Public transit offers a unique social setting where strangers from different backgrounds share physical proximity in an enclosed space, yet little is known about how riders maintain and create social order through unwritten rules in this context. My research addresses this gap by examining how passengers sustain and negotiate social order through everyday practices of civil inattention (Goffman, 1963) on the bus and Metro systems of Los Angeles, a city marked by prevalent automobile usage and in which public transit is often stigmatized as the space of the “other.” Drawing on ethnographic observations, I analyze a broad continuum of behaviors that constitute civil (in)attention on public transit, ranging from spatial dispersion and engagement in “auto-involvements” (Ocejo, 2014), to subtle forms of acknowledgement, including micro-coordinations to make room for others and offering seats through verbal and nonverbal cues. I also show how these practices are unevenly distributed, often involving the avoidance of individuals perceived as disruptive or threatening, particularly those who appear unhoused, highlighting how perceived social identities influence who is engaged, avoided, or ignored. Finally, I consider how transit infrastructure, including seating layouts, the presence or absence of turnstiles, fare enforcement, and ridership, not only structures movement and access, but also influences riders’ perceptions of safety, demonstrating how material and social elements work together to shape social life on public transit.

California is one of many places in the United States struggling with difficulties such as low housing supply but high prices, a lack of walkability, car-dependency, and transportation emissions. Invisible policies known as “parking minimums” have been proven to contribute to these problems due to them requiring developers to build a certain amount of parking spaces for each unit, bedroom, or gross square foot built. To rectify the problems at hand, the state of California passed AB2097 in 2022, which ordered the elimination of parking minimums for any development located within a half-mile of a major transit stop. However, the impact of AB2097 is dependent on local agencies and developers themselves. In this paper, California’s most populated city, Los Angeles’ , implementation of AB2097 is studied to understand how developers are using this bill, what they’re using it for, and how much housing and parking have been subsequently proposed by analyzing development applications from Los Angeles City Planning’s AB2097 Case Filings database. 73.8% of developments proposed a change of use, and commercial projects specifically, both within and outside of AB2097’s boundaries, were investigated to understand if the elimination of parking minimums also facilitated these conversions.

The study investigates how collaborative art-making in the Keiskamma Art Project confronted HIV-related trauma and cultivated community resilience in Hamburg, South Africa, which faced extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS political denialism in the early 2000s. Challenging a gap in psychological resilience literature regarding individual factors in dominant Western models, this study examines group art-making as a vehicle for building collective efficacy within the Xhosa people. This project explores the Keiskamma Altarpiece, a monumental embroidered textile modeled after the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece. Iconographic analysis and thematic coding of primary and archival interviews traced the work’s creation and subsequent exhibition. There, more than 130 community artists, mostly women, translated shared epidemic trauma into the altarpiece that moved the community from social invisibility toward international recognition. Results demonstrate how this emergent, collaborative process functioned as an arts-based intervention to address social exclusion and foster resilience among women and families experiencing institutionalized denialism. This case study evaluates how this community-led intervention validated marginalized narratives to function as a source of collective agency. By strengthening social ties and a shared sense of purpose, this model offers a contextual framework to mitigate the isolation of stigma and cultivate resilience in communities currently facing systemic health inequities.

This abstract has been withheld from publication.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is highly regarded for its transfers and the resources it provides to the Transfer community. Approximately one-third of UCLA’s student population consists of transfer students, yet they often face unique academic, social, and mental health challenges during their transition to a four-year university. UCLA offers a range of support services specific to transfers, including the Transfer Student Center, academic counseling, peer mentorship programs, and mental health resources. This study examines the differences in accessibility and engagement between transfer and first-year admission webpages across UCLA. Utilizing a structured content analysis framework, webpages and online resources were evaluated based on navigation ease, engagement features, and clarity of information. Findings suggest that while both first-year and transfer webpages provide essential admissions information, transfer-focused pages are comparatively less centralized and more reliant on self-directed navigation.

Mental health crises on university campuses increasingly demand institutional responses, yet the administrative mechanisms governing those responses remain understudied, particularly in Chinese contexts. This project examines how Chinese university students experience involuntary academic separation during mental health crises, what institutional procedures are involved, and how those procedures shape students' academic progression and post-separation reintegration. Involuntary academic separation is defined to include short-term breaks, year-long leaves, withdrawal, and expulsion, while mental health crises encompass depression, suicidal ideation, and other clinically significant psychological distress. The study proceeds in two phases. The first phase involved qualitative coding of 142 student-authored posts from the Chinese social media platform RED, revealing that separation typically unfolds as a multi-stage process: identification of mental health concerns, information-sharing with advisors and parents, negotiation or enforcement of leave, and post-separation reintegration marked by stringent documentation requirements and ongoing oversight. The second phase consists of semi-structured interviews with students who experienced involuntary separation within the past five years. This research addresses a significant gap in both scholarship and policy by documenting institutional response and identifying practices that could make university procedures more transparent, consistent, and supportive of students in crisis.