settlement was reached in 2014 for $41 million.

The story of the Central Park Five has remained in the public consciousness, in part due to acclaimed documentaries on the subject and recent reminders of Donald Trump’s role in fanning public hysteria, and is an ideal subject for composer Anthony Davis. Davis has created several operas that address social and political issues in both a historical and contemporary context, with particular focus on events and figures in American history involving issues of race and social justice.

Davis’ first opera, “X,” examined the struggle of Malcolm X to redefine his identity in accordance with his spiritual beliefs. Subsequent operas included such diverse topics as the kidnapping of Patty Hearst (“Tania”), the 1870s trial of Standing Bear (“Wakonda’s Dream”), a rebellion aboard a slave ship and the trial that followed (“Amistad”), and the story of Adam’s apocryphal first wife as emblematic of the eternal conflict between the sexes (“Lilith”). Given his concern with America’s continuing racial and political struggles, his latest opera, “The Central Park Five,” is of a piece with Davis’ earlier works.

In conversation with UC San Diego Professor Emeritus Cecil Lytle, Davis recounts the origins of the opera, the challenges of writing for an ensemble, the use of jazz idioms in his work, his preference for smaller-scale intimate dramas, and the responsibilities an artist undertakes when dealing with historical events. He stresses that there will always be a place for socially-aware works that confront controversies head-on, and in this vein mentions his plan to create an opera focusing on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (depicted in the first episode of HBO’s “Watchmen” series). As Davis noted in an earlier interview, “These pivotal events in our history offer windows into understanding who we are today and how we arrived at our present situation. The slogan, “Black Lives Matter” is not only an important political statement but it is also the central focus of my work as an artist and composer.”

Watch — The Central Park Five with Anthony Davis