Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--RAND Graduate School, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in electronic version.

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).