By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

At a recent International Institute event, speakers discussed how community-engaged research and volunteer projects have taught them to listen to and work with residents who are already addressing local needs. Such engagement can expand on-the-ground contributions to public policy and strengthen global solidarity.

UCLA International Institute, May 30, 2025 — A panel discussion at the International Institute on May 19 brought together students, staff and faculty to consider the question: “How Do Community-Engaged Research Practices Strengthen Transnational Solidarities?”

Six panelists — four Bruin seniors, an institute staff member and an institute faculty member — addressed the question as it related to issues of socioeconomic development and human rights, public health, educational outreach and environmental sustainability.

Local-to-global connections and solidarities forged by community-engaged research is the theme of a new International Institute initiative cosponsored by three UCLA International Institute faculty leaders: Immaculada García-Sánchez, community engagement advisor; Shaina Potts, equity advisor; and David Kim, associate vice provost. All three, together with Vice Provost Cindy Fan, were on hand for the event.

Socioeconomic development and human rights

Maher Salha (UCLA 2025, B.A. global studies and political science) reflected on his work with Project Incubator of the Global Development Lab (a student association). The incubator is a year-long program in which student members attend a series of workshops to “identify a global issue that matters to them and essentially propose [a project] in a feasible way on a local scale [that] can eventually be scaled up,” he explained.

Most incubator participants spend a great deal of time interacting with local community and nongovernmental organizations — many of which serve diaspora populations in the U.S. — in order to define specific community needs and identify a local partner with whom they can collaborate. They then develop a project proposal for seed funding.

Salha’s international experiences at UCLA have given him deep exposure to migration and human rights issues in different countries. An internship with a law firm in London involved work on migrant deportation and extradition cases in the UK. A travel study program on human rights at The Hague was, he said, “a life-changing experience, especially being able to see all of the different human rights issues and the different groups of judges and lawyers throughout the entire world coming together and [unite] in international law at a time where we obviously see that our world needs it the most.”

Ixchtel Aguilar-Moore (UCLA 2025, B.A global studies, Spanish and geography minors) spoke about her global studies thesis research, her work with the student association, Unión Centroamericana de Estudiantes (UNICA), and her participation in travel study programs in South Africa and The Hague.

UNICA, she explained, “[works] with Central American communities in LA, in Central America and at UCLA. Last year I worked as an external liaison, and this year as a political educator. We really [work] on bridging the gaps between all these Central American communities, and that's also informed my research this year.”

Her senior thesis examines post-coup democratization trends in Latin America. “One of my case studies … is the Honduran coup of 2009,” she explained. “I realized that when it comes to research, there’s a lot of different narratives… but I really wanted to turn to my own community to describe the coup and be able to represent that [perspective] in my research.”

“[W]hen it comes to transnational solidarities,” she said, “… the internship that I did in Cape Town, South Africa … focused on immigrant and refugee communities. Specifically, the impact of xenophobia on policy that targeted Zimbabwean migrants. This is something that keeps coming up within my own research, with the political climate and the attack on the immigrant communities right now.”

Public health

Trisha Badjatia (UCLA 2025, B.A. neuroscience, global health minor), graduated from UCLA this past March and begins an M.P.H. program at Dartmouth in the fall.

During a 10-week summer Future Public Health Leaders Program at the University of Michigan (UMI), Badjatia conducted research for a local county health department in Michigan. “[M]y job was to write an extensive literature review on health inequities related to COVID-19 across social factors, varying from race, class, even zip code to gender and social orientation,” she said. “[But it] was when I interviewed community residents and leaders and department staff... [that] I found the most insights.

“I learned a lot that shifted my perspective on community engagement from something that is more of a partnership to, ‘We really have so much to learn from communities.’ It shifted my perspective to understanding community leadership, rather than community engagement per se.”

Local residents responded to the Covid shutdown, for example, by using closed schools to house community-organized food distribution centers. “It was learning about initiatives like these that were being led by people living there that showed me… people from marginalized communities are not necessarily marginalized in the way that they hold power, and that power is important in starting any initiatives that they see fit,” concluded Badjatia.

Panel discussion speakers (from left): Dr. Utpal Sandesara, Audrey Jason, Veronica Zavala,
Trisha Badjatia, Ixchtel Aguilar-Moore and Maher Sahla. (Photo: Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.)

Utpal Sandesara, M.D., Ph.D., a faculty member of the International Institute’s global health program who has a joint appointment in the UCLA School of Medicine’s Division of General Internal Medicine-Health Services Research, spoke about four community-engaged research projects.

During his undergraduate education, he and fellow student Tom Wooten traveled to India to research a little-known collapse of an irrigation dam in Gujarat, India in 1979. With the help of local journalists, the two undergrads delved into local archives and conducted 147 oral interviews, work that was published in the book, “No One Had a Tongue to Speak: The Untold Story of One of History’s Deadliest Floods” (Prometheus, 2011).

“[The journalists] were the ones who knew the local community,” related Sandesara. “They were the ones who knew who we should interview. They knew the organizations who had done work 25 years earlier, and they could connect us with them. [I]t ended up being this incredible collaborative experience.”

By contrast, Sandesara’s doctoral research on sex-selective abortions in India based on sonograms was conducted without a local partner. “I learned very quickly that… if I was going to do this project responsibly, if I was really going to understand the perspective of the doctors and nurses and the patients and families who were engaged in this, because it was an illegal practice,” he related.

The scholar-practitioner is currently working on a small ethnographic project focused on family caregiving for people with advanced liver disease, as well as a large National Institutes of Health–funded study that seeks to create more equitable care for hypertension in the Los Angeles County public health system. “[I]t's been this really incredible project to get a sense of how [to take a] 360-degree perspective on a really, really complicated social problem and bring everybody's expertise together at the table,” he said.

Educational outreach

Victoria Zavala, K–12 educational outreach coordinator at the Latin American Institute and a doctoral student in film and media studies at UCLA, spoke eloquently about community engagement.

“At the heart of my role is the mission to make Latin American scholarship accessible and meaningful to K–12 educators and students. This involves designing professional development workshops, creating curricula [and] resources and facilitating connections between UCLA faculty, artists and community leaders with teachers across Los Angeles and beyond,” she explained.

“I have always believed that scholarship is meaningful when it’s activated in the community and it steps beyond [the university] and engages directly with students, educators and family.”

As the result of a special monthlong teacher development workshop that took place in Oaxaca, Mexico in summer 2023, an LAUSD participant in the workshop created a California standards-based high school unit on ancient [Mesooamerican] civilizations. She then extended the unit to include a community day called Día de Muertos.

“This event has now become an annual event [at the school] … where families and teachers come together to create this community-centered lived experience,” said Zavala.

Environmental sustainability

Audrey Jason (UCLA 2025, B.A. psychobiology, global health minor) spoke about her work with the UCLA Sustainability Action Research Program of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, where she helped lead a research project on waste management, then became a program director for student research.

The latter role, she said, “has been a wonderful experience in getting to… develop the research projects that students are working on, as well as putting a large emphasis on [equity, diversity and inclusion]… and [to] facilitate exactly how we want course curricula to focus on elements that might be missing and that our students are nervous about.”

Jason remarked on the power of digital communications to give greater numbers of UCLA students exposure to relatable information about sustainability. “I’ve really seen the first-hand impacts of being able to publish zines regularly and see how that encourages other students who maybe aren’t used to finding sustainability [issues] in their fields,” she shared.

Download a detailed summary of the panel discussion here.

Published: Friday, May 30, 2025