Right to left: Marjorie Harness Goodwin (anthropology) and Jeffrey Lewis (political science).
Distinguished research professor of anthropology Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Lewis have been selected to the American Academy of Arts, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies. They are among four UCLA faculty and nearly 250 artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors chosen for membership this year.
The academy serves as an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions and perspectives to address significant challenges, with the aim of producing independent and pragmatic studies that inform national and global policy and benefit the public.
They will be inducted in October at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Goodwin, a linguistic anthropologist, focuses on how language, touch and other embodied practices shape human interactions. Her work has examined how members of children’s peer groups, families and workplace groups use everyday language and communication to construct social order, express intimacy and navigate ideas about moral behavior. Through her research and influential books, including “The Hidden Life of Girls,” “He-Said-She-Said” and “Embodied Family Choreography,” Goodwin has helped advance our understanding of human social dynamics and the ways people use their language, their bodies and their emotions to manage relationships and create meaning.
Lewis, a political scientist, investigates foundational questions of democratic representation and develops innovative methods for analyzing political behavior. His research explores how preferences can be deduced from behavior. He is also a leading figure in political methodology, contributing tools that have reshaped how scholars study legislatures and electoral politics. As the curator of Voteview.com — a platform that provides free data and tools for analyzing roll call voting in the U.S. Congress — he helps advance public and scholarly understanding of ideological polarization and legislative behavior. Lewis has served as president of the Society for Political Methodology and as an editor of the American Political Science Review, helping to shape the direction of research in the discipline. Through his empirical rigor and public scholarship, Lewis has played a pivotal role in elevating both the accessibility and sophistication of political science research.
Read American Academy of Arts & Sciences announcement here.
Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Park Williams, professor of geography within UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences, was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow on April 15.
Williams, who holds a joint appointment in the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, is a hydroclimatologist who uses statistical analyses of climate data, reconstructions of past ecosystem behavior and a detailed understanding of plant ecology to study the impacts of climate on Earth’s water and land systems.
His research aims to improve our understanding of how climate change influences the hydrological cycle and ecological dynamics and how extremes like drought, floods, heat waves and wildfires affect life on the planet. Williams, who runs the HyFives research lab at UCLA, was awarded a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2023.
Williams joins four other UCLA faculty members among a distinguished group of 198 scholars, scientists and creative professionals from the U.S. and Canada selected to receive 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships announced by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The new fellows were chosen from a pool of more than 3,500 applicants.
The prestigious awards, now in their 100th year, recognize scholars in 53 disciplines across the creative arts, social sciences, natural sciences and humanities who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in their fields and show great promise for future endeavors.
Learn more about this year’s UCLA Guggenheim Fellows via UCLA Newsroom’s coverage here.
Watch— Tariffs and Trade Wars: Impacts of the Changing Economic-Political Relationship Between Canada and the U.S.
American and Canadian economic and policy experts discussed the impacts of the current trade tension
UCLA’s Department of Geography and UCLA’s Canadian Studies hosted an Ursus Symposium titled, Tariffs and Trade Wars: Impacts of the Changing Economic-Political Relationship Between Canada and the U.S., on Wednesday, March 26.
During the panel discussion, American and Canadian economic and policy experts shared their perspective on how current trade tensions between these nations could affect the economies, the public and environments of both nations.
Since implementation of the NAFTA and USMCA trade agreements, the United States and Canada had experienced three decades of closer economic integration, relatively harmonious trade and mutual economic benefits. Yet, under the second Trump administration, the U.S. has announced punishing tariffs on Canadian goods — including on resources such as energy. President Trump has also threatened to annex Canada to make it the “51st state.” In turn, Canada has announced reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods, and attitudes toward the United States as a reliable trading partner and ally have turned sharply negative.
The panel discussion featured:
Kristen Hopewell,Canada Research Chair in Global Policy, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs Director, Liu Institute for Global Issues University of British Columbia.
