Los Angeles

In efforts to transform schools, federal- and state-driven agendas often disregard students as viable producers of meaningful educational space. Some scholars have centered the experiences, actions, and voices of students in transforming their unequal education, establishing tha…

This dissertation examines contemporary Los Angeles-based artists whose identity and work engages with issues of diaspora. I combine visual analysis of the artwork with interviews with the artists to look at the ways in which they utilize several visual and theoretical concepts …

In the early 1990s, authenticity become a buzzword in the heritage tourism industry as the characteristic that sets historic sites apart from other tourist attractions such as amusement parks. Scholars have examined–with much skepticism–sites such as Colonial Williamsburg and ot…

This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of Iranian exiles in Los Angeles who, for the past thirty years, have created popular music and media that both directly criticizes the state and realizes secular, sensual, and cosmopolitan iterations of Iranian-ness that…

This research study investigates the perceptions, identities, and typecasting issues surrounding Asian American commercial dancers in Los Angeles through personal and historical contexts. My own experience as a commercial dancer in Los Angeles has led to questions about typecast…

This dissertation examines the role of spectacle events in global cities and the elite-driven transformation of the Olympic Games into producers of the urban image, with implications for determining who has the power to envision the urban future. While the spectacle of the Olymp…

This dissertation explores the impacts of resource procurement on economic growth and urbanization in a county through a historical case study, moving on to discuss the welfare impacts of resource-sharing in two regions. The first two essays explore the impact of the Owens Valle…

Duke Ellington was already an international celebrity recognized for his seventeen-piece “Famous Orchestra” and their decade-long string of three-minute radio hits when he arrived at Los Angeles’s Union Station from New York in January of 1941. New York’s Harlem had been a seemi…

Previous research studies regarding acculturation of Iranian immigrants include adaptations and revisions of scales and inventories designed for other ethnic populations. This study was designed to investigate the acculturation of first-generation Iranian-Americans residing in L…

This thesis interrogates the hotly contested issue of Armenian genocide recognition and its ramifications on Istanbul Armenian immigrants residing in the greater Los Angeles area. Previous Armenian genocide scholarship has examined the events leading to the 1915 genocide and the…

This master's thesis project explores the centuries-old Indonesian musical genre gamelan as it exists now in Los Angeles, primarily through the ensemble Gamelan Burat Wangi. I present it as a multimedia package online at ehough.ascjweb.org/gamelan. Burat Wangi, founded in 1972 a…

This study focuses on the musical activities and views of Iranian immigrant artists who perform, teach, and support traditional Iranian music in Los Angeles and Southern California. This geographic area and its interconnected social networks, which I refer to as Irangeles, is pa…

This dissertation traces the financial meaning and effect of religious organization on the emerging hospital industry in Los Angeles in the 20th century. For centuries, religious groups opened and maintained hospitals as charitable institutions. However, in the early the 20th ce…

This study is about efforts to formally recognize ethnic places, or areas of noted ethnic spatial concentration. What we now see with efforts to formally recognize ethnic places is a sense of voluntary spatial concentration that is also actively claimed and asserted--i.e., volun…