Matrix Podcast: Recent Episodes
Social Science Matrix
The Matrix Podcast features interviews with social scientists from across the University of California, Berkeley campus. Hosted by Professor Michael Watts, the podcast is produced by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center. We also sometimes feature recordings of events, such as lectures and panel discussions.
Recorded on May 5, 2026, this video features a talk by Benjamin Recht, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, focused on his book, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. Professor Recht was joined in conversation by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix.
This event was co-sponsored by the D-Lab; the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG); the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS); and the UC Berkeley Departments of Sociology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
About the Book
Mathematicians and engineers of the 1940s set out to design machines that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, a cluster of foundational mathematical technologies — including information theory, linear programming, game theory, and neural networks — emerged as a foundation for a mathematical formalization of rationality, reshaping how we think about human decision-making itself. The Irrational Decision traces how a narrow mathematical framework for computing came to define rationality in economics, public policy, and popular culture. Recht's talk will discuss how these seminal computational methods have evolved into a robust discipline and industry, with success stories in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce. These examples will highlight how automated decision systems excel in specific sweet spots with clear rules, well-defined goals, and well-constrained contexts. They will also show how, outside these narrow contexts, the rational program tends to absurdity. Given these strengths and limitations, the discussion will explore how to best harness 80 years of unfathomable computational progress while preserving human agency and judgment.
About Benjamin Recht
Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 and 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Awards. He is the author of three books: "Optimization for Modern Data Analysis" (2022), with Stephen J. Wright; "Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning" (2022), with Moritz Hardt; and "The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us" (2026).
A full transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/irrational-decision
Recorded on April 9, 2026, this Authors Meet Critics panel features the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology, and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.
Professor Briggs was joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.
About the Book In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians — John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem — to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts.
He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/incommunicable.
On April 7, 2026, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson was joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, moderated.
The Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics, History, and Sociology.
About the Book Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn't always capitalism, it didn't have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn't have to be this way. How did it happen?
With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism's development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.
A transcript for this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/insatiable-machine
The global dominance of the U.S. dollar has long shaped international trade, financial markets, and geopolitical power. Amid shifting global dynamics and the rapid development of stablecoins and other digital assets, new questions are emerging around the structure and evolution of dollar hegemony. How are technological innovation and geopolitical change reshaping the international monetary system, and what possibilities lie ahead?
Recorded on April 8, 2026, this panel brought together scholars and industry voices to examine the foundation of U.S. monetary influence and the role of financial innovation in an evolving global economy. The panel featured Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, Rohan Kekre, Assistant Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley Haas, and Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Brian Judge, Research Director for the UC Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, moderated.
Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
A transcript of this can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/dollar-hegemony.
Recorded on March 18, 2026, this podcast features a lecture by Julien Migozzi, an economic geographer and Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Migozzi's lecture, "Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa," examined how 21st-century class dynamics become connected with data-driven stratification systems, focusing on the digital transformation of property markets.
This talk was part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) training program (https://crels.berkeley.edu), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.
ABSTRACT
How do persistent inequalities and rapid technological change shape class formation? Centred on South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, this presentation examines how contemporary class dynamics become intertwined with racialised, data-driven mechanisms of social sorting. Integrating computational analysis with in-depth fieldwork across the suburbs and corporate boardrooms of Cape Town, I demonstrate how digital, legal, and financial transformations have reorganized the housing market around a data imperative. Once based on racial categories to exclude the majority from urban property under apartheid, the market is now structured around credit scoring to allocate mortgages and sort the "good" from the "bad" home-seeker, encoding racial inequalities in seemingly colour-blind market outcomes. Thinking class from the realm of digitized markets, I document and theorize how the making of the South African middle-class rests upon the production of a "mortgaged periphery", where middle-income households earn their middle-class stripes by scoring "high enough" to access debt-leveraged homeownership in gated estates. In this suburban, post-apartheid space, physical fences and algorithmic barriers regulate the production and access to housing wealth, materialising class boundaries through asset ownership, capital gains, property aesthetics, and debt relationships.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Julien Migozzi is an economic geographer and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, after appointments at Oxford University and the École Normale Supérieure. At the intersection of geography, urban studies and economic sociology, Julien's research investigates how digital technologies affect markets, cities, and inequalities, with a particular interest in housing and financial markets. At Cambridge, Julien is teaching a course on digital capitalism. He is a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024).
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/julien-migozzi.
Higher education is facing mounting pressures, from political intervention and financial challenges to attacks on academic freedom. These tensions are visible in the University of California system, where debates over funding, governance, labor, and public mission are increasingly shaping the future of public universities.
Recorded on February 9, 2026, this panel brought together leading scholars to examine the forces challenging public higher education today. Drawing on areas spanning finance, policy, and labor, the discussion explored how these dynamics are shaping the UC System, and what is at stake for students, employees, the public, and the future of higher education.
The panel featured Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced; Katherine Newman, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California; and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Christopher Kutz, C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology.
A transcript of this event can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/higher-ed-under-attack.
Recorded on February 19, 2026, this video presents a lecture by Ula Taylor, Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies. The talk centered on Professor Taylor's current work in progress, an oral biography of Frances M. Beal.
The talk was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies.
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/taylor-teach-in.
About Matrix Teach-Ins
Matrix Teach-Ins are a new series designed to bring UC Berkeley's most engaging social science lectures into a public setting. Instructors will share their favorite lesson, the one students remember long after the semester ends, as a stand-alone lecture reimagined for anyone curious to learn.
Abstract
In this talk, I am going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances M. Beal's Black Feminist House. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments where she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical during the 1960s and 70s. Understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st-century activists because I explore fatigue and failures alongside empowering sisterhood, pleasurable heterosexual sex, and disciplined study. By doing so, I aim to bring to the fore the exhaustion and exhilaration.
About the Speaker
Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities. Her articles on African American Women's History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women's History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for UC Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor, and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.
Corruption is a persistent challenge in America, shaping institutions, influencing policy, and eroding public trust. Understanding its roots, mechanisms, and consequences is essential for assessing the health of democratic governance.
On February 3, 2026, Social Science Matrix brought together leading scholars from business, political science, and law to examine the many facets of corruption in the United States and the ways it is identified, constrained, and addressed.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Political Science, this Matrix on Point panel featured Sarah Anzia, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley, Erwin Chemerinsky, Jesse H. Chopper Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, and Ernesto Dal Bó, Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at the UC Berkeley Haas School. Sean Gailmard, Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy, moderated.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/corruption-in-america
What are the economic consequences of starting, but not completing college? On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Sarah Harrington, Program Manager at Social Science Matrix, spoke with Sarah Payne, a sociologist who recently published a paper in Sociology of Education that examined what happens when students begin college but fail to graduate. "Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt," Payne wrote. "However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated."
Payne is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. She earned a PhD and an MA in sociology from UC Berkeley and bachelor's degrees from Wellesley College. She studies culture, inequality, and organizations, particularly in contexts of education and precarious work, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research investigates how racial inequality is produced, reproduced, and mitigated, as well as the meaning people make of it. She examines PK-12 schools, higher education, and work in early adulthood as contexts where these processes happen. She is particularly interested in inequality at the intersections of race, gender, and class, and in how subjectivity (selves, emotions, mental health, social psychology, agency), culture, and debt relate to racial inequality in organizations and society. Payne's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley.
Prior to graduate school, Payne worked in PK-12 public education and college access, state government, and public interest organizing. She has been a middle school teacher and college counselor in Louisiana, and she co-founded College Beyond, a college persistence non-profit serving Pell-eligible undergraduates in the Greater New Orleans region.
A full transcript of the recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sarah-payne.
