Urban Humanities Portfolio

UCLA Urban Humanities Initiatives Graduate Certificate

2018-2019 Cohort // Year Shanghai

Summer 2018 Design Research in Urban Humanities

Over a three-week period during Summer, students were introduced to the methodological approaches of the “Urban Humanities” and an opportunity for interdisciplinary research and collaboration. We created a ‘counter-tour’ entitled A LAyer Deeper which lays bare hidden spaces, unseen realities, missed connections, and forgotten histories in around Los Angeles’ Chinatown. My team contributed a thick map More than CHINAtown and a short film A Tale of Two Plazas to the site-specific counter-tour.

Fall 2018 Urban Theory and Praxis

Throughout the quarter, the cohort collectively interrogates key topics or constructs from urban theory as developed in architecture, planning, and the humanities. Drawing upon Frederic Jameson’s writing on utopia and the utopian impulse, the cohort conceives seven speculative futures for our non-utopian city: Los Angeles and translates them into a collective exhibition Los Angeles: Archaeologies of Urban Possibility. Rayne Laborde, Spike Friedman and I are responsible for curating, theorizing, and putting together this tabletop prototype of an urban exhibition envisioned by the UHI. We also created a mobile installation to spur our theorizing into practice.

Winter & Spring Break 2019 Shanghai Un/Expected

My team conduct extensive archival research in LA during Winter and fieldworks in Shanghai on the Waibaidu Bridge 外白渡大桥 during Spring Break. Our project Waibaidu Waimai (Waibaidu To-Go) is a zine in the form of a hand-made rubber stamp that allows us to stamp info of our Instagram page on fast-food napkins. The Instagram page is a digital archive containing relevant stories/images/quotes of the bridge from the 19th century to present day. Bridge history is filtered for a digitally savvy audience. Historical counternarratives, those that have been suppressed in the built environment, take the back door, slipping into an easily digestible, continually contemporary platform. See our vlog for the process.

Spring 2019 Trans-LA-ting Shanghai

As a UCLA doctoral student living on the Tongva Land, I decided to use my creative fiction and collage project titled Indigenous Futurity: Walking into the Near Future 2059 as the start of my endeavor in learning and engaging with the intertribal/transnational Indigenous communities in LA. My project is a historical and imaginative interpretation of Indigenous futurity via remembering and thinking through the histories, afterlives, and continuation of settler colonialism. The project revisits the longstanding struggles taking place in different time/space and the multiple histories of colonial expansion and decolonial efforts.

For reflections, see my blog “trip to Shanghai 上海” and others more to come.