UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

When those accused of being high-level perpetrators of human rights abuse die before publicly yielding their secrets in legal and archival arenas, victims may simultaneously express relief about the perpetrator’s demise and grief that, along with it, possible crucial information about the past is lost forever. Although the accused do not usually directly admit their actions and the teasing out of what actually happened is dependent upon the complex processes of cross-examination of their testimony and of records and other forms of evidence, victims project such moments of revelation onto the public act of holding accused perpetrators to account. In their deaths, the accused become forever from-now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth. Complicating this scenario, however, is the increasingly open-ended hope offered to victims, judicial processes and historians alike by the application of new forensic methods, for example, in the examination of gravesides and human remains, and by satellite footage, that are generating additional categories of evidence. Using the juridical and archival legacies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Yugoslav Wars as case studies, this article argues that when perpetrators die before giving legal testimony, survivors and victims’ families construct them as unavailable documents with imaginary agency to settle competing versions of history. Such imagined documents enter into a complex landscape of human rights archives that has heretofore been exclusively focused on tangible evidence. First, this article frames the case of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, who died before giving his testimony in a hybrid tribunal. In the face of diverse archival documentary evidence capable of presenting a more complete and complex picture of atrocities, it contemplates why survivors and victims’ family members placed high hopes on his potential testimony, essentially constructing him as a now-dead living document. Second, it explores a parallel case, that of the death of Slobodan Milošević while being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and argues that the notion of a dead perpetrator as imagined document has less sway when the public has the opportunity to hear the perpetrator defend himself, regardless of the perpetrator’s own admission (or denial) of culpability. Third, it proposes the notion of imaginary documents. It argues that such imaginary documents challenge dominant conceptions of the evidentiary qualities of tangible records and the archival legacies of trauma by insisting on a more dynamic and holistic view of records that takes the affect of survivors and victims’ family members into account.

This study explores Korean-American parents' perceptions on successful transition to kindergarten (TTK) for their child on the autism spectrum. It further examines challenges experienced during this process, and possible predictors for their challenges. Findings from an online survey (N = 212) indicate that participants consider their child's behavioral readiness and cooperation with teachers as the most important school readiness skills for successful TTK. They further consider building positive relationships with teachers and providing support at home as the most important support parents could provide during this process. Moreover, the child being a vocal communicator, higher income and parent's educational level were found to buffer against their reported challenges, while first-generation immigrant status and restrictive school placement were found to predict more challenges.

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Abstract: The study investigates a tension between affirmative action scholars who hypothesize that affirmative action bans would increase underrepresented minority students’ STEM college completions and scholars who have empirically estimated declines. It also questions results that that find no existence of a STEM penalty (compared to non-STEM) caused by affirmative action bans and finds that a STEM penalty is likely, but varies from a very modest effect (using the Department of Homeland Security taxonomy) to a more substantial impact (using the National Science Foundation taxonomy). This study finds that many of the tensions between affirmative action scholars studying STEM are likely the product of model specification. It illustrates how the following have impacted the estimates: the period studied, the inclusion and exclusion of certain ban states, the measure of institutional selectivity, and most importantly, the taxonomy of STEM. Furthermore, this study builds upon prior studies by analyzing private schools and the shorter-term and longer-term impacts of the bans.

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Many schools now screen students for dyslexia in early grades. However, there are valid concerns that these screeners may be biased or ineffective at screening students who are not yet proficient in English (i.e., English Learners; ELs). The present study examined the performance of 54 first graders on a dyslexia screener. Results showed that students who were ELs performed similarly to their peers who were proficient in English on many literacy subskills. Additionally, we found that EL students were not significantly more likely to be “flagged” as at risk for dyslexia. These findings have practical implications for using universal screeners to identify students, including students who are designated ELs, as being at risk for learning disabilities, including dyslexia.