Recorded on December 4, 2025, this video features a Social Science Matrix Distinguished Lecture, "To Know a Place," presented by journalist and author Alexis Madrigal. Madrigal has long explored how technology, culture, and environment shape our lives; from his work co-founding The COVID Tracking Project to his books Powering the Dream and The Pacific Circuit. In this talk, Madrigal turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he explores different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us. About the Speaker Alexis Madrigal is a journalist in Oakland, California. He is the co-host of KQED's current affairs show, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, The Pacific Circuit, came out in March 2025 from MCD x FSG. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. Madrigal authored the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School and UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard. A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/alexis-madrigal.
Recorded on December 2, 2025, this video features a talk by Maximilian Kasy, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, presenting his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits).
This talk was part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.
The talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Economics.
A transcript of this recording can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/max-kasy.
About the Book AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate.
As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners' wants and ends.
Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn't between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.
The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology's owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI's objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls "the means of prediction," or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy.
As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity's most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power. Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI's capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms.
The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.
About the Speaker Maximilian Kasy received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His current research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. Kasy teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. Learn more at his website.
Recorded on November 17, 2025, this recording features a talk by Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who presented a talk reflecting on his experiences with collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland's Fruitvale District.
Lunine's courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, which aims to transform how faculty's community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy.
In Fall 2024, students in Lunine's Geography 50AC: California collaborated with Canticle Farm and Restorative Media, two nonprofits located in the Oakland Fruitvale District. ACES students developed story maps to represent the spatial histories of the Canticle Farm site. To create these story maps, they analyzed historical newspaper articles, real estate promotions, archeological reports, and city planning documents, revealing legacies of Indigenous stewardship, the Brown Power movement, redlining, and criminalization that has shaped Canticle Farm. Another group of ACES students collaborated with the Executive Director of Restorative Media, an organization led by formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people, to interview Canticle Farm stakeholders about their movement activism and life stories.
This event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center, and presented as part of a new event series featuring talks by UC Berkeley lecturers and professors who earn praise from students for their teaching. The speakers are invited to deliver a favorite standalone lecture, reimagined for anyone curious to learn.
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/seth-lunine.
The technical world of insurance is a critical lens through which to understand the escalating crises in climate change and housing. As climate risks intensify, both public and private homeowner insurance markets face unprecedented pressure, revealing the interconnections between housing affordability, wealth inequality, and the broader financialization of our communities.
Recorded on November 13, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore the intersection of insurance, housing, and climate. The panel featured Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Meg Mills-Novoa, Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/financializing-disaster.
Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes.
Recorded on November 3, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. The discussion bridged diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments.
The panel featured You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Anthropology.
A video and transcript of this podcast are available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/spaces-for-thriving
Conspiracy theories are a pervasive and powerful force in contemporary society, shaping public discourse and influencing real-world events. Understanding their origins, spread, and impact is crucial in navigating today's information landscape.
Recorded on October 27, 2025, this panel brought together experts to delve into the multifaceted world of conspiracy theories. Drawing on diverse academic perspectives, the discussion explored the nature of conspiracy theories, their societal implications, and how they are understood and addressed.
The panel featured Michael M. Cohen, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and Tim Tangherlini, Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Lakshmi Sarah, journalist and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, moderated.
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian, African American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory.
A video and transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/conspiracy-theories.
On October 15, 2025, Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, by Patrice Douglass, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley.
Professor Douglass was joined in conversation by Salar Mameni, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Henry Washington, Jr., Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
About the Book In this incisive book, Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human.
By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence — one of the most prevalent under slavery — continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. "Engendering Blackness" urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.
For a transcript of this panel, please see https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/engendering-blackness.
Recorded on September 22, 2025, this video features a talk by Davon Norris, Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) and Faculty Associate at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan.
Professor Norris's research is broadly oriented to understanding how our ways of determining what is valuable informs patterns of inequality with an acute focus on racism and racial inequality. Often, this means he studies the history, construction, and operation of various ratings, scores, and rankings whether that be at the government level (i.e., government credit ratings) or individual level (i.e., consumer credit scores). Other work that comes out of this interest in valuation processes further probes questions related to finance and the role of credit and debt in shaping inequality.
His research has been published in outlets such as Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Social Problems, and Sociological Forum, and has received awards from the Future of Privacy Forum and American Sociological Association. His work has been funded by the American Sociological Association. Davon received his Bachelor of Science in Accounting (2014), Master of Arts in Sociology (2018) and Ph.D. (2022) in Sociology all from The Ohio State University.
This talk, "Legitimation by (Mis)identification: Credit, Discrimination, and the Racial Epistemology of Algorithmic Expansion," was presented as part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. (Learn more at: https://crels.berkeley.edu/.)
The event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/davon-norris
Borders reflect the many social, historical, and political forces that shape global movement and identity. While borders often suggest fixed lines of division, the experiences within and around them increasingly influence national and global understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and human rights.
Recorded on October 1, 2025, this panel together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of history, sociology, and ethnic studies for a discussion on borders and their impact, particularly through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The panel featured Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate in History; Adriana Ramirez, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Irene Franco Rubio, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies. Hidetaka Hirota, Professor of History, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix New Directions event series features research presentations by graduate students from different social science disciplines. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, Department of Ethnic Studies, and Department of History.
For a transcript of this podcast, visit https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/borderlands.
The innovation, use and experience, and exchange of new and emerging technologies today are influenced by the role that China plays in global politics and economy.
Recorded on April 18, 2025, this Matrix on Point panel brought together experts of the Chinese political economy and law and society in a conversation to discuss the political, economic, security, and social dimensions and complexities of technology in China’s internationalization during times of global tensions. Topics covered included the institutional foundations of China’s technological development, technology governance and industrial policy, global technology competition, and legal technology and societal impacts in today’s China.
The panel featured Mark Dallas, Professor of Political Science and Science, Technology, and Society at Union College; Roselyn Hsueh, Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Berkeley. AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the School of Information, served as chair and moderator.
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation.
The panel was co-presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies (IIS), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science. This public panel is a part of the two-day Bringing the Sector Back In conference, also co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
A video recording of this panel is available on YouTube.
A transcript of this recording can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/tech-and-china
Large corporations increasingly dominate markets, the flow of information, and political influence. In response, many governments have used antitrust policies in an attempt to rein in companies. Examples include investigations and cases brought by the United States and the European Union against Google, in addition to major investigations against Microsoft, Facebook, and others.
Recorded on April 25, 2025, this Matrix on Point panel brought together scholars of political science, economics, and law to discuss the changing landscape of antitrust policy in an era of multinational corporations.
The panel included Michael Allen, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; Prasad Krishnamurthy, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley; and Amy Pond, Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Ryan Brutger, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The panelists spoke about new challenges in competition policy, the domestic and international dimensions of antitrust policy, and the economic, political, and social considerations that shape antitrust policy and enforcement.
The event was presented as part of Matrix On Point, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
A transcript of the panel this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/governing-giants.
Recorded on April 23, 2025, this event marked the 150th anniversary of the Page Act of 1875, one of the first federal laws to restrict immigration to the United States — especially Asian immigration, as the law prohibited the importation of Asian contract workers, prostitutes (a provision targeted against Chinese women), and criminals.
The interdisciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors discussed their current work related to race, gender, or labor in US immigration history or Asian American Studies, and their thoughts on the legacies of the Page Act and related issues for the United States today. Panelists included Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Leti Volpp, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley; and Matrix Faculty Fellow Hidetaka Hirota, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Department of History, Department of Ethnic Studies, the Asian American Research Center, and the Center for Race and Gender.
A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/page-act.
Are we witnessing a backlash to the progress of gender equality around the world? New research reveals a growing gender gap in attitudes across a range of topics, particularly striking among younger generations. From polarized views on social issues to contrasting expectations regarding marriage and family, this divergence in outlook between genders points to deeper societal fissures.
This panel brought together experts to discuss the contours and complexities of this “new gender gap” and explore its ramifications for politics, demography, and societal cohesion. Recorded on April 7, 2025, this recording features Xiaoling Shu, Professor of Sociology at UC Davis; and Rachel Bernhard, Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Kiera Hudson, Assistant Professor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, moderated.
