UCLA School of Education & Information Studies

AERA 2026: UCLA Conference Schedule
2026-04-07 08:00 - 2026-04-12 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Explore UCLA School of Education and Information Studies (Ed&IS) participation at the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting through this Google Sheet. This sheet provides a comprehensive overview of sessions, presentations, and events featuring Ed&IS faculty, students, and research centers. Use it to identify when and where our community is contributing, discover topics of interest, and plan your schedule for the conference.

By UCLA Ed&IS Faculty Member

Tuesday, April 7th (Pre-Conference sessions)

Wednesday, April 8th

Thursday, April 9th

Friday, April 10th

Saturday, April 11th

Sunday, April 12th

Colliding Worlds: Restoring Orie Medicinebull's 1980 UCLA Student Film
2026-04-09 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom
On April 9th, AMIA-UCLA is honored to invite filmmaker, North Fork Mono Rancheria tribal citizen, and UCLA alum Orie Medicinebull for a Zoom conversation on the restoration of her UCLA student film, Colliding Worlds (1980). The event will take place April 9th at 11am on Zoom (link below). Orie was part of the L.A. Rebellion film movement at UCLA. In addition to her filmmaking, she is an educator and community organizer. Her student film Colliding Worlds (1980) emerged from the L.A. Rebellion and this conversation will center around its making, loss, rediscovery, and restoration. Also joining the conversation will be Krista Riggs, the director of Madera County Library, and Willow Germs, the conservation archivist at the California State Archives, a filmmaker, and a California Revealed Advisory Board Member.

Colliding Worlds: Restoring Orie Medicinebull’s 1980 UCLA Student Film

Apr 9, 2026 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Meeting ID: 998 4245 3844

Zoom Link

For some information about the project history see below.

In 2020, Madera County Library participated in the Digitization and Preservation Assistance program at California Revealed, submitting films that had been stored in a wooden shed in a fire-prone area. While performing quality control on the digitized files, Willow Germs was struck by one film in particular: a short, independent documentary that centers on four generations of women’s relationships to their traditions and popular culture, including acorn gathering, powwows, rock ‘n’ roll music, and hand games. This faded 16mm print was Colliding Worlds (1980), a film made by Orie Medicinebull, an educator, community organizer, filmmaker, and tribal citizen of the North Fork Mono Rancheria.

The film documents the “People Who Live Where the Cedar Trees Start to Grow” (Wah-up-weh-tuhneum), also known as the Mono or Western Monache people, and their attempts to maintain cultural traditions such as acorn collecting, food preparation, music, dance, powwows, and games. Filmmaker Orie Medicinebull was the first woman of the Mono tribe to earn an MFA in Motion Pictures and Television Production from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Motion Pictures and Television Production, and the first Native American woman to make a film about the Native American people of California.

Willow was not able to find contact information for Orie at first, but momentum built after sharing an excerpt of the film during AMIA’s Archival Screening Night in 2022. In January 2023, Willow and Orie finally connected, and in collaboration with Krista Riggs, director of the Madera County Library, they began to apply for grants to reintroduce Orie’s film to the public. Over the next two years, they received two grants: a Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore Colliding Worlds, and a “Humanities for All” grant from California Humanities to support the premiere of the restoration, set for October 2026. The premiere will be in Madera County and will focus on living culture, creating bridges across multiple generations and multiple tribes.

Disabled Desires for Reimagining Archives: Past Experiences toward Future Possibilities
2026-04-09 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
The UCLA Department of Information Studies invites faculty, staff, and students to its Information Studies Colloquia.

Presented, Researched, and Written by Dr. Gracen Brilmyer, McGill University

Through historic records that document disabled people in ways that can reinforce ableist, sanist, or medicalized stereotypes to outright absence from other types of records, disabled people can feel erased in history through archives. Alternatively, community-based archives have been shown to offset historical imbalances through communities representing themselves on their own terms. This talk addresses preliminary findings from a new project by the Disability Archives Lab that focuses on the ways that disabled people imagine archives differently. This project— conducted by, with, and for disabled people—uses community-based methods to identify current issues in archives as well as alternative approaches to archiving. Centering the powerful words of disabled people, this research not only aims to understand the needs and desires of disabled people who have worked with archival materials but also demonstrates the critical role of disabled people in building and designing the scaffolding for a new disability digital community archive.

To attend, email striola@g.ucla.edu for the Zoom link.

AERA Reception in Los Angeles
2026-04-09 18:00 - 21:00 | Pez Cantina, 401 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, California, 90071
Join us for our 2026 UCLA Ed&IS AERA Reception in Los Angeles! Don’t miss the perfect opportunity to connect and network with fellow UCLA Alumni, Faculty, Students, and Staff.

Hosted by UCLA Dean Christina Christie and Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Chair, UCLA Department of Education

For more information, please contact Amy Lassere at alassere@support.ucla.edu or 310.206.0375.

Please note, our reception is being hosted for AERA Conference attendees, Ed&IS Alumni, and Ed&IS Faculty & Staff. All guests must be 21 yrs and over.

Register Now

View the UCLA Ed&IS at AERA schedule here.
