Meeting in the Middle: A Return Walk Through UCLA

    Retracing my steps from North to South Campus, I found myself once again pausing at the Tongva Steps, formerly Janss Steps. These 87 stairs are more than just a connector between the arts and the sciences, they are UCLA’s spine, binding disciplines, ideologies, and communities. Since their renaming to honor the Gabrielino-Tongva people, the steps have taken on new meaning. As the Daily Bruin reported, the decision wasn’t just symbolic; it was a conscious effort to acknowledge the Indigenous history beneath our feet and reconsider whose narratives are centered in our institutions


    In our Art, Science, and Technology course, we’ve challenged the rigid divide between North and South Campus, between humanists and scientists. We've seen how artists use algorithms and how scientists rely on creative intuition. Programs like UCLA’s Sci|Art Lab + Studio illustrate this convergence in action, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address questions too complex for any one field alone.


    This time, my walk wasn’t just about geography, it was about perspective. As someone trained in the sciences, I used to pass through North Campus as if it were another world. But now I recognize that my work doesn’t exist in isolation. Whether I’m thinking about bioethics, the storytelling power of data visualizations, or the cultural assumptions behind AI, the humanities aren’t peripheral, they’re essential. This shift mirrors what Silvia Casini describes in her work on medical imaging: that technologies like MRIs don’t just reveal bodies, they shape how we perceive them.


    Standing at the midpoint of campus, I now see the Tongva Steps not only as a physical bridge but as a conceptual one. They remind me that to truly innovate, to truly learn, we must meet in the middle, between disciplines, between people, between ways of seeing the world.


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