2026-2027

Luskin Center Student Researchers are engaged in several exciting research projects throughout the 2026-27 academic year. Below are the broad topics they are researching — stay tuned for more updates about their work and findings!

Staging Heritage: Policy Lessons from Global Cultural Events for the 2028 LA Olympics

Principal Investigator: Tawny Paul

Co-Principal Investigator: Anaghime Esmeralda Ziani

Project Description: Now in its second year, this project explores how cultural programming is prepared and presented for international events such as the Olympics and other mega-sporting events. Previously, this project analyzed the Olympics in 1984 (Los Angeles), 2012 (London), 2024 (Paris), and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar to understand how cultural heritage presented national identity and crafts public memory and history, often excluding Indigenous and other marginalized voices and perspectives. This year, the project draws on the toolkits created in its first year to help institutions shape programming for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

New Faces of Race: Haitian and Dominican Identity in Southern California

Principal Investigator: Robin Derby

Co-Principal Investigator: Monika Gosin (UCSB)

Co-Principal Investigator: Génesis Lara (UCI)

Project Description: Since 2010, Southern California’s Black population has undergone a dramatic demographic shift. While the region’s U.S.-born African American population has declined, Black immigrant communities from the Caribbean – including Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, and the Dominican Republic – and from West and East Africa have grown, making the region’s Black population increasingly diverse. This project considers ethnic restaurants as monuments of identity in southern California as Haitians and Dominicans strive to make themselves known as not Cubans or Jamaicans, two Caribbean groups that are already established in the region. Through a combination of oral histories as well as surveys and GIS mapping of restaurant locations in Los Angeles, the project will examine this demographic shift in LA’s Black population to evaluate its socioeconomic drivers and policy implications.

Accuracy, Authenticity, and Representation: Public Perceptions of Gender in the Past in Assassin’s Creed Video Games

Principal Investigator: Roselyn Campbell

Project Description: This project explores public perceptions of gender in the past, as depicted in the Assassin’s Creed video games. These games, massive open worlds set in real historical time periods and geographic locations, involve thousands of hours of historical research to create realistic landscapes, cities, and monuments, and often feature real historical figures in side quests. Through the use of player surveys as well as online chat forums, this project examines how accurate players perceive these games to be with regard to gender in the past, and thus also explores how common misconceptions about gender in the past are reformulated and recycled to persist despite decades of academic work that may be contradictory. Ultimately, this project attempts to understand what the public thinks the past was, and how that relates to scientific findings and research.