Hello!
I'm Victoria Tran,a PhD candidate at UCLA researching urban sociology, community dynamics, and local governance.
Get in touch vlt6cp@ucla.edu
Please click here for a copy of my CV (updated April 2024)
I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. My research is situated in the fields of urban sociology, race and ethnicity, and Asian American studies. I study how community groups and neighborhoods participate in local politics to influence policies on redevelopment and policing. This work studies the dynamics between community members and the government over the community’s power to shape their own neighborhoods and how competing interests within a community negotiate whose needs should be prioritized. I also study how political and urban sociology theories apply to Asian American communities and neighborhoods.
Before coming to UCLA, I worked as a research analyst in the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. I received my BA in Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
My dissertation studies how community groups participated in and opposed redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 1975-2005. While redevelopment have been understood to be primarily driven by government officials and rentier elites, community groups and residents are active players in urban politics over neighborhood revitalization and redevelopment. Within systems of urban governance that promote community-engaged redevelopment and participatory governance, claims of community ownership and the performance of community gives local actors legitimacy to define who governs, how they come to govern, and who speaks for the urban poor. While redevelopment projects are open to extensive public engagement processes through stakeholder task forces and public meetings, the practice of community engagement often reduces the community to a bureaucratic checkbox. The “community” then becomes a tool to promote a neighborhood while also creating a boundary for who does and does not belong, whose needs should be prioritized, and who has the right to speak on behalf of the neighborhood.
Using the Chinatown Redevelopment Project as a case study, I analyze how the power to define the neighborhood and its priorities was contested by groups with different social, economic, and cultural ties to the space and competing perceptions of their legitimacy to speak for the neighborhood. These contestations over community ownership shape what groups the government legitimized as community representatives, how projects were prioritized and funded, and who benefited from housing and redevelopment projects. I use archival documents, interviews, and historical quantitative data to understand the opportunities and limitations of community engagement in local urban politics and provide important context for current urban studies questions around neighborhood authenticity, community ownership, and displacement in minority and immigrant communities.
My research is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, Center for Engaged Scholarship, the Haynes Lindley Foundation, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Evasion Lab, the Institute of American Cultures, and UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.
This paper argues existing scholarship on Asian American communities is limited by an assumption that incorporation into the US can productively address racial and economic precarity. As an alternative, we offer “Extinguishing Asian (American) Insurgency”, a theoretical framework that incorporates histories of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics of incorporation into contemporary sociological analyses of Asian subject formation. Applying Du Boisian sociology alongside Frantz Fanon and Joy James, the framework adopts a global, relational analysis of Asian Americans and the US state. We demonstrate the framework's utility through two case studies: anti-colonial Sikh diasporic politics through the Gadar Party and US state efforts to tie diasporic South Vietnamese identity to an anti-communist politic.
This paper has been presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings and Brown University’s The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois: Crossing Boundaries for Social Justice Conference.
In local governance debates, both grassroots organizations and scholars have argued for increasing resident participation in policymaking to reduce inequalities and make politicians more responsive to constituent needs. One means to accomplish this is through neighborhood councils (NCs), which serve as a forum for resident input and an advisory body to elected officials. While these studies focus on internal characteristics that make NCs effective, they overlook how organizational culture shapes members’ understandings of their role in local governance, the issues they prioritize, and the strategies they use to address those issues. We ask: How do neighborhood councils understand their role in urban governance and exert influence particularly in relation to homelessness? What external and internal factors prevent them from doing so? Using Los Angeles neighborhood councils’ participation in homelessness policy as a case study, we analyze interviews, meeting observations, and documents to understand how NCs position themselves in the larger network of homelessness governance and how their strategies are shaped by both internal contestation and their political alignment with external actors.
This paper has been presented at the International Conference on Urban Affairs.
Building on a growing body of literature on how Black residents are disproportionately policed by police officers, private security, and residents, this paper analyzes how residents police each other in their neighborhood through 911 calls. Furthermore, it asks how do rates of 911 calls to the police change as neighborhood demographics change? Using a longitudinal dataset of Los Angeles neighborhoods from 2010 to 2018, I analyze how changes in a neighborhood’s racial and economic characteristics relate to changes in 911 calls for violent, nuisance, and property crimes. Drawing on racial threat and neighborhood cohesion theory, this article analyzes the separate effects of racial and economic changes on 911 calls.