Thesis (Ph.D.)--RAND Graduate School, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-95).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-238).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--RAND Graduate School, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-95).

The figure of the human body and notions of its sustenance, wellbeing and need for change are central, if often latent, within discussions of contemporary eco-social 'crises'. This dissertation considers cycling practices in Los Angeles as a 'case' to ask how conceptions of human bodies - the intertwined ideas and materials that constitute them - need reconsidering. Cycling, particularly when replacing car journeys, is increasingly promoted as a solution for some of these 'crises': Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, traffic congestion and alleviating health concerns associated with sedentary lifestyles and mental health. Much cycling advocacy and research is focused on improving the cycling experience and enhancing rates of cycling in cities, yet rests on dominant ontological presumptions around human bodies, their categories of identity and their normativity - both what is considered 'normal' as well as aspirations of 'good' in terms of health and sustainability. In this dissertation, I work through a methodology of 'riding theory' by bringing together (material) feminist, queer and critical race theories with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork on cycling practices, focusing mainly on Los Angeles, California. Rather than building on automatic assumptions of cycling as a 'solution', I ask in what ways cycling practices manifest through relations of power. This rests on an ontology of 'flesh' and 'enfleshment' - indebted to the work of corporeal and black feminist theorists - whereby cycling is understood not as modulated by relations of power, but becoming-as and through these relations in highly uneven ways. Through cycling in Los Angeles, intertwined techniques of power are discussed as: categorization (the naming and reproduction of identities and bodily difference); configuration of matter and meanings through spacetime (the configuration and affordances of cycling lungs, exposures, taking up spacetimes, speeds and locomotion) and valuation (the enrolment of cycling subjectivities and energies within the reproduction and circulation of value). As opposed to cycling futures reconfigured to fulfil alternative criteria of valuation, I consider what a cycling ethic of response-ability might do: An ethic that arises from the ontologies of enfleshment and that requires a working-with the affordances of cycling. Thinking through these ontologies and/as ethics, I argue, forces emergent reconsideration of how cycling subjectivities and responsibilities, justice, health and sustainability are understood.

Most Americans, whether consciously or unconsciously, associate certain defining traits with the contemporary American press: a broad definition of news, an emphasis on analysis, a skeptical tone, and adherence to a specific definition of objectivity. None of these elements characterized American newspapers in 1960, but all were firmly in place by 1980. Remaking the News examines how that remarkable transformation occurred, and how it influenced politics and society. While focusing mainly on two newspapers—The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—it attempts to analyze the media business as a whole. Chapter 1 describes the rise of interpretive reporting. A response to competition from other news media and to the changing demographic profile of newspaper audiences and staffs, interpretation contributed to the disintegration of the Cold War consensus and to a reappraisal of American journalism’s bedrock principle, objectivity. As Chapters 2 and 3 show, objectivity came under attack simultaneously from the right and the left, launching a debate that has persisted to this day but that, paradoxically, reinforced most news-industry leaders’ faith in the ideal. Chapter 4 examines how newspapers began giving readers what they wanted to know, rather than telling them what (in the editors’ view) they needed to know. This resulted in a greater focus on soft news and service journalism, which helped validate a broader shift in the primary identity of the American public, from citizens to consumers. These changes occurred amid powerful political and social currents in the journalism profession and the country at large. Chapter 5 describes how challenges from minorities and women forced the press to adjust its discriminatory employment practices as well as its dismissive treatment of women and non-whites in news coverage. The social movements and political turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s also led journalists to take a more adversarial approach to news subjects, as Chapter 6 discusses. In addition to providing a novel interpretation of how the press assumed its contemporary form, this dissertation suggests that the evolution of American politics and society since 1960 cannot be understood without considering the evolution of journalism from 1960-1980. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

This Capstone Project encompasses two videos, each representing different ways to visually structure the experience of “the city”. The first video, "My Way or the Highway", is a 5 minute piece examining Los Angeles Transportation systems. Through observational footage and a poetic editing style, I compare and contrast the experience of traveling via public and private transportation. Through this video I aim to encourage the viewer to consider their own transportation options whether it is in Los Angeles or anywhere else around the world. The second is a 12 minute video, titled "A Correspondence" structured as a correspondence between Seattle and Los Angeles as if they were personified discussing what it means to be a developing/growing city and the responsibilities it entails. Visually I present a combination of footage from L.A. and Seattle to create an "impossible city" making the viewer second guess from where the footage originates, emphasizing the difference between learning about a city from others and learning about a city through experience. In "A Correspondence" I aim to provide an experience that forces the viewer to realize their own interactions with cities and how their view is shaped by their specific experiences, making everybody's view of a city subjective.

