Crystal Baik

Assistant Professor | Ethnic Studies

    Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. Her fields of expertise include Korean transnational history, immigration studies, gender and sexuality studies, oral history and visual culture studies. Currently, she is completing her first full-length book manuscript, tentatively entitled Demilitarized Futures: Korean Diaspora Aesthetics and the Decolonial Present. Professor Baik is also an active member and supporter of several community-based organizations in the Los Angeles area, including the Korean Resource Center-Los Angeles and Khmer Girls in Action (KGA).

The crucial funding from the Blum Initiative will support the very first phase of a larger (second book) project focusing on undocumented Koreans in North America. By drawing on a variety of methods, including semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis, Professor Baik will work closely with the Korean Resource Center of Los Angeles to unpack the complex meaning of "undocumented" status beyond llegal categorizations. Specifically, this exploratory project will examine the socio-economic ramifications of "undocumented" status among Koreans living in the Los Angeles-Orange Country area, while identifying the different strategies (ranging from cross-racial organizing to community-based healthcare, education, financial support, and other critical resources) mobilized by Koreans to address the problematics of immigration status. To a greater extent, the funding from the Blum Initiative will provide support for one of the first in-depth projects focusing on the impact of "undocumented" status among Korean Americans.

Steven Helfand

Professor | Economics

    Steven Helfand is Associate Professor of economics at the University of California, Riverside. He was Chair of Latin American Studies at UCR from 2002 to 2006, Director of the UC Education Abroad Program in Brazil from 2006 to 2009, and the 2010-11 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award in the UCR College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He specializes in issues related to poverty, inequality, and economic development in Latin America. Most of his recent research examines the role of public policies in reducing rural poverty in Brazil, including evaluations of land reform policies, agricultural productivity enhancing policies, and conditional cash transfer policies. He is currently working on several projects about productivity, poverty and the future of small farms in Brazil.

Deepak Singhania (co-investigator)

PhD Candidate | Economics

Deepak Singhania is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Before joining the Ph.D. program at UCR, he worked as a consultant for The Alchemists Ark, a sales and marketing consultancy firm based in India. Currently, he is serving as President of the UCR Economics Graduate Students’ Association. He is a recipient of the 2015-16 Outstanding Teaching Assistant award as well as the Dissertation Year Program fellowship at UCR. His research interests are in Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics. His Ph.D. thesis explores the relationship between decentralization and welfare, as well as the role of occupational choices as pathways out of poverty.

This project aims to investigate the relationship between poverty and the pathways that help households escape it, (e.g. occupational switching, diversification of household labor, etc.) – particularly in light of specific political and economic environments. The extant literature on pathways out of poverty is primarily built on estimated correlations and thus a primary objective of this research is to move toward a causal understanding, which will allow us to demystify the link between occupational choices and poverty. Focused on Indonesia, this research helps to unpack how much of poverty reduction is the result of pathway choices versus other key variables of interest and has the potential to inform important policy decisions. Identifying successful pathways can provide a cost-effective solution to poverty reduction, when compared with other policies that often require cash-transfers, and these pathways have the potential to be self-sustaining as they can move households onto a higher productivity trajectory, reducing the need for traditional policies.

Robert Ream(co-Principal Investigator)

Associate Professor | Graduate School of Education

    Robert K. Ream is Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Riverside. He joined the UC Riverside faculty in 2004 after postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the RAND Corporation. He recently returned to UCR after having taken up responsibilities in 2013 as an Associate Program Officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. The social dynamics of educational inequality have been the main focus of his research and scholarly writing. He is past president of the Sociology of Education Association. His work appears in a variety of scholarly journals including American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Sociology of Education, and Teachers College Record. His book, Uprooting Children: Mobility, Social Capital, and Mexican American Achievement (LFB Scholarly, 2005) was published in the book series, “The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society.” He is the co-editor (with Douglas Mitchell) of Professional Responsibility: The Fundamental Issue in Education and Health Care Reform (Springer, 2015). Before embarking on a career in research, Dr. Ream served as a legislative aide to former California State Senator and Education Committee Chair, Gary K.

Cecilia Cheung(co-Principal Investigator)

Assistant Professor | Pscyology

   Cecilia Cheung is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. She received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the role of the environment – including parents, teachers, and peers – in children’s motivation and achievement. Her recent research investigates the intra- and inter-personal processes that underlie children’s creativity in the United States, Japan, and China. Dr. Cheung has also led research projects using international assessments, including the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Dr. Cheung’s research has appeared in scholarly outlets including Child Development, Journal of Educational Psychology, and Journal of Youth and Adolescence. She is a native of Hong Kong in California.

The Blum Initiative’s funding subsidizes an early step in a larger, multi-phase research initiative designed to investigate a crucial challenge – California continues to struggle to effectively educate the Hispanic majority of its student population. As is well established, better education helps to lower poverty rates, but persistent opportunity and achievement gaps are especially pronounced among Mexican origin youth, who constitute the vast majority (>80%) of Hispanics in California. This project helps to unpack the causes of this disparity by strategically accounting for the often-overlooked factors of geographic parochialism and non-cognitive skills. Employing a transnational narrative that allows a comparison between immigrant children in the United States and migrant children who have attended schools in the United States, but are residing in Mexico, we assess the role and importance of non-cognitive skills – including sociability, creativity, and positive core self-evaluation – in positive education outcomes. Non-cognitive skills have been shown to have a large impact on economic and health-related outcomes and are more malleable than IQ traits, which highlights the promise of this research’s ability to unpack the determinants of educational and economic outcomes in the border region.

Qingfang Wang

Associate Professor | School of Public Policy

    Qingfang Wang is an Associate Professor of Geography and Public Policy at the University of California Riverside. She is interested in place, as both work site and residential location, interacts with race, ethnicity, immigration status, and gender in shaping individual labor market experiences and other socioeconomic wellbeing. Her work has been funded by National Science Foundation, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Kauffman Foundation, and other agencies. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, she is currently conducting projects on immigrant, ethnic minority, and female entrepreneurship and development, with a particular interest in the sector of higher education.

With the increasing economic and cultural diversity of the U.S. economy, it is extremely important to understand the process of ethnic entrepreneurship and its linkages to economic disparities across race and ethnicity. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine ethnic entrepreneurship in the Greater Los Angeles Area since the 1980s. Specifically, two questions will be addressed for the study area: (1) How do ethnic groups differ in entrepreneurship and how have the disparities changed since the 1980s? (2) How is ethnic entrepreneurship contingent on the regional and local environments? Using multi-year data samples from the U.S. Census, this study will conduct spatial analyses, multivariate regression, and hierarchical linear modeling. Results from this study will contribute to the inequality literature of ethnic entrepreneurship and ethnic business development. In addition, understanding the relationship between minority businesses and their embedded places will provide significant insights to a broad scholarship on entrepreneurship, sustainable development, socioeconomic equity, and urban planning. With Los Angeles as “the most unequal place in California,” there are huge disparities in the greater Los Angeles area. Through a comparative and longitudinal approach, this study will provide significant insights into practices related to sustainable development and socioeconomic equity during the push for economic recovery and urban revitalization in our region.