According to the United Nations Environment Program, unless greenhouse gas emissions fall by 42% by 2030, the global temperature will rise a staggering 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Many museums and institutions within the cultural heritage sector have acknowledged the importance of implementing practices that reduce their impact upon the environment and surrounding communities. Within cultural institutions, conservators of cultural heritage are often strong advocates of integrating greener practices, specifically within conservation labs. However, many labs have yet to put theory into practice. This study explores the challenges of implementing sustainable practices within the context of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Using a survey administered to students and three semi structured interviews with staff, this study examines the perceived challenges and successes with regards to sustainability. Qualitative analysis reveals the leading barriers to sustainability are institutional oversight, difficulties with division of labor, monetary constraints, and material limitations. Given these challenges, this study suggests three areas for improvement: climate control in collection storage, Green Lab Certification, and sustainable alternatives for conservation materials. This research concludes that the UCLA/Getty program would benefit from establishing roles for students and staff and by creating written protocols to provide tangible examples of sustainability within the lab and facilities.

Recent vinyl record scholarship emphasizes spikes in vinyl records’ popularity over the past few decades, and themes of authenticity and tangibility often lie at the center of these dialogues. While opinions regarding the tactility of vinyl records as opposed to the virtuality of digital media vary greatly, an emphasis on understanding the vinyl record as something beyond a listening medium unifies scholarship. In a similar vein, the concept of striving for authenticity on account of nostalgia appears frequently in recent vinyl record discourse. If vinyl’s renewed popularity reflects a broader desire for authenticity in an increasingly digitized world, it is imperative to look beyond vinyl records as objects and to examine the structures that contain their cultural meaning, namely record shops. In engaging with existing literature and conducting ethnographic research in Southeast Los Angeles, or the Gateway Cities, I have narrowed a focus onto three characteristic pillars that uphold how record shops sustain and disseminate the “authenticity” of vinyl records, and thus serve important functions in their communities. The pillars discussed in this paper are: social, archival, and experiential. In analyzing these pillars I aim to convey the importance of situating “informal” repositories of information into these ideas as they relate to community engagement, aesthetics, and archiving, the latter two often being reserved for elite institutions.

In this paper, I investigate how masculinity and womanhood are constructed and performed in the hypermasculine tradition of gangsta rap in Compton, California, by comparing the 1993 rap collective Bloods & Crips with contemporary rapper Stonah4rmThaTown. Both artists foreground their gang affiliation as a central element of their musical and visual identities, offering a lens through which to examine the ongoing relationship between urban violence, gender performance, and racialized self-representation. Drawing on the legacy of 1990s gangsta rap and its aesthetic of aggressive Black masculinity—as analyzed in works such as Cheryl Keyes’ Rap Music and Street Consciousness and Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood—this paper explores how these performances both reinforce and complicate dominant gender ideologies. Tricia Rose’s Black Noise frames hip-hop as “a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression,” while Murray Forman’s The ‘Hood Comes First contextualizes gangsta rap within specific urban geographies, showing how spatial narratives help produce a performance of credibility. I also draw upon Eithne Quinn’s Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang, which further traces the commodification of gangsta identities, particularly in the post-Reagan neoliberal landscape, as well as Michael P. Jeffries’ Thug Life which offers a sociological analysis of how authenticity, violence, and masculinity are intertwined in listener expectations and artist performances of gangst