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
This panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), the UC Berkeley Department of Demography, the Berkeley Population Center, the Haas School of Business, and the Center for Research on Social Change.
A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/new-gender-gap
Recorded on April 4, 2025, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims, by Shari Huhndorf, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.
Professor Shari Huhndorf was joined in conversation by Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, and Luanne Redeye, Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and the Department of Ethnic Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.
About the Book
Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.
A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/native-lands.
For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, recorded in Fall 2023, Julia Sizek interviewed Morgan P. Vickers, an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice at the University of Washington. Vickers received their Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and their B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Vickers is currently a Content Editor for Environmental History Now and an Executive Board member of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They previously worked with The Black Geographic, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Community Histories Workshop, A Red Record, and the Landscape Specialty Group of AAG.
The interview focused on Vickers' research on drowned towns of the Santee-Cooper Project in South Carolina, wherein 901 families were displaced in the name of New Deal “progress.” Vickers' work highlights New Deal infrastructures, transformed ecologies (notably, swamplands), and dispossessed (racialized) populations in order to challenge myths of universal progress and narratives of purportedly moral geographies.
Thematically, Vickers' work contemplates Black ecologies, placemaking, federal dam and reservoir projects, racial capitalism, moral geographies, community memory studies, and questions of belonging.
Transcript
A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/morgan-vickers
Recorded on April 1, 2025, this video features a talk by AJ Alvero, a computational sociologist at Cornell University, presenting findings from an analysis of parole hearing transcripts in California.
This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The talk was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS).
Abstract
In California, candidates for parole are able to present their case with the support of an attorney to commissioners appointed by the state. These hearings are professionally transcribed, making them highly amenable to a variety of social scientific questions and computational text analysis. In this talk, I will discuss a large project analyzing every parole hearing transcript in California that occurred from November 2007 until November 2019, along with a wealth of administrative data, some of which was obtained after successfully suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In some of our early work, we find that patterns in the text based on the words being used and who is using them (e.g., words used by the parole commissioner) have stronger explanatory power than variables used in past studies. To conclude, I will discuss forthcoming work which takes advantage of the unique structure of the transcripts.
Transcript
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/AJ-Alvero
Recorded on March 18, 2025, this video features a talk by Alexander F. Roehrkasse, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. Roehrkasse’s research focuses on inequality, victimization, punishment, families and children, and quantitative and historical methods.
His work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Social Forces, and other leading journals. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.
This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS).
Abstract
The dynamics of inequality in mass incarceration are rapidly changing and poorly understood. In this talk, I present new evidence of declining Black–White inequality and skyrocketing educational inequality in U.S. prison admissions. I qualify these findings by documenting vast racial disparities in indirect contact with the carceral system through families and neighborhoods. I conclude by discussing possible causes of recent inequality trends and potential research strategies for identifying them.
Transcript
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/roehrkasse
Psychedelics are steadily moving from the fringes of counterculture to the heart of mainstream society, driven by a growing body of research and shifting public perception. Once relegated to underground movements, substances like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are now being explored for their potential in treating mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety.
High-profile studies at institutions like Johns Hopkins and Stanford have highlighted their therapeutic benefits, while cities like Denver and Oakland have decriminalized their use. In addition, psychedelic retreats, wellness practices, and even art and tech industries are embracing these substances as tools for creativity, self-discovery, and healing. As psychedelics shed their stigma, they are catalyzing a broader conversation about mental health, spirituality, and the boundaries of human consciousness.
Recorded on March 6, 2025, this panel featured Diana Negrin, Lecturer of Geography at UC Berkeley; David Presti, Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley; Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; and Graham Pechenik, a patent attorney and founder of Calyx Law. Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, moderated.
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation.
This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Program in Critical Theory, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Center for Research on Social Change, the UC Berkeley Department of English, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/mainstreaming-psychedelics
One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.
The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.
We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.
Episode 3 As universities across England and Wales continue to announce redundancies, close departments and programs we talk to political theorist Lorna Finlayson about the nature of the crisis, why academics are relatively restrained in their responses to it, and how students offer some hope for alternative visions of higher education.
A transcript of this interview can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/finlayson.
As wildfires grow more frequent and devastating, they expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, governance, and community preparedness. Tackling this escalating threat demands interdisciplinary solutions that address not just the immediate risks but also the broader systemic changes driving extreme weather events.
Recorded on February 18, 2025, this Matrix on Point discussion (presented by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix) featured Christopher Ansell, Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM); Kenichi Soga, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure; and Marta Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning. Louise Comfort, Professor Emerita and Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, moderated.
This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).
The panel was presented by US Berkeley's Social Science Matrix as part of Matrix On Point, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
Transcript
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/LA-wildfires
Recorded on February 10, 2025, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, by Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow.
Professor Barrera de la Torre was joined in-person to introduce the book, and Professor Ince presented remotely. The authors were joined in conversation by Dylan John Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Anna Stilz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.
About the Book
The logic of the state has come to define social and spatial relations, embedding itself into our understandings of the world and our place in it. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre challenge this logic as the central pivot around which knowledge and life orbit, by exposing its vulnerabilities, contradictions and, crucially, alternatives.
"Society Despite the State" disrupts the dominance of state-centred ways of thinking by presenting a radical political geography approach inspired by anarchist thought and practice. The book draws on a broad range of voices that have affinities with Western anarchism but also exceed it. This book challenges radicals and scholars to confront and understand the state through a way of seeing and a set of intellectual tools that the authors call ‘post-statism’ In de-centring the state’s logics and ways of operating, the authors incorporate a variety of threads to identify alternative ways to understand and challenge statism’s effects on our political imaginations.
Transcript
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/society-despite-the-state.
Julia Sizek is a writer and anthropologist who studies the California desert and rural land management more broadly. Her work focuses on the politics of land in the California desert, including: the cultural politics of conservation acquisition in the railroad checkerboard, the rhetoric of environmental impact reporting, and the legal geographies of off-highway vehicle use. In addition to this work, Julia has also led the qualitative portion of the 30-year social and economic monitoring for the Northwest Forest Plan. Previously, Julia was a postdoctoral scholar at Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, running programs, planning events, and interviewing social scientists about their research. Julia also hosted the Matrix Podcast.
In this interview, recorded in Spring 2024, Sizek talked with Marion Fourcade, Director of Social Science Matrix, about her paper “Impossible evidence: The legal dismal cycle of regulating off-roading in the California desert,” published in Geoforum. The paper traces a 40-year battle over off-road vehicle use in the California desert through the concept of "impossible evidence," evidence that is legally demanded but cannot or does not exist. In a forthcoming summer 2025 article in Environmental History, Julia builds on this story by detailing the rise of the “Bureau of Livestock and Motorcycles” in California.
A transcript of this episode can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sizek-interview.
Fringe politics today is highly diverse and dynamic, reflecting the rapid social, technological, and economic changes of the 21st century. While the term “fringe” suggests ideas or movements outside the political mainstream, many fringe ideologies have increasingly influenced, or even reshaped, national and global political landscapes.
Recorded on February 4, 2025, this panel brought together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of geography, anthropology, and sociology for a discussion on politics on the fringe through the lens of such topics as QAnon, religious studies, and California secessionism.
The panel featured Josefina Valdes Lanas, PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley; Alexis Wood, PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley; and Peter Forberg, PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Department of Sociology, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/fringe-politics.
As one of the nation’s agricultural powerhouses, California’s farming industry stands at a critical juncture. Climate change, labor availability and migration, and rapidly evolving technologies are reshaping the landscape of agriculture in the Golden State.
