The Smithsonian Institution will center a virtual symposium this month around groundbreaking research by UC Davis history professor Andrés Reséndez on the enslavement of Native Americans.

Facebook recently awarded two grants to the Department of Communication researchers in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science to study misinformation and polarization on social media.

The project titles and researchers are:

How do we make decisions about a situation we have not encountered before? New work from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain shows that we can solve abstract problems in the same way that we can find a novel route between two known locations — by using an internal cognitive map. The work was published Aug. 31 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Lauren Peters, a UC Davis Native American studies doctoral student, and her family recently returned the remains of their grandmother's aunt, Sophia Tetoff, to her native Aleut island in Alaska. In 1896 the 12-year-old orphan was sent to an Indian school in Pennsylvania where she died five years later and was buried. The Peterses are among the hundreds of Native families retrieving their ancestors from school cemeteries in the United States and Canada. They are believed to be the first to return a Native child to Alaska.

Teens who have lived in poverty experience physical signs of stress at higher levels than those in more economically secure families, showing that public policy programs that help alleviate poverty can improve psychological and physical health even in pre-adulthood, researchers suggest.

While a life-altering pandemic has caused a substantial uptick in anxiety and depression symptoms among adults and children alike, LGBTQ+ youth have turned to peers in anonymous online discussion forums for support. New research from UC Davis suggests these LGBTQ+ teenagers — who already experience disproportionate levels of psychological adversity — exhibited increased anxiety on the popular r/LGBTeens subreddit throughout 2020 and the start of 2021.

A book by UC Davis anthropology professor Li Zhang on the rise of Western-style psychological counseling in China received honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s 2021 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing competition.

The economy is rapidly growing coming out of the pandemic, but prices are rising and supply chains are fragile. Are these just glitches, or are the changes here to stay? UC Davis LIVE held a conversation, hosted by Soterios Johnson, on the future of the U.S. economy following the pandemic. Òscar Jordà and Marianne Bitler, professors in the Department of Economics, focused on the current state of the U.S. economy, short- and long-term changes to look out for, and whether we would be anxious or confident about our economic future. The show was livestreamed July 1.

As part of a $1.8 million award from the UC Office of the President, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas will examine how artists around the world have created public protest art. She plans to bring artists from Cuba, Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa and other places together for a symposium, create a graphic publication and organize an exhibition of their work.

To celebrate and connect Indigenous activist-researchers across the hemisphere, UC Davis Department of Native American Studies graduate students are holding their ninth annual research symposium April 26-29. The theme this year is “From Red Power to Wallmapu Libre and Land Back” and the event will feature a lineup of Indigenous scholars and activists, as well as 25 graduate student researchers from UC Davis and beyond who represent a multitude of disciplines and collaborate with numerous Indigenous communities.

Beth Rose Middleton, professor and chair of the Department of Native American Studies, is a leading voice on three projects that recently received a combined $1.5 million in funding to advance ongoing Indigenous research connected to water, fire and land.