Black and white photograph of a Ferris wheel by Trevor Auldridge-Reveles.

California Dreaming: Coming of Age in America’s Other Heartland

Wed, 01/17/2024 - 4:00pm to Wed, 06/19/2024 - 5:00pm
Exhibition
Location:
Learning Commons
UCSB Library presents an exhibition of photographs by UCSB graduate student Trevor Auldridge-Reveles (Sociology) that explores what it means to grow up in one of the highest opportunity towns in rural America. Please join us on at 4PM on January 17 for an opening event and exhibition tour.
This exhibition and opening event is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Graduate Division, and the Department of Sociology.
 
Social scientists tend to study the most intensely unequal communities. The places where getting ahead happens least often. But what if we studied the most equal communities? The places where getting ahead happens most often.
 
Over the course of 13 months, Trevor Auldridge-Reveles researched this question by spending over 1,000 hours following and documenting the lives of teenagers as they went about their daily lives in Dixon, California. 
 
Why Dixon? 
 
Because teenagers who grow up in this small, racially diverse town 20 miles west of Sacramento have some of the highest likelihoods in the whole country of climbing out of the social class into which they were raised. 
 
If we can understand how and why upward social mobility happens there, we might be able to replicate these conditions across the country.
 
This exhibition features black and white photographs and quotes collected by Auldridge-Reveles for his study, highlighting the consistencies–and contradictions–of one of the most unique towns in America. 
 

Please join us for an event at 4PM on Wednesday, January 17 in the Library's Instruction & Training Room 1312 (1st Floor, Mountain Side) to celebrate the exhibition opening.

 
Trevor Auldridge-Reveles is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. His dissertation research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute.