Past Projects

Akua studies how institutions tasked with care, instead enact violence in Black communities. More specifically, through ethnography, feminist science and technology studies, and Black feminist theory, they explore how historical legacies of racism in medicine and law in the U.S. endure in hospital-based sexual assault response. Akua does this work with the aim of reimagining models of care that are Black feminist, queer, and abolitionist.

My project relates to vegetarianism and its relationship to kindness. In my dissertation research, I use archaeological and textual evidence to examine the changing relationships between humans and animals in ancient India during the time that Buddhism and Jainism, religions which specifically recommend non-violence toward animals, were becoming established in eastern India. For this project, I collaborate with Professor Monica Smith in the Department of Anthropology to build upon the historical context to examine whether kindness is always a primary motivating factor in the decision to reduce meat consumption. Beyond the historical lens, we also examine how the modern social climate, particularly that created by the COVID-19 pandemic, has transformed discourses around vegetarianism and veganism by analyzing the prevalence of these topics in international main-stream online news media and comments on these articles.

Aggression — a perfect counterpose to kindness — is characterized by an intention to inflict harm on oneself or another being. At its most extreme, aggression is lethal, resulting in violent death such as homicide and suicide. One potential factor to aggression are scripts: these are simplified and widely known sequences of aggressive interactions, which define and may guide aggressive behavior. In this project, I propose to identify scripts (commonly occurring sequences of interaction) within violent incidents, and do so at scale. I will use written summaries of over 300,000 violent death incidents across the U.S., compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, and I will use text analysis methods to model the sequence of events in these summaries. By studying the micro-patterns in violent incidents at macro-scale, we can gain nuanced insight into how aggression escalates and potential points at which we can intervene.

My project is based on long-term ethnographic research at a tribal college in Montana, among a cohort of students who are close to completing their degrees in either hydrology or wildlife and fisheries. I examine the ways an ethics of care develops as part of the everyday interactional landscape of the college community, represented in locally-valued acts of kindness, as well as language that is grounded in recognition and advocacy. I also analyze the relationship between an interaction-based ethics of care and the approaches students develop for protecting and managing wildlife, land, and water in a professional capacity once they graduate.

This qualitative study will explore how immigrant-origin young adults in the United States express civic kindness (encompassing both political and prosocial behaviors) on social media, as well as how their immigrant identity may shape their civic kindness on social media. In this study, civic kindness is conceptualized as a behavior that aims to empower, amplify, or increase empathy for marginalized groups. Themes will emerge during analysis, but could include allyship, providing emotional support, participating in digital social or political action, or building empowering online communities. The sample of 30 participants has been recruited through Twitter direct messaging, and data units will include an estimated 3,000 tweets and 10-15 interview transcripts. The research team includes Dr. Laura Wray-Lake (Social Welfare) and Dr. Carola Suárez-Orozco (Education).

In this research, we investigate factors that promote voluntary gratitude expression towards essential workers working on the frontline in the COVID-19 pandemic. Expressing gratitude provides a variety of psychological and social benefits to both people who express and receive gratitude, and we argue that promoting expression of gratitude towards essential workers in the pandemic has important implications in alleviating workers’ burnout and facilitating a sense of meaningfulness among expressers. Collaborating with an appreciation letter writing campaign, we will conduct field and experimental studies that examine how to frame outreach messages to motivate more people to volunteer writing quality letters of gratitude. We will focus on factors such as invoking a sense of collectiveness versus individuality and test whether certain framing is more effective in encouraging more people to write letters or in increasing letter quality.

I am interested in how attitudes and behaviours relating to prosociality and cooperation are affected by wide-scale societal and political changes. As a BKI Summer Fellow, I am working on the early stages of two projects, both in Southeast Asia. The first examines baseline levels of prosociality in a highly underdeveloped region of hill tribespeople in upland Myanmar. The project aims to measure long-term changes as a result of rapid development and increasing exposure to the outside world, accelerated by the construction of mobile phone towers and the provision of cell and Internet connectivity. The second project examines how the COVID-19 pandemic, as a moment of both heightened public anxiety and interdependence, is shaping values relating to kindness, cooperation, and conflict.

Short, online prosocial interventions have been shown to promote well-being and improve physical health. To date, however, these interventions have primarily been conducted among healthy individuals. Adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors (age 15 to 39 years at diagnosis) are one population that may benefit from prosocial interventions, though this has yet to be tested. Recent literature suggests that giving to others may help AYAs to acquire social and psychological resources critical to healthy development. Further, AYA cancer survivors often report a desire to “give back” following treatment but may feel that they lack the expertise or opportunity to do so.

This project explores how national elites, divided by strong political and social differences over decades, eventually temper their conflict and politics becomes less polarized. Using the English Civil War as an instance of such conflict, the project explores the 1650-1750 period to understand what drove both the continuation of conflict, and its eventual tempering.

Post-partum women are often in need of selfless acts of kindness from others due to the overwhelming needs of their new baby. For most of our evolutionary history, this support was likely freely offered in the form of child care or direct provisioning from both kin and non-kin. However, due to the complex realities of the globalized world, this ideal is not always realized. In fact, immigration, family separation, poverty, and other factors may interrupt the free exchange of help within a social network. Cultural values may serve to further hinder requests for these acts of support, especially when social networks are small. This project aims to explore the cultural factors surrounding the expectations for, hindrances to, and mobilization of receiving social support for first-time Latina mothers. The support received from the individuals’ own mother (the baby‘s grandmother, who has been identified by biological anthropologists as holding an important role in the reproductive success of her children) is of particular interest in comparison to the support received from the baby’s father, paternal grandmother, and unrelated groups of women. Moreover, this project explores how support and lack of support from kin and non-kin influence new mothers’ mental health. This work represents a unique contribution to anthropological and public health literature by approaching questions of stressors and social support from an evolutionary, cultural, and psychological perspective.

Adolescence is a key period of social-cognitive and affective development, setting the stage of the rest of one’s life. However, research focused on adolescence has mainly examined risk-taking and ‘negative’ behaviors that arise during this period, suggesting that prosocial behaviors may be stunted during this time. This is quite puzzling, as the social-cognitive abilities that underlie positive behaviors, particularly prosocial behavior, increase dramatically throughout this period.

That being said, this research project aims to fill this gap in knowledge by studying prosocial behavior in a more nuanced manner; examining who adolescents choose to give to, when they choose to give, and how these factors manifest within the developing brain. Understanding the factors that contribute to giving behavior, and how it evolves throughout this key period of development, can lead to more tailored approaches to increasing prosociality. Increasing prosocial behavior, particularly at such a key period of development, is crucial for both fostering acts of kindness and reframing adolescence as a time of opportunity.

I am currently a J.D. / Ph.D. dual degree candidate with the UCLA School of Law, where I am pursuing a specialization in tax law and taxation policy; and the UCLA Department of Political Science, where I conduct research on criminal deterrence and I apply political theory to real-world issues.

My project for the BKI conceptualizes kindness as something that is commendable, but not required. Thus, instead of imposing punishments when kindness is not seen, a more effective and ethical policy is to promote kindness by rewarding kind actions. Hence, my interdisciplinary research draws from comparative law, taxation law, and moral philosophy to examine the legal structures that can encourage members of society to take action for others’ benefit.

I want to understand what role laws play in promoting pro-social and anti-social behavior and feelings. To do this, my project relies on a case-study of immigration policies. I take advantage of timing and geographic differences in the enactment of identical policies across localities in the United States to see how these policies predict changes in the way public officials, journalists, and the public talk and feel about immigrants based on data from internet activity, newspapers, government records, and a host of other sources.

In this research I investigate the extra, intensive work that legal interpreters, judges, and attorneys put in to assist asylum seekers to understand complex legal processes. I search for evidence that points to how to construct a more effective, equitable working environment for courtroom professionals and better language access for court users.

Los Angeles County has the highest rate of food insecurity in the United States and the Harbor-UCLA Food Pharmacy assists patients and the surrounding community through the provision of free fresh fruits and vegetables. Volunteerism is vital to building community cohesion and recipients of kindness often “pay it forward” through performing kind acts of their own for others. This study will look at attitudes and perceptions of volunteers and recipients of a food insecurity intervention on prosocial behaviors and community cohesion.

This study aims to determine methods in which zoos can most effectively and efficiently promote public engagement and procure charitable donations during the COVID-19 pandemic closure, or any extended closure. I am working with the Santa Ana Zoo where I am creating ten pairs of short, informational videos that will be shared on the zoo’s popular Facebook page. Each pair of videos will be testing one of five variables derived from theory in a variety of fields in social science of what promotes kindness by maximizing a variable in one video, minimizing it in the other, and directly comparing them via “likes”, “shares”, comments, and amount of donations received. Ultimately, I plan to create a document advising zoos on how to continue promoting public engagement and collecting donations as effectively and efficiently as possible during this time and during any other period of extended closure.

My research aims to challenge both the ancient and early-modern traditional narratives of warfare and competition between the ancient Egyptian state and the peoples inhabiting the Eastern Desert (a large area of land located between the Nile river and the Red Sea). By examining archaeological and ethnographic data, I plan to re-characterize the nature of this relationship, demonstrating that cooperational strategies, and not competition, dominated the nature of Egyptian state-desert peoples interactions. By focusing on reputation (characterized by the classic example of “tit-for-tat”) and rewards, my summer research will attempt to describe and understand the way that altruistic actions lead to an increase in reputation, which in turn, maximizes rewards for both major parties.

This qualitative study will explore how immigrant-origin young adults in the United States express civic kindness (encompassing both political and prosocial behaviors) on social media, as well as how their immigrant identity may shape their civic kindness on social media. In this study, civic kindness is conceptualized as a behavior that aims to empower, amplify, or increase empathy for marginalized groups. Themes will emerge during analysis, but could include allyship, providing emotional support, participating in digital social or political action, or building empowering online communities. The sample of 30 participants has been recruited through Twitter direct messaging, and data units will include an estimated 3,000 tweets and 10-15 interview transcripts. The research team includes Dr. Laura Wray-Lake (Social Welfare) and Dr. Carola Suárez-Orozco (Education).

My research is situated in the economic center, the lower Yangzi delta, of Qing China (ca. 1644-1912) and examines the emergence of long-enduring collaboration among villages with shared water systems. It focuses on rural communities living alongside the Taiping River (literally, the River of Grand Peace). Specifically, it explores social contexts of the river basin; it also investigates how individual farmers, despite their different lineage and socioeconomic status, forged a strong and lasting bond with one another, generating kindness, devotion, and commitment to regularly repair the river for nearly two centuries and thus promote the well-being of the entire area.