This panel, presented as part of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series, brought together experts to analyze these changes and explore their implications for agricultural communities and rural economies. The panel featured Federico Castillo, Lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and Project Scientist at the College of Natural Resources; Julie Guthman, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz; and Eric Edwards, Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. Timothy Bowles, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS); the Berkeley Food Institute; the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI); and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/future_CA_agriculture
The American election closed out a year of momentous elections. Almost two decades on from the financial crisis of 2007 that helped unleash a wave of authoritarian, populist, and nativist movements in global democracies, a range of social and political forces have reshaped elections around the world.
What do the election results tell us about the health or fragility of global democracy, and how might we better understand the outcome of the American election as part of a broader global process?
Recorded on November 21, 2024, this panel featured a group of UC Berkeley scholars discussing the 2024 elections in different parts of the world. The panel featured James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor, History; Alison Post, Associate Professor, Political Science; Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor, History; Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; and Kwanele Sosibo, Lecturer, Art History.
Presented as part of the Global Democracy Commons initiative.
A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/making-sense-elections.
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Tara Chandra, a consultant and independent researcher who received a PhD in in Political Science with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley. Chandra's research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked in foreign policy in Washington, D.C. She holds a Master's degree in Global Affairs from Yale and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Social Science Matrix, and focused on Chandra's work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. [Note that the interview was conducted while Chandra was still a PhD candidate.]
A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/tara-chandra.
In this "New Directions" panel, recorded on December 2, 2024, an interdisciplinary group of UC Berkeley graduate students explored the evolving dynamics of work, management, and labor organization.
The panel featured research by three current Berkeley PhD students: William Darwell (Jurisprudence and Social Policy), Kristy Kim (Economics), and Vera Parra (Sociology). The panel was moderated by John Logan, Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
The presenters' studies focus on such topics as the impact of pension systems on workforce participation, labor union organizing in automotive supply chains across North America, and how different political and economic systems influence workplace management practices.
This event was co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the Berkeley Law Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/new-directions-labor.
Recorded on December 3, 2024, this podcast episode features an Authors Meet Critics panel on Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Stephanie L. Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.
Professor Canizales was joined in conversation by Kristina Lovato, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and Caitlin Patler, Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Sarah Song, Professor at Berkeley Law, moderated.
This event was presented by Social Science Matrix as part of the Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Latinx Research Center.
A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sin-padres.
Recorded on November 13, 2024, this Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China, by Yan Long, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.
Professor Long was joined in conversation by Matthew Kohrman, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law, and the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. The panel was moderated by Tom Gold, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
The panel was presented as part of the Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
About the Book
Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China’s pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state’s inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state’s domestic control and international status.
Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China’s AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.
Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China’s subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/authoritarian-absorption-panel.
Gold Okafor is a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research questions include, "how does the race and gender of an emotional person influence the judgments of the emotional person?" For example, how is an angry Black woman judged differently from an angry White woman, and what are the downstream consequences? And how do we accurately measure mindfulness, an emotion regulation strategy, within Black Americans?
Okafor is Ford Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. Her past papers include "Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire." This interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, who was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at Social Science Matrix.
A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/gold-okafor.
Recorded on October 25, 2024, this panel examined the shifting demographic and political forces that are redefining the traditional bases of the Democratic and Republican parties and their efforts to build new electoral coalitions. Panelists analyzed voter trends and realignment along key dimensions, including gender, age, race and ethnicity, and explored how issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, and threats to democracy are motivating different segments of the electorate.
The panel featured Ian Haney López, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley; David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley; and Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science. Moderated by G. Cristina Mora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy), and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/shifting-alignments.
Global Democracy Commons Podcast: Episode 2 In the run up to the American election we talked to Todd Wolfson, the new President of AAUP, about how public disinvestment from higher education and the culture wars have transformed colleges in ways that make them less democratic places — and imperil democracy across the country.
A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/todd-wolfson.
About the Series
One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.
The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.
We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.
Over the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia; Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas, talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie; and Lisa Pruitt has straddled the rural-urban divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of rural legal access.
As the nation braced for a decisive election, this conversation — recorded on October 21 — sought to illuminate the frequently overlooked yet politically potent voices emanating from America’s rural heartlands and small towns. The panel was moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies.
About the Speakers Arlie R. Hochschild is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, details rise of the right. Her latest book, ‘Stolen Pride: loss, shame and the rise of the right’ is based on six years of field work in eastern Kentucky and focuses on the politics of pride and shame. In particular, it focuses on the distress caused by “structural shaming” in an era of post-70s economic decline, a shame which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement.
Lisa Pruitt is Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis. Pruitt’s work reveals how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales, (e.g., material spatiality, lack of anonymity) profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory.
Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.
Cihan Tuğal (moderator) studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Tuğal is currently working on a book that will incorporate these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.
Watch the panel above or on YouTube.
Listen to the panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/voices-heartland.
Recorded on October 9, 2024, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era, by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
The authors were joined in conversation by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Mark Danner, Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics event series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
About Partisan Nation The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras.
In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.
Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.
Watch the video on YouTube.
A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/partisan-nation.
War is back. Open military operations in Europe and the Middle East have driven an escalation of geopolitical tensions in those regions. The conduct of warfare is changing, too, fueled by the deployment and sometimes live-testing of new technologies. Meanwhile, a new cold war seems to be settling in. The growth of China's economic power and worldwide influence has triggered proliferating sovereignty disputes and defensive trade and security policies.
In this Matrix on Point panel, UC Berkeley experts discussed these and other transformations, and offered their views on what to expect in the short to medium term.
Recorded on September 30, 2024, the panel featured Michaela Mattes, Associate Professor in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley; Andrew W. Reddie, Associate Research Professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and Founder of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab; and Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and Co-Director for the Institute of International Studies.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute of International Studies, the panel was moderated by Vinod Aggarwal, Distinguished Professor and Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair in Asian Studies, in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at UC Berkeley.
Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/war-is-back.
One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe. The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest. We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy. Episode 1: Understanding Academic Freedom: Interview with Hank Reichman To mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and the introduction of new restrictions on protests at the University of California and at over a 100 campuses across the U.S., our first podcast explores the relationship of free speech and academic freedom to the fragile history of democracy in America over the past century. James Vernon, Director of the Global Democracy Commons, talks to Hank Reichman, Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay and a former AAUP vice-president who chaired its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure for almost a decade, from 2012-2021. A new edition of his last book, Understanding Academic Freedom, will be out in Spring 2025. A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/hank-reichman.
On Sept. 16, 2024, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel focused on the book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.
In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess.
Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work’s stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor.
For this panel, Professor Rodriguez was joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. The discussion was moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. The panel was co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/puta-life/
While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a 2023-2024 Research Team at Social Science Matrix.
Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley's History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina's history of convict labor, and shows how incarcerated labor shaped (and in turn, was shaped by) the state's highway systems, landscapes, and scenic tourism industries in the early decades of the 20th century.
Xander Lenc is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley's Geography Department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns—and their problems—from other economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. In doing so, he argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography.
An edited transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/prisoner-labor-legacies.
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China.
Ross Doll is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.
Coleman R. Mahler is a PhD Candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is a history of information and truth in postwar China and Taiwan, exploring how governments across the Taiwan Strait gathered and analyzed agricultural data, and how these mass data gathering projects produced new understandings and practices of truth-making. He has published in journals including The PRC History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).
A transscript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/agricultural-modernization.
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas, who at the time of the interview were Ph.D. candidates in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow.
Jenna Wells is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the clinical science area at the University of California, Berkeley and a clinical psychology intern at the University of California, San Francisco, specializing in neuropsychological assessment of older adults. Her research examines interpersonal emotional phenomena in connection with aging and mental and physical health, with a focus on dementia caregiving relationships. She is interested in identifying factors that are associated with individual differences in caregivers' health and well-being, and ultimately, hopes this work will inform the development of targeted, evidence-based interventions for caregivers of people with dementia.
