Publications and Other News from STPL Faculty

Andrea Ballestero, Professor of Anthropology

Andrea Ballestero, Professor of Anthropology, recently received a Collaborative Research grant from the National Science Foundation (co-funded by its STS and Cultural Anthropology programs) for a project titled “Retooling at the Hydro-Frontier: Devices for Resource Extraction in the 21st Century.”

Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History

In April 2024, Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, received the Phi Kappa Phi USC Faculty Recognition Award for his book Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022). He was also elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2024–25, he is Huntington Library Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow while at work on a new project that concerns Asian American artistic perspectives on environment and embodiment. He appears in a creative documentary, DIS-EASE (2024, dir. Mariam Ghani), a provocation to rethink how we define both the “public” and “health” in public health, which premiered at the Tate Modern in August.

The City on Life Support: Los Angeles as a Laboratory for Planetary Health

We are very pleased to announce that STPL has been awarded a Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (HHSS) Initiative Award from USC’s Office of Research and Innovation. During the 2025–26 academic year, the Center will host a series of workshops and other events developing the concept of planetary health and exploring the ways in which the urban environments of greater of Los Angeles disclose new dimensions of the problem. These workshops will address topics including, but not limited to, the infrastructure of urban water provision in a period of increasing water scarcity, the energy grid and the dangers of extreme heat, and the relation between air pollution and respiratory illness.
Participating faculty are drawn from numerous component schools of USC: Dornsife, Annenberg, Architecture, Keck Medicine, and Gould Law. They represent a uniquely interdisciplinary group that cross-cuts the humanities, social sciences, design disciplines, environmental sciences, and health sciences, and is well positioned to address the project’s core questions: What forms of ethics and politics consolidate around planetary concerns? What scales of space and time do they involve, and what sense of limits and possibilities do they evoke? How, more generally, do contemporary ecological crises reshape the experience of collective urban life?