Brett House,Professor of Professional Practice in Economics, Columbia Business School Senior Fellow, Canada’s Public Policy Forum Senior Fellow, University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy Senior Fellow, Massey College.
Jerry Nickelsburg, Faculty Director, UCLA Anderson Economic Forecast.
Glen MacDonald FRSC, UCLA Endowed Chair in Geography of California and the American West Chair, UCLA Canadian Studies Program (Discussion Moderator)
Co-sponsored by UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences and UCLA’s International Institute, the event was streamed live via Zoom.
The Ursus Symposium at UCLA is a series of events, often environmental in nature, featuring UCLA scientists and experts discussing pressing issues, like climate change and coastal conservation, with a focus on Southern California.
Latino USA: The Real Lives of Human Smugglers with Jason De León
The episode featuring Jason De León and his book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” aired on March 14, 2025.
UCLA professor Jason De León who won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” discussed his book on a recent episode of Latino USA with host Maria Hinojosa.
Drawing on seven years of on-the-ground ethnographic research and interviews, “Soldiers and Kings” gives voice and unprecedented context to the people, most of them young men, who make a precarious living smuggling migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States.
During the interview, De León talked about the sociopolitical conditions that drive human smuggling: “I think people fail to realize that human smuggling is the outcome of border policies, changes in border security, the drive to have undocumented labor in the United States. Smuggling is responding to those things,” he said. “All these guys, they know that human mobility is unstoppable. There is nothing you can do to stop people who are desperate to find some new and better place.”
De León is the director of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute for Archaeology and professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies within UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences. In 2017, he was a 2017 MacArthur Genius fellow.
Inside a UCLA course on gender in motorsports
A Fiat Lux seminar examines the roles of women in motorsports, exploring gender, strategy and cultural narratives
Brazilian driver Aurelia Nobels competes in the F1 Academy series, an all-women single-seater racing series. Nobels has backing from Scuderia Ferrari./ Photo Credit: PUMA
Kayla McCormack
On a Tuesday evening in Rolfe Hall, a small group of UCLA students settled into their seats. A simple question — “Did you follow motorsports before enrolling?” — sparked an enthusiastic exchange about favorite Formula 1 teams and drivers. One student, raised by a McLaren-loving father, shared that his recent dive into the sport had converted him to a proud tifosi – a supporter of Ferrari and one of their drivers, Charles Leclerc.
This personal connection is what makes Motorsports and Society, a Fiat Lux seminar, so impactful. Co-taught by motorsports historian Steven Meckna; Sharon Traweek, associate professor of gender studies and history; and Fred Ariel Hernandez, lead scientist for the UCLA Disability Studies Sports and Society Lab, the course offers students an interdisciplinary lens on motorsports, with a particular focus on gender and representation from World War II to today.
Fiat Lux seminars are one-unit, discussion-based courses, designed to foster intellectual curiosity in a small class setting. They connect students with leading UCLA faculty and allow them to explore timely and complex topics — like motorsports through the lens of society, culture, and STEM. In recent years, women have worked in prominent and decision making-capacities in motorsports, particularly in strategy — an area Hernández and Meckna saw as paralleling broader increases in women’s representation in science, technology, engineering and math. They proposed the course idea to Traweek, and the three collaborated to develop the course.
As part of the content, students watched an interview with Bernie Collins, former head of race strategy for Aston Martin F1 Team and current Sky Sports commentator. Collins spoke about the intense pressure of strategizing during a race but also reflected on how race strategy has become one of the technical areas in motorsports where women have consistently thrived.
“We wanted students to hear directly from someone who’s worked both on and off the pit wall,” said Meckna, a retired history teacher and longtime women’s sports coach. “Collins offers insight into how demanding a strategist’s job is, but also how strategy has created more space for women, compared to some other roles that require extensive travel due to the rigorous Formula 1 race calendar.”
After watching the clip, Meckna pushed students to think critically about why these roles have seen more female representation than others, such as race engineering. Students pointed to the structure of the roles themselves — strategy positions can rotate more regularly, Collins suggested. In contrast, engineers, who serve as a driver’s primary point of contact during a race, typically spend over a decade developing their expertise and must travel extensively throughout the season, attending nearly every grand prix.