Felicia Zerwas is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with a team at New York University on the community science initiative, MindHive. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the social-personality psychology area at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on understanding the role that emotions play in the formation and maintenance of close relationships. Since we rarely experience emotions in isolation, she examines how individuals experience and express their emotions in the presence of others, like a friend or romantic partner. Ultimately, she is interested in how those emotion related processes influence measures of relationship quality such as intimacy, perceived support, and conflict.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/dyadic-emotions/
For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, J.T. Jamieson, a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Pérez is a historian of the United States who specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research focuses on migrant sugar beet workers in Colorado, and explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post Civil War.
Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, Pérez was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2017-2020, where she taught courses in History and American Studies. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. In 2018, her dissertation won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
A transcript of this interview is availabile at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/bernadette-perez/.
Contemporary writers and activists have described the climate crisis as, in part, a crisis of the imagination, of culture, and of storytelling. Recorded on March 11, 2024, this panel featured a group of authors and scholars of different genres — science fiction, journalism, history, literary fiction, and comedy — discussing how the climate crisis has impacted their craft and what practices of storytelling have to offer us at this pivotal moment in human history. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of English, the Department of History, and the Berkeley School of Journalism.
Panelists Daniel Gumbiner is a novelist and editor based in Oakland. His first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award. His new novel, Fire in the Canyon, was published by Astra House in 2023. He is the Editor of The Believer.
Annalee Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist. They are the author of nine books including, most recently, the science fiction novel The Terraformers. They are a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, a columnist in the The New Scientist, and the co-host of an award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
Aaron Sachs is a professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, most recently, Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change (NYU Press, 2023).
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and a graduate of the Berkeley School of Journalism. She has written more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Together with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Solnit edited the 2023 collection Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.
Rebecca Herman (moderator) is associate professor in the History Department at UC Berkeley and author of Cooperating with the Colossus (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a book about the unlikely ban on mining in Antarctica, told through the stories of the military wives and children, artists, writers, activists, soldiers, and scientists who traveled South in growing numbers during the 1970s and 80s.
A video and transcript of this event are available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/storytelling-climate
As the effects of climate change become more obvious, moving away from fossil fuels has only become more urgent. But to do so, new energy sources – and new infrastructure – are desperately needed.
Recoreded on March 20, 2024, this panel features three early-career scholars from UC Berkeley presenting their research on the greening infrastructure and the green energy transition. The panel included Johnathan Guy, PhD Candidate in Political Science; Caylee Hong, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, and Andrew Jaeger, PhD Candidate in Sociology. The panel was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Co-Sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, the Berkeley Climate Change Network, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.
Presented by Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
A video and transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/greening-infrastructure/
Recorded on March 18, 2024, this panel focused on Professor Alex V. Barnard’s book, Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness. The book analyzes conservatorship, a legal system used to take legal guardianship over individuals deemed unable to meet their own basic needs. This controversial system, which has come under fire from civil liberties and disability rights groups, is at the center of state policies for mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Through interviews with policy makers, professionals, families, and conservatees, Barnard shows how the system operates, and its many shortcomings.
At this event — part of the Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series — Professor Barnard was joined by Lauren Rettagliata, whose comments on her lived experience of the system complement Barnard's discussion of his research. The discussion was moderated by Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law at Berkeley Law.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), Department of Sociology, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.
A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/conservatorship.
About the Speakers Alex V. Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at NYU, holding a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. His work examines cross-national differences in the trajectory of people with severe mental illness between different institutions of care and control. His book, Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. He is currently working on another book, tentatively titled, Mental States: Ordering Psychiatric Disorder in France.
Lauren Rettagliata is the mom of four sons, the oldest has Autism, the youngest has Schizophrenia. Almost five decades ago, she worked on committees that formulated federal legislation that ensconced into federal law protection for a free appropriate education for all children. Lauren found herself back home in California at the time her youngest son was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. The world changed for her. She had to search the streets and delta for her son who spent many years homeless and fell into drug addiction. Her son has been conserved. Lauren’s advocacy now centers around Housing That Heals.
Moderator Jonathan Simon joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2003 as part of the J.D., JSP, and Legal Studies programs. He teaches in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, criminology, legal studies and the sociology of law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His published works include over seventy articles and book chapters, and three single authored monographs, including: Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass (University of Chicago 1993, winner of the American Sociological Association’s sociology of law book prize, 1994), Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press 2007, winner of the American Society of Criminology, Hindelang Award 2010) and Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New Press 2014).
Recorded on March 4, 2024, this Authors Meet Critics panel focused on Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics, by Professor Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Professor Mameni was joined by Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz; Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley; and Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory, the Art Research Center, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Department of Art History, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative.
About the Book In Terracene, Professor Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.
A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/terracene
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Caroline Tracey, who holds a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, and whose research uses ethnographic, archival, and literary methods to study the American Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border. Tracey's dissertation, "Binational Politics from Intimate Scales: Motherist, Feminist, Queer and Trans Activism by Deportees and Return Migrants in Mexico City," responds to existing scholarship that has focused on deportation as a male phenomenon, and argues that women and trans deportees and returnees carry out fundamental community-building and activism on the ground in Mexico that has improved emplacement over the long term for all return migrants.
As a journalist, Tracey's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other outlets, and in Spanish she is a frequent contributor to Mexico's Nexos. She is currently the Climate Justice reporting fellow at the High Country News and an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square.
The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Social Science Matrix. An edited transcript of the interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
Recorded on May 2, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this video features a roundtable conversation with Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, focused on The Paradox of Freedom, an interview with Patterson by David Scott, originally published in Small Axe in 2013. The interview has recently been published by Wiley as a book.
In their interview, Scott and Patterson discussed the sociologist and novelist’s childhood, education, public service, and books. The conversation reflected on Patterson’s intellectual biography and his groundbreaking analysis of the political entanglement between slavery and freedom.
Joining Patterson in conversation for this Social Science Matrix Roundtable Discussion were Ricarda Hammer, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The discussion was moderated by Caitlin Rosenthal, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.
Recorded on May 1, 2023, this episode of the Matrix Podcast features a lecture by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, entitled “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil.”
Presented as the Matrix Distinguished Lecture, the lecture was presented at Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary center at the University of California, Berkeley. Stephen Best, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, was the discussant. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of the West Indies, his alma mater, and the London School of Economics where he received his Ph.D. His academic interests include the culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean and African American youth. He has also written on the cultural sociology of sports, especially the game of cricket.
Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and six major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); The Ordeal of Integration (1997); and The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (2015). A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was a guest columnist for several weeks. His columns have also appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and The Washington Post.
Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines.
To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice. Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018). His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Kimberly Cecilia Burke, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, researches the relationships between institutional violence and social stratification, utilizing multi-level mixed-methods analysis. Her dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how Black-White interracial couples understand and experience police violence in their relationships. Her current research aims to determine how the dynamics of intimate partnerships can perpetuate and challenge patterns of racial inequality structured by police violence. As a scholar-activist, Kimberly is guided by feminist ethics of love and mutuality and seeks to bring insights from social science to the broader public to advance social equity.
For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek interviewed Burke about her research.
Recorded on February 22, 2023, this podcast features a lecture by Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University.
In this talk, “Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty,” Amin discusses a key architect of Modern Sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Amin argues that Hirschfeld’s work allows us to track the process by which the bourgeois Western notion of sexuality as a form of innate selfhood subsumed sex as a social and spatial practice. By turning to Hirschfeld’s work, Amin’s talk argues that the fundamental problem of queer of color critique — that of how sexuality conceals and transacts more salient hierarchies of power — was born with the epistemological invention of sexuality.
The event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the UC Berkeley Department of French. Additional support was provided by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. The event was organized and moderated by Professor Salar Mameni, a Matrix Faculty Fellow.
Recorded on March 22, 2023, this talk — "The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out" — features Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet.
Boushey is co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she was President and CEO from 2013-2020. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary Clinton’s 2016 transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.
