This week’s guest blogger is Douglas Mungin, a Professor at Solano Community College where he has been the Director of Forensics since 2016. Douglas received his M.A and Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Louisiana State University and completed his undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University. Douglas’ research explores the performance of space and identity, ranging from the creation of abject spaces, community displacement, gentrification, and homelessness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to communication studies, Douglas employs critical race theory and theories of mobility to explore how we understand and engage cultural differences across aesthetic practices. His work is featured in the Netflix documentary “Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” and has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Texas Speech Communication Journal, and Oral History Review. He is currently working on a book that traces the impacts of socio-economic neoliberalism on the performance and political movements of homeless communities in the United States.
The story of Los Angeles is one told through concrete. The freeways are called the arteries of the city. Paul Haddad in his work Freewaytopia (2021) explores the history of Los Angeles told through the story of its freeways. Haddad articulates on this use of concrete and argues “Just like the hammer to which everything is a nail, to these builders, virtually every traffic problem could be solved by building another freeway.”
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