Almost every morning I walk down the hill of Landfair Avenue, turn left on Strathmore, and make my way to the UCLA campus. This is a main outlet from the only (barely) affordable area of student housing near campus that is surrounded by some of the world’s most wealthy neighborhoods (Bel Air, Beverley Hills, Brentwood). Each morning it funnels hundreds of students from their three or four to-a-room apartments to school, caught up in a constant entrepreneurial push to become something in a top tier university. These students are only here for a few years and are therefore just passing through on their way to better things (or so goes the aspirational logic), creating a situation where no shared attitude of care for the surroundings exists and where developers can exploit students through expensive low-quality, or more recently, exorbitantly priced “luxury,” housing. The area is also UCLA’s “frat row,” an obvious site of toxic culture whose influence extends from the constant parties and trashed sidewalks to their key status in structures of power and privilege.For Visualizing Toxic Subjects, I plan to document this street and surrounding student transient zone to explore these intersections of privilege, predatory housing, student aspiration, and their relationship with the university at large. This area represents something like a dark (toxic) side of the American University’s imaginary, where the fantasy of irresponsible enjoyment is allowed as long as you are also a hardworking student, and I’d like to work out what this means and how it manifests in the physical environment. I have lived here for the past five years while completing my doctorate, and my educational status provides a critical out-of-placeness with which to analyze.
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