This talk was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Society and Economy Initiative (BESI), the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and Social Science Matrix.
Abstract The Biden-Harris Administration began at a time of intersecting crises, including the pandemic, rising inequality, stagnating economic growth, and the large and growing costs of climate change. The President, in partnership with Congress and state and local governments, took rapid action with policies that have spurred the strongest and most equitable economic and labor market recovery in modern history — including legislation to enhance the resilience of our supply chains, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. These historic measures, together forming the core of the Modern American Industrial Strategy, were designed with an understanding that strategic public investments are essential to achieving the full potential of our nation’s economy — one built from the bottom up and middle out, where the gains of economic growth are shared.
Recorded on March 23, 2023, this talk featured Phil Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, discussing his new book (co-authored with Samuel Perry), The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. The respondent was David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. Carolyn Chen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Ethnic Studies, moderated.
The talk was jointly sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR), the Center for Right-Wing Studies, and Social Science Matrix. The event was part of the BCSR Public Forum on Race, Religion, Democracy and the American Dream.
About the Speaker
Philip S. Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. His other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life.
Among his recent publications are The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003); Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford, 2004); and “The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation,” Sociological Methodology, 2004. Gorski is Co-Director (with Julia Adams) of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research (CCR), and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center.
About the Book
Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation’s Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; “Jesus saves” and “Don’t Tread on Me;” Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus’ name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism.
In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it’s headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries—and especially its influence over the last three decades—they show how, throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand “sacrifice” from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their “rights” in the names of “liberty” and “property.”
White Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment. The future of American democracy, Gorski and Perry argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.
How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices?
Recorded on April 3, 2023, this panel featured experts explaining aspects of the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes.
The panel included Duncan Wigan, Professor with Special Responsibilities in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School; and Gabriel Zucman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley.
The panel was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix.
Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.
Recorded on March 8, 2023, this video features a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi’s lecture was entitled “Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century.”
Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of History, and D-Lab, this talk was presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab.
Abstract A world awash in text requires interpretive tools that traditional quantitative science cannot provide. Text mining is dangerous because analysts trained in quantification often lack a sense of what could go wrong when archives are biased or incomplete. Professor Guldi’s talk reviewed a brief catalogue of disasters created by data science experts who voyage into humanistic study. It finds a solution in “hybrid knowledge,” or the application of historical methods to algorithm and analysis.
Case studies engage recent work from the philosophy of history (including Koselleck, Erle, Assman, Tanaka, Chakrabarty, Jay, Sewell, and others) and investigate the “fit” of algorithms with each historical frame of reference on the past. This talk profiles recent research into the status of “memory” in British politics. It profiled the persistence of references to previous eras in British history, to historical conditions per se, and to futures hoped for and planned, using NLP analysis. It presented the promise and limits of text-mining strategies such as Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech Analysis for modeling temporal experience as a whole, suggesting how these methods might support students of social science and the humanities, and also revealing how traditional topics in these subjects offer a new research frontier for students of data science and informatics.
About the Speaker
Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include “The Distinctiveness of Different Eras,” American Historical Review (August 2022) and “The Official Mind’s View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Most nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa experienced some form of “land reform” in the 20th century. But what is land reform? In her book, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Professor Jo Guldi approaches the problem from the point of view of Britain’s disintegrating empire. She makes the case that land reform movements originated as an argument about reparations for the experience of colonization, and that they were championed by a set of leading administrators within British empire and in UN agencies at the beginning of the postwar period.
Using methods from the history of technology, she sets out to explain how international governments, national governments, market evangelists, and grassroots movements advanced their own solutions for realizing the redistribution of land. Her conclusions lead her to revisit the question of how states were changing in the twentieth century — and to extend our history of property ownership over the longue durée.
Recorded on March 8, 2023, this talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).
About the Speaker
Jo Guldi, professor of history and practicing data scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include “The Distinctiveness of Different Eras,” American Historical Review (August 2022) and “The Official Mind’s View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped global geopolitics, trade, and security. How will these changes affect the relationship between the US and China, Europe, and the Global South? How will they impact US firms operating globally, and how might foreign leaders — and notably the Chinese leadership — respond?
Recorded on February 16, 2023, this panel discussion featured a group of distinguished scholars addressing these questions, and the possible implications for the global multilateral order established in the second half of the 20th century.
The panel included Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; James Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies; Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund (who is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business and Director of the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy; and Laura Tyson, Class of 1939 Professor of Economics and Business Administration and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderaetd by John Zysman, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder/co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.
The panel was held in Spieker Forum at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy (https://clausen.berkeley.edu/).
Misinformation and conspiracy theories have become a central feature of modern life, but they have a long history that have served to justify surveillance and prosecution of marginalized groups. In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on March 15, 2023, a group of scholars who study these histories discussed how misinformation circulates, and the effects of such myths and stories on society.
The panel featured Timothy R. Tangherlini, Professor in the Scandinavian Department and Director of the Graduate Program in Folklore at UC Berkeley; Robert Braun, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; and Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and affiliated faculty in the Programs for Critical Theory and for Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, and the Department of Department of South and South East Asian Studies. The panel was moderated by Elena Conis, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
Presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. This panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Othering and Belonging Institute.
Recorded on March 7, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this Authors Meet Critics panel focused on To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, by Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Morris was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies. The panel was moderated by Lok Siu, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Gender & Women’s Studies.
About the Book To Defend this Sunrise examines how Black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, Black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, Black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine Black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
Recorded on March 6, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel focused on Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America, by Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. The recording also features a response by Julio Moreno, Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, and and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Caribbean History at UC Davis, and a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College. Elena Schneider, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History, moderated. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History.
About the Book
During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality. "Cooperating with the Colossus" reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites.
Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the “Colossus of the North” as best they could. Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice.
Drawing on archival research in five countries, "Cooperating with the Colossus" is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways.
Learn more about the book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cooperating-with-the-colossus-9780197531877?cc=us⟨=en&
Learn more about Social Science Matrix: https://matrix.berkeley.edu
On February 15, 2023, Social Science Matrix was honored to host Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture entitled "Reimagining Global Integration."
Abstract Whether they live in vast cities or rural villages, people in virtually every corner of the world have experienced enormous growth in cross-border economic, political, and social connections since World War II. This latest chapter in the story of transnational activity has coincided with enormous changes in the well-being of billions of people. As China gained access to global markets and its share of worldwide trade increased eight-fold in a single generation, for example, the percentage of its population living in extreme poverty plunged from 72 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2010. Global life expectancy has risen from less than 47 years in 1950 to 71 years in 2021, and the male-female gap in primary and secondary schooling globally has almost disappeared.
But increased cross-border trade, migration, flows of information, and political ties have also engendered an intense backlash to “globalization” and related concepts. Today, at a time of major geopolitical upheaval and technological change, policymakers and the public are vigorously debating the merits of domestic policies suitable for an interconnected world. They are exploring new trade and migration rules, reviving strategies for national industrial and technological development, and reflecting on the lessons of 1990s-style globalization for international law and institutions substantially influenced by the United States. Discussions of “reshoring” supply chains and United States-China economic “decoupling” are just two examples of rising concerns in Washington about cross-border ties.
Yet global cooperation remains vital to solving many of humanity’s most urgent challenges: mitigating and adapting to climate change, harnessing technology for the benefit of humanity while taming its risks, reducing poverty, and preventing violent conflict. By better understanding the long-simmering conflicts over global cooperation and integration, policymakers and civil society can further develop the ideas, institutions, and coalitions necessary to create a stable foundation for a more reflective version of global integration: one that addresses the connections between economic well-being and security, and better aligns domestic realities with international norms to tackle the pressing issues of our time.
About the Speaker A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies, and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades. Before serving on California’s highest court, Justice Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In this capacity, he oversaw programs on international security, governance and development, global health, cyber policy, migration, and climate change and food security. Previously, he co-directed the Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security.
