The Brief

Two UCLA professors were among 20 people awarded the 2023 MacArthur Fellowship announced today. Legal scholar E. Tendayi Achiume and hydroclimatologist Park Williams were each awarded an $800,000, five-year grant to be used at their discretion.

Connecting global laws with local actors

Achiume, a professor of law at UCLA and a former United Nations special rapporteur, was recognized for her work in race, migration, human rights and law.

She told LAist the award “feels very surreal” and she is feeling completely overwhelmed.

“I think that kind of award requires reflection before you start deciding what you're going to do,” she said. “Whatever it will be, it will follow along the work that I've been doing up until this point, which is thinking about how we can have global frameworks [to] better reflect the interests and experiences and perspectives of racially marginalized groups.”

For example, Los Angeles has one of the biggest jail systems in the world — one that Achiume said disproportionately harms the city’s racially marginalized communities. One thing she did was to highlight global anti-discriminatory practices, like those detailed in The International Human Rights Framework, locally.

“In my own work, what I have found to be valuable is connecting local actors in Los Angeles with the international laws and using those international laws to advocate for change with city council officials,” she said.

Her work has examined the concept of migration through the lens of state sovereignty. Achiume has challenged the rights of states to exclude economic migrants — those seeking a better life — stating that it is unethical for wealthy countries to exclude migrants, and that colonial powers have an obligation to open their borders to their former subjects.

“International law embeds injustice in the way that migration and mobility frameworks work,” she said.

In her work, a priority is looking at ethical ways to address the border crisis, especially because people have this misconception that people crossing the border are coming from far away and “have nothing to do with us here.”

“In my work, I try and show the ways in which the United States, as a nation, has been complicit in creating the displacement and destabilizing regions from which people are fleeing in ways that mean that we have responsibilities to people at the border,” she said.

Achiume said she wants to provide ways to hold the United States accountable for the disruption it causes elsewhere.

She also wants to use the award to highlight how racial injustice affects some of the global crises we are experiencing. For example, she said, technology is often thought of as being race neutral and fair. But, Achiume said, facial recognition software has trouble recognizing Black and brown faces and the faces of women, which can result in wrongful incarceration, wrongful death or deportation.

The effects of climate change on water

Williams is part of a team of multi-institutional researchers developing a system to understand how climate change will impact fire patterns.

“My research right now focuses on producing a computer model that can simulate wildfire and vegetation ecosystems across the western United States in order to tell how fire is going to continue changing in the future,” Park, who teaches in the geography department at UCLA, said. “One of the things that we find to be a major limitation is just computer space and computer time. This job is very computationally intensive and so one thing I may use those funds for [is] some industrial computing equipment.”

Water, Williams said, is the foundation of his research. “A hydroclimatologist just means somebody who studies the effect of climate on water that is precipitation, floods, droughts, and the things that changes in water availability cause, such as wildfires or bark-beetle outbreaks,” he said.

With the climate crisis, the distribution of the Earth’s water changes has led to continental changes. This in turn changes where people live and where forests are. While research sometimes focuses on other parts of the world, Park said he often finds himself returning his focus to the Western United States, where he grew up.

About the fellowship

Recipients of the fellowship — also known as the “genius grant” — will begin receiving the grant funding early next year. Fellows are chosen for their creativity, their promise in their respective fields, and their track record. The prize is awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.