This case study examines the Self-Help Cooperative Movement (SHCM). Largely ignored by social scientists for the past eighty years, the movement took place during the Great Depression and, while national in scope, it was concentrated in Los Angeles. This movement combined traditional protest tactics with pre-figurative politics; its goal was to provide full employment for all Americans through the proliferation of worker and consumer cooperatives. Despite a very promising start in 1931, the movement collapsed and disintegrated by 1940. This dissertation examines the reasons for the SHCM's early successes and later its failures. The SHCM's early successes were made possible through their alliances with Japanese farmers (who lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles) and people of color in general, Los Angeles businesses and conservative business leaders, and with sympathetic politicians and state agencies. These alliances were, in turn, made possible by the inherent ambiguity of the SHCM's politics, which incorporated both conservative practices (e.g., self-help) and socialist practices (e.g., workplace democracy). This unique mixture, what the Los Angeles Times called "voluntary communism", generated widespread support among hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers and among conservative, socialist, and liberal political actors. In 1933, the SHCM underwent a profound transformation when Upton Sinclair and the End Poverty in California movement assumed leadership of the cooperatives and the California Democratic Party, promising to place state support behind the cooperative movement and in the process both end unemployment and undermine capitalism. The gubernatorial campaign of 1934 became a referendum on the cooperatives. Over the course of the prolonged bitterly fought campaign the cooperatives became associated with communism, and their liberal and conservative allies responded by discontinuing their support. With the loss of this political and financial assistance the SHCM slowly faded away. While the movement failed to achieve its specific goals, its impact on California politics, along with other Utopian Socialist movements in Los Angeles during this period, was immense. By the 1940s both political parties in California were supporting liberal and socialist initiatives (e.g., universal health-care and mass university education).

abstract: Emerging in the late 1960s, the Free Clinic Movement represented an attempt to provide equitable, accessible, and free health care to all. Originally aimed at helping drug addicts, hippies, and runaways, free clinics were community-led organizations that ran solely on donations and volunteers, and were places where “free” meant more than just monetarily free - it meant free from judgment, moralizing, or bureaucratic red tape. This dissertation is an institutional history of the Los Angeles Free Clinic (LAFC), which, as a case study, serves to illustrate the challenges and cooperation inherent in the broader Free Clinic Movement. My project begins by investigating the links between the Free Clinic Movement and aspects of Progressive era reform, health care policy, and stigmatization of disease. By the 1960s, the community health centers formed under Lyndon Johnson, along with the growth of the New Left and Counterculture, set the stage for the emergence of the free clinics. In many ways, the LAFC was an anti-Establishment establishment, walking a fine line between appealing to members of the Counterculture, and forming a legitimate and structurally sound organization. The central question of this project is: how did the LAFC develop and then grow from a small anti-Establishment health care center to a respected part of the health care safety net system of Los Angeles County? Between 1967 and 1975, the LAFC evolved, developing strong ties to the Los Angeles County Department of Health, local politicians, and even the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). By 1975, as the LAFC moved into a new and larger building, it had become an accepted part of the community. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2016

abstract: In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, many artists in Europe had to flee their homelands and sought refuge in the United States. Austrian composer Hanns Eisler who had risen to prominence as a significant composer during the Weimar era was among them. A Jew, an ardent Marxist and composer devoted to musical modernism, he had established himself as a writer of film music and Kampflieder, fighting songs, for the European workers' movement. After two visits of the United States in the mid-1930s, Eisler settled in America where he spent a decade (1938-1948), composed a considerable number of musical works, including important film scores, instrumental music and songs, and, in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, penned the influential treatise Composing for the Films. Yet despite his substantial contributions to American culture American scholarship on Eisler has remained sparse, perhaps due to his reputation as the "Karl Marx in Music." In this study I examine Eisler's American exile and argue that Eisler, through his roles as a musician and a teacher, actively sought to enrich American culture. I will present background for his exile years, a detailed overview of his American career as well as analyses and close readings of several of his American works, including three of his American film scores, Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939), Hangmen Also Die (1943), and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), and the String Quartet (1940), Third Piano Sonata (1943), Woodbury Liederbüchlein (1941), and Hollywood Songbook (1942-7). This thesis builds upon unpublished correspondence and documents available only in special collections at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as film scores in archives at USC and the University of California, Los Angeles. It also draws on Eisler studies by such European scholars as Albrecht Betz, Jürgen Schebera, and Horst Weber, as well as on research of film music scholars Sally Bick and Claudia Gorbman. As there is little written on the particulars of Eisler's American years, this thesis presents new facts and new perspectives and aims at a better understanding of the artistic achievements of this composer. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Music 2013