While serving in the Obama White House as the president’s special assistant for justice and regulatory policy, he led the Domestic Policy Council teams responsible for civil and criminal justice reform, public health, immigration, transnational regulatory issues, and supporting the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. He then co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, and was a presidential appointee to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States. As a California Supreme Court justice, he oversaw reforms of the California court system’s operations to better meet the needs of millions of limited-English speakers.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar is the author of Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies (2013) and has published widely on American institutions, international affairs, and technology’s impact on law and government. Cuéllar co-authored the first ever report on the use of artificial intelligence across federal agencies. He has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.
He chairs the board of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and is a member of the Harvard Corporation. He currently serves on the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Earlier, he chaired the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, and co-chaired the Obama Biden Presidential Transition Task Force on Immigration.
Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he grew up primarily in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He began his career at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Zahra Hayat, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and is also trained as a lawyer with a background in intellectual property.
Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Hayat about her research on pharmaceutical access in the global South, particularly in Pakistan, and the regimes of price and property on which such access is contingent.
On February 1, 2023, Social Science Matrix presented an Authors Meet Critics panel on Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present, a book by Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
Professor Riley was joined by two discussants: Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and Donna Jones, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. The panel was moderated by Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and was co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
About the Book
Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.
Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and Fraser, to weigh sociology’s relationship to Marxism and the operations of class, race, and gender, alongside discursions into the workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in a pandemic.
Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the ‘present as history.'
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Adriana D. Kugler, the World Bank Group Executive Director for the United States. Dr. Kugler was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate in May 2022. She is the first Latinx person and first Jewish woman to be appointed to this position since the foundation of the World Bank in 1944. She is also a proud UC Berkeley alumna who graduated with a PhD in 1997.
Prior to joining the WBG Board, Dr. Kugler had a long and distinguished career in research and policy as a development and labor economist. Her contributions on the impact of government policies and regulations on labor markets were recognized with the 2007 John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and with the 2010 First Prize for Best Contribution in the area of “Globalization, Regulations and Development” from the Global Development Network. Dr. Kugler has also served in high-level leadership roles in the public and private sectors. She was Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor between 2011-2013.
Dr. Kugler was Professor of Public Policy and Economics (2016-2022), and Vice Provost for Faculty (2013-2016) at Georgetown University. She was Chair and Chair-elect of the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association in 2020 and 2019, respectively; was a member of the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (2019-2022); and served in the Technical Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016-2019). She was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Labor Economists (2003-2009) and of the Executive Committee of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (2015-2019). Dr. Kugler serves on the Audit Committee (AC) and Committee on Development Effectiveness (CODE). Kugler received her Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in 1991, graduating with first class joint honors in economics and political science.
This interview was conducted by Danny Yagan, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, who is on leave as Chief Economist of the Office of Management and Budget. Yagan was a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Associate of the Berkeley Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and Faculty Co-Director of the Taxation and Inequality Initiative of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab.
Learn more about Social Science Matrix at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
On November 9, 2022, Social Science Matrix hosted a panel discussion on “Authors Meet Critics” panel discussion on How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, by Sandra Eder, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Eder was joined in conversation by Laura Nelson, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and Danya Lagos, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. The panel was moderated by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging in the UC Berkeley Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History, the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS).
In How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, Eder tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-20th-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s.
In the wake of recent decisions on abortion, First Amendment rights, gun rights, Miranda rights, and jurisdiction over Native American reservations, the Supreme Court today seems particularly out of sync with the American people. In this Matrix on Point panel, a panel of experts from UC Berkeley discussed what these decisions and the conservative turn in the Supreme Court mean for the relationship between the court and the people.
Recorded on October 20, 2022, the panel featured Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law; Thomas Biolsi, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley; and Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel was moderated by Ronit Stahl, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
Recorded on October 10, 2022, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made, by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Social Science Matrix and a member of the faculty at Apple University. Robinson was joined in conversation by Iason Gabriel, a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, and Deirdre Mulligan, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG).
About the Book Algorithms – rules written into software – shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person’s traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?
Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software — exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm – a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.
Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.
Recorded on October 10, 2022, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made, by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Social Science Matrix and a member of the faculty at Apple University. Robinson was joined in conversation by Iason Gabriel, a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, and Deirdre Mulligan, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG).
About the Book Algorithms – rules written into software – shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person’s traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?
Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software — exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm – a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.
Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.
Presented on October 14, 2022 as part of the Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics series, this panel focused on the book Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley.
Professor Scott was joined in conversation by Ula Taylor, Professor & 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African-American Studies and African Diaspora; and Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. The panel was moderated by Greg Niemeyer, Professor of Media Innovation, Toban Fellow, Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program at UC Berkeley.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media.
About the Book Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.
Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.
Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal.
Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry. Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.
Presented on October 14, 2022 as part of the Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics series, this panel focused on the book Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley.
Professor Scott was joined in conversation by Ula Taylor, Professor & 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African-American Studies and African Diaspora; and Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. The panel was moderated by Greg Niemeyer, Professor of Media Innovation, Toban Fellow, Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program at UC Berkeley.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media.
About the Book Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.
Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.
Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal.
Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry. Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.
What role did American social and moral reformers play in managing human migrations? J.T. Jamieson, a Phd Candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of History, examines how social reformers in the first half of the 19th century sought to control migration and insert their own understandings of morality, social benevolence, and humanitarianism into the lives and experiences of migrants. In so doing, he argues, their reforms frequently perpetuated racial supremacy, religious supremacy, and Christian expansionism. In other words, they sought to determine who belongs in America — and who doesn’t.
Jamieson's dissertation, "A Mere Change of Location: Migration and Reform in America, 1787-1857," integrates the histories of religion, immigration, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and Western expansion to argue that 19th-century social and moral reformers attempted to control the mass migrations of various peoples: African Americans, Indigenous peoples, European immigrants, and American settlers. A forthcoming journal article, “Home Work: Religious Nationalism and the American Home Missionary Society,” will appear in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2023.
On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Jamieson about his research. A transcript is available on the Matrix website at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
Now more than ever, humanitarianism is being conducted at a distance. As humanitarian efforts shift from in-kind and in-person assistance to cash- and information-based assistance, how does this change what humanitarian work looks like?
Recorded on September 26, 2022, this "Matrix on Point" panel featured a group of scholars examining how technology raises new questions about the efficacy of humanitarian interventions, the human rights of recipients, and the broader power relations between donors and recipients.
The panel was moderated by Laurel E. Fletcher, Clinical Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic. The panel included Daragh Murray, Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre & School of Law; Fleur Johns, Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney; and Wendy H. Wong, Principal’s Research Chair, Professor, Political Science, The University of British Columbia.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, and the Human Rights Center.
This panel was presented as part of the Matrix On Point discussion series, an event series focused on cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These events are free and open to the public.
Recorded on September 30, 2022, this Matrix “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor in the University of California, Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies.
Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life. Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met.
Professor Chen was joined in conversation by Arlie Hochschild, Professor Emerita in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and Morgan Ames, Assistant Professor of Practice in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. The conversation was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix. The event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Berkeley Culture Center.
Monica Ellwood-Lowe is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology whose research focuses on differences between outcomes for students of different socioeconomic status, as well as the societal barriers that might hinder student success. Ellwood-Lowe tries to answer such questions as, what skills do children develop when they come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes, even in the face of societal barriers to success? Do children’s brains simply adapt to their respective environments?
Ellwood-Lowe is co-mentored by Professors Mahesh Srinivasan and Silvia Bunge. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. Her work is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, and the Greater Good Science Center.
For this episode of the Matrix podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Ellwood-Lowe about her recent research on the topic of children’s cognitive performance, and how we might think about removing barriers to children’s success.
On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two scholars whose work focuses on explanining how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years.
Alex Roehrkasse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. He studies the production of racial class and gender inequality in the United States through violence and social control. He was previously a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University.