“Children,” one student said plainly, prompting nods around the room. The class explored how the physical demands, intense schedules and lack of institutional support can still pose barriers for women.
Yet even amid these constraints, progress has accelerated. “Not long ago it would have been almost unthinkable to have a woman in a senior technical position in an F1 team,” Meckna said. “Today, it is rare not to see one. This corresponds with the increasing numbers of women in STEM fields. I’m not trying to be Pollyannaish about it — we’re still light years from anything resembling equality — but steps forward have been big and fast.”
The 2025 Formula 1 season, which kicked off earlier this month in Australia, is particularly historic. Haas’ Laura Mueller is now the first female race engineer in F1 history, working with driver Esteban Ocon.
“In professional motorsports, where most drivers are men, there are women with decision-making power,” Meckna said. “Hannah Schmitz at Red Bull makes calls that will win or lose a race for her team. So does Laura Mueller. The same was true when Leena Gade led the engineering team at Audi during their phenomenal run of success.” Gade became the first female race engineer to win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Progress on the driver side has been slower. There have been successful female racing drivers across IndyCar and endurance racing in recent years, including Danica Patrick and Lyn St. James, though no woman has started a Formula 1 Grand Prix since Lella Lombardi the 1970s.
“Part of this is numbers,” Meckna said. “There are many times more men than women in junior categories of racing. That is starting to change, though. More girls are now competing in karts, the first step on the road to Formula 1.”
Meckna credits these changes, in part, thanks to the unprecedented institutional support for women racers today. The F1 Academy, launched in 2023, was created specifically for this purpose. Each Formula 1 team is required to support a woman in the series, which opens opportunities for female racers to access the training, technology, telemetry, race simulation machinery and qualifying and race day routines of the top professionals in the sport.
“The history of motorsports mirrors broader societal shifts in gender equity,” Hernández said. “In the Sports and Society Lab, we’re interested in how structural changes, like educational access, media representation and community and institutional support increase inclusive opportunities for people with disabilities and women as athletes and in technical roles. This class gives students the tools to examine those systems within motorsports.”
From left: Former racer Susie Wolff and three-time F1 champion Niki Lauda share a smile. Wolff is now the F1 Academy managing director. / Photo Credit: Thomas Ormston/Wikimedia Commons.
Cultural shifts are underway not only in the paddock but also in the stands. Several students shared that their interest in motorsports and the class itself was sparked by the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive,” which has expanded Formula 1’s U.S. fan base, especially among women. Today, F1 fans are estimated to be around 40% female, up from just 8% in 2017, as well as significantly more culturally diverse, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said in 2022.
By connecting historical barriers with contemporary breakthroughs, the seminar helps students trace how representation in motorsports has shifted and where challenges remain. The course equips students to explore what progress looks like and to critically examine what else is possible.
“There’s so much potential to build on this,” Traweek said. “Motorsports intersect with engineering, emergency medicine, gender studies, environmental science and more. I know we all have hopes to see this course expand into a larger offering.”
This story was originally published in UCLA’s Newsroom, here.
Jason de Leon’s award-winning “Soldiers and Kings” named to the 2025 Pen America Literary Awards longlist
The author of the winning book will be honored at the annual PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony considered “The Oscars for Books.” (Composite: PEN America)
Jason De Leon’s book, “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” has been selected on the longlist for the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards.
Drawing on seven years of on-the-ground ethnographic research and interviews, “Soldiers and Kings” gives voice and unprecedented context to the people, most of them young men, who make a precarious living smuggling migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States.
Founded in 2016, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award is an annual award which recognizes a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence. A distinguished panel of judges nominates candidates internally. The author of the winning book will receive a prize of $75,000 and will be honored at the annual 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony to be held on May 8 in New York City.
De León serves as director of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies. He is an expert on the study of migration and the human consequences of immigration policy, with a focus on undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2017 he was named a Macarthur Genius fellow.
UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute and ISH host Adam Phillips for its Compassionate Conversation Series
Bedari Kindness Institute
On February 26-27, the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute (BKI) and Initiative to Study Hate (ISH) welcomed Adam Phillips, renowned psychoanalyst and bestselling author of many critically acclaimed works, including “On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life” (1993), “On Kindness” (with Barbara Taylor, 2009) and, most recently, “On Giving Up” (2024).
During his visit, Phillips gave a lecture entitled “On Kindness” at the James West Alumni Center, led a seminar on fellow psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s essay, “The Transformational Object” at the Young Research Library, and sat down for a conversation, “On Kindness and Hate,” with UCLA Professors of English David Russell and Mona Simpson at the Landmark Theater in Westwood (hosted by the Hammer Museum). Along with BKI and ISH, this event series was co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of English, the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature and the Hammer Museum.
In his lecture, “On Resistance,” Phillips began by explaining that psychoanalysis is, at root, the study of resistance and more specifically the struggle of the mind against itself. Psychoanalytic explorations represent a long process of understanding how we resist our own desires and fears, getting to the heart of what we are unwilling or unable to confront within ourselves.
In his virtuosic unraveling of human psychic processes, Phillips highlighted the fundamental connections between the way in which we resist in our own minds and how we act out against one another. He further emphasized that in order to confront ideologies like fascism and xenophobia, we must understand them, and in order to understand them, we must be willing to examine what they purport to offer to their followers. He observed that these political movements offer some form of pleasure and what he called “self-recognition” to their followers. In order to resist them effectively, we have to be able to pinpoint honestly why so many do not resist them, and think more about how to re-channel the underlying desire to belong.
Phillips continued to probe these issues the following day. UCLA students, researchers and faculty gathered in the Young Research Library for a discussion of Bollas’s concept of the “transformational object.” In layman’s terms, a transformational object is a person, place or thing that we identify as a potential catalyst for transformation within ourselves. And because we are always seeking self-transformation, the quest for such objects dominates our entire lives. Our earliest transformational object is, of course, our mother, whose inevitable inability to satisfy our desires perfectly and completely is what initiates our search. As Phillips pointed out, this concept may help us understand the irrational, narrow and even violent impulses that characterize organized misogynist movements. As before, this understanding is what allows us to counter effectively such ideologies, and to intervene in situations where especially adolescent boys are radicalized by narratives that play into their sense of frustrated need.
Phillips’ final appearance was before a packed audience at the Landmark Theater in Westwood, in collaboration with the Hammer Museum. Appearing in BKI’s ongoing “Compassionate Conversations” series, he was joined in conversation with Mona Simpson and David Russell, two colleagues from the UCLA English Department, on the theme of “On Kindness and Hate,” Phillips focused on kindness as a source of pleasure, one which we tend to deny ourselves all too often. By extension, cruelty towards others is a form of cruelty towards ourselves, an expression of what Sigmund Freud termed the “death drive,” the basic urge towards self-destruction that lives in our subconscious mind. To create a kinder world, we each have to reclaim our pursuit of pleasure through community and fellow feeling. In this spirit, Phillips championed a form of psychoanalysis that is oriented towards happiness, that works in tandem with art and culture, and that makes itself understandable to a broader audience. Capping a dazzling series of talks at UCLA, Phillips left the audience with a clear and invigorating vision for how we might utilize psychoanalysis to confront hate through self-discovery.
A key strength of the Bedari Kindness Institute is that its members encompass a broad range of views and scholarship on kindness and related topics. As such, the works of individual members reflect their individual viewpoints and contributions. Except as otherwise noted, their works do not constitute joint efforts or collective statements by our Institute as a whole.
This story was originally published on Bedari Kindness Institute website, here.
