March 31 – June 2
WL ARTS C159/259:
Art and Global Health
The Wildfires of Los Angeles
Spring 2025
Professor David Gere
3-hour weekly seminar:
Mondays, 10 AM–12:50 PM, Kaufman Hall 230
Open to undergraduate and graduate students across the university, this seminar is centered on an arts-activist response to the wildfires of Los Angeles by South African photographer Gideon Mendel. Mendel’s Fire/Flood series explores the impact of climate change on people’s lives around the world. In the seminar, we will study Mendel’s work and contribute to it by conducting oral histories with people who have lost their homes in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Final presentations, in TED-style, will be complemented by an exhibition.
The seminar is positioned at the interface of arts-based and public health-based methods, using examples drawn from an array of international projects—many of them created and supported by the UCLA Art & Global Health Center. Readings include texts by scholars of performance studies and allied fields (Dwight Conquergood; Shannon Jackson; Erving Goffman) alongside articles from the public health and medical literature (Paul Farmer; Deborah Glik; Arthur and Joan Kleinman).
Graduate students are assigned additional readings and a larger-scale final project.
Undergrad students may apply this course to the Global Health minor.
Top photo by Gideon Mendel. Dawn and Patrick Fowler. Churn Creek Road, Redding, Shasta County, California, USA. October 2018.