Christopher Muller is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. He is particularly interested in how agricultural labor markets, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected incarceration and racial and class inequality in incarceration. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, and Science.
On Friday, September 9, 2022, Matrix hosted an "Authors Meet Critics" panel discussion on the book The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, by Stephen Collier, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, and Andrew Lakoff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This new book explores how experts and officials approach challenges like pandemics and cyberattacks as catastrophic risks.
The authors were joined in conversation by Cathryn Carson, Chair of the UC Berkeley Department of History, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Aihwa Ong, Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley. The panel was co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies.
On Friday, September 9, 2022, Matrix hosted an "Authors Meet Critics" panel discussion on the book The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, by Stephen Collier, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, and Andrew Lakoff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This new book explores how experts and officials approach challenges like pandemics and cyberattacks as catastrophic risks.
The authors were joined in conversation by Cathryn Carson, Chair of the UC Berkeley Department of History, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Aihwa Ong, Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley. The panel was co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies.
Why do people choose to go to college (or not)? What impact do race-based or financial aid policies have on higher education and the broader economy? In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley-trained economists whose research focuses on higher education and its impact on the broader economy.
Maximilian Müller completed his PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley this year and is now starting a position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality in Bonn. In Fall 2023 he will join the Toulouse School of Economics as an Assistant Professor. Maximilian is a behavioral economist studying questions in fields such as education, development, and family economics. In his research, he examines social influences on individual behavior around big life decisions, such as career choices, and their potential consequences for society-wide outcomes, such as social mobility. Prior to his PhD, he obtained an M.Phil. in Economics from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Zach Bleemer is an Assistant Professor of economics at the Yale School of Management and a research associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. His current research uses natural experiments to examine the net efficiency and equity ramifications of educational meritocracy, with recent studies on race-based affirmative action, race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, and university policies that restrict access to high-demand college majors. Zach holds a BA in philosophy, economics, and mathematics from Amherst College and a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley.
Why do people choose to go to college (or not)? What impact do race-based or financial aid policies have on higher education and the broader economy? In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley-trained economists whose research focuses on higher education and its impact on the broader economy.
Maximilian Müller completed his PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley this year and is now starting a position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality in Bonn. In Fall 2023 he will join the Toulouse School of Economics as an Assistant Professor. Maximilian is a behavioral economist studying questions in fields such as education, development, and family economics. In his research, he examines social influences on individual behavior around big life decisions, such as career choices, and their potential consequences for society-wide outcomes, such as social mobility. Prior to his PhD, he obtained an M.Phil. in Economics from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Zach Bleemer is an Assistant Professor of economics at the Yale School of Management and a research associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. His current research uses natural experiments to examine the net efficiency and equity ramifications of educational meritocracy, with recent studies on race-based affirmative action, race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, and university policies that restrict access to high-demand college majors. Zach holds a BA in philosophy, economics, and mathematics from Amherst College and a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley.
In countries around the world, the "Green Revolution" has changed the scale and economy of growing crops, as pesticides, fertilizers, and new kinds of hybrid seeds have transformed the agricultural production process. In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars who study agrarian life in India, where farmers have been forced to adapt in the face of new technologies, as well as environmental and social change.
Tanya Matthan is a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Berkeley’s Department of Geography. An economic anthropologist and political ecologist, she finished her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA in 2021. Her current book project, tentatively titled, The Monsoon and the Market: Economies of Risk in Rural India, examines experiences of and responses to agrarian uncertainty among farmers in central India.
Aarti Sethi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her book manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society.
In countries around the world, the "Green Revolution" has changed the scale and economy of growing crops, as pesticides, fertilizers, and new kinds of hybrid seeds have transformed the agricultural production process. In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars who study agrarian life in India, where farmers have been forced to adapt in the face of new technologies, as well as environmental and social change.
Tanya Matthan is a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Berkeley’s Department of Geography. An economic anthropologist and political ecologist, she finished her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA in 2021. Her current book project, tentatively titled, The Monsoon and the Market: Economies of Risk in Rural India, examines experiences of and responses to agrarian uncertainty among farmers in central India.
Aarti Sethi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her book manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society.
How do American child welfare and obstetric healthcare converge? Matty Lichtenstein, a recent PhD from Berkeley’s Sociology Department, studies how state and professional organizations shape social and health inequalities in maternal and child welfare. Her current book project focuses on evolving conceptions of risk in social work and medicine, illustrated by a study of the intertwined development of American child and perinatal protective policies. She is working on several collaborations related to this theme, including studies of maltreatment-related fatality rates, the racialization of medical reporting of substance exposed infants, and risk assessment in child welfare. In another stream of research, she has written on social policy change, with a focus on educational regulation and political advocacy, and she has conducted research on culture, religion, and politics. Dr. Lichtenstein’s work has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Methods, and Sociological Methods and Research. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
In this interview, Matrix content curator Julia Sizek asks Lichtenstein about her research on the transformation of American child welfare and the impact of that transformation on contemporary maternal and infant health practices.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was insulted on the Capitol steps in July 2020, it was a brief media sensation. But what does being called an “effing bitch” mean for how we think about political speech?
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Gabriella Licata, a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, who discusses how the standard language ideologies of political speech come to shape perceptions of language and people in Congress. Gabriella utilizes mixed methodologies to assess language behavior and linguistic bias in sociolinguistic experiments, social media, and political discourse. She tells us about her paper, recently published in Journal of Language and Discrimination, which discusses the aftermath of an insult on the Capitol steps, and how it reveals the norms of American political speech.
Floods are the most destructive natural hazard, both at the national and international scale, and they disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. To understand this uneven exposure to floods requires that we understand the history of land use and institutional structures that have resulted in current exposure and inequitable allocation of resources for flood protection and for post-disaster aid (‘procedural vulnerability’). One of the most critical agencies is the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose cost-benefit analysis approach tends to preclude flood risk management projects in poor communities.
In this presentation, recorded on May 12, 2022, two panelists — Danielle Zoe Rivera, Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and Jessica Ludy, Flood Risk Program Manager and Environmental Justice Coordinator for the San Francisco District US Army Corps of Engineers — drew upon their research on these topics and discuss pathways to improving on the current situation.
This panel was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, Global Metropolitan Studies, and River-Lab, from the University of California, Berkeley.
As we pass the grim milestone of one million deaths in the United States, taking stock of the personal and collective consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic becomes an urgent task for social scientists.
Recorded on May 10, 2022, this panel examined the physical, material and psychological toll of the past two years of rampant disease, on-and-off social distancing, and shifting economic ground. The panelists discussed the unequal distribution of the pandemic’s burden across the population and the long-term scarring that may ensue, and contemplated the (possibly more uplifting) lessons to be drawn for the future.
This event was co-sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center and the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology
Panelists * Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center * Tina Sacks, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare; author, Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the American Healthcare System (Oxford, 2019) * Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology * Iris Mauss (moderator), Professor, Berkeley Psychology
What can we learn from historical and contemporary cases about building organizations that engage, mobilize, and manage to wield influence on the political process? What kinds of infrastructural choices best support engagement and success in the long run?
Recorded on May 5, 2022, this panel explored the varied and changing terrain of collective action to reflect on the nature, promises, and pitfalls of associational power in the 21st century.
Panelists included Arisha Hatch, Vice President and Chief of Campaigns at Color Of Change; Liz McKenna from Johns Hopkins University; Michelle Oyakawa, from Muskingum University; Margaret Levi, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University; and Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The panel was moderated by Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley.
This panel was presented as part of the Matrix on Point event series and co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy and Organizing.
Recorded on April 22, 2022, this “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation by Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Professor Vaughn was joined in conversation by Stephen Collier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability.
In Engineering Vulnerability, Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources, but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and more broadly, future life on a warming earth.
Recorded on April 27, 2022, this panel discussion brought together members of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix Research