In memoriam: Sandra G. Harding, 89, global trailblazer in feminist philosophy and critical science and technology studies
She was a Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies at UCLA in 1996-2014, directed UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999
Sandra G. Harding (1935-2025)
Cynthia Enloe, Emily Harding-Morick, Gail Kligman and Joni Seager
Sandra G. Harding, a global trailblazer in feminist and postcolonial philosophy, critical science and technology studies and social justice and activism died March 5. She was 89.
Harding is internationally acclaimed for her pioneering development of “standpoint theory,” which apprehended science as a contextualized and culturally embedded undertaking, in sharp distinction to the conventional view of science as neutral and objective. Her standpoint analysis challenged both Liberal analytic philosophy’s tendency to think of science as value free, and orthodox Marxism’s approach that limited its standpoint epistemology to primarily a class perspective largely ignoring race, ethnicity and gender. Her work had enormous impact across disciplines, sparking lively debates and critical engagement with her ideas.
Harding developed her analyses first through socialist-feminist organizing, women’s rights activism and then ever-widening engagement with Civil Rights, Poor People’s movements, LGBTQ rights and anti-colonial critiques. She situated standpoint theory as an organic methodological development rooted in her social justice activism, noting that “it tends to emerge whenever a new group steps on the stage of history and says ‘things look different from the perspective of our lives’.” An important component of standpoint theory is what she identified as “strong objectivity,” a term that describes research grounded in the experiences of those who have traditionally been excluded from the production of knowledge.
Harding was a professor at the University of Delaware from 1975-1996, and then at UCLA until 2014; prior to her retirement, she was Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies and then Distinguished Research Professor Emerita. She served as Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999.
She authored or edited 18 books, including the prize-winning “The Science Question in Feminism” and “The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future.” A forthcoming book, “Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agencies,” will be published posthumously. Astonishingly prolific, Harding also published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters.
Harding was in considerable demand globally as a visiting lecturer, and over the course of her distinguished career presented more than 500 invited lectures across 6 continents. Harding also served as a consultant to several international entities including UNESCO, the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development and UNIFEM. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science.
Harding was always attentive to the importance of building networks with intellectual allies and activists. She was a highly influential and lifelong member of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), and in 1975-1976 worked with SWIP to edit syllabi for the first feminist philosophy courses offered in the United States. She was a member of the editorial board of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy from its founding in the 1980s to 2000. In 2000 she was invited to become co-editor of the leading international journal in women’s and gender studies, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
In 2016, Harding collaborated with scholars from Latin America as a co-founding advisor for a new academic journal, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society, created to serve as a forum for science-technology-society research that elicits conversations within Latin America, between Latin America and Euro-American cultures, and across global peripheries. A brief memoriam on the journal’s homepage remarks that “Sandraunderstood the need to question whose perspectives have shaped Western science, philosophy, and social studies of science. She also recognized the urgency of amplifying STS scholars from the Global South. That’s why, in 2016, she conspired with Latin American scholars to create Tapuya. This journal exists because of her tenacity and vision.”
Harding is survived by her daughtersDorian and Emily, her beloved granddaughter Eva and sisters Constance Joy and Victoria.
A celebration of Harding’s life will be held later in 2025.
Media Contact: cchaveznava@college.ucla.edu
Los Angeles Times: Hollywood diversity in decline despite audience demand, study finds: ‘The writing was on the wall’
Lupita Nyong’o stars in “A Quiet Place: Day One,” which had people of color representing between 41% and 50% of the cast. / Photo: Universal Pictures
The Hollywood Diversity Report 2025, Part 1: Theatrical, was released by UCLA’s Entertainment and Media Initiative on Feb 27. The report examines the relationship between racial, ethnic and gender diversity and the bottom line in the entertainment industry. The study forms part of a bi-annual report series housed at UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment within UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences.
The Los Angeles Times covered the study reporting “that Hollywood is backsliding on its diversity efforts.”
Furthermore, the story cited: “Last year, we celebrated some historic highs for people of color in the industry,” Ana-Christina Ramón, the report’s co-founder and director of UCLA’s Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, said in a statement. “But 2024 saw a widespread reversal, as film studios retreated from racial and ethnic diversity in front of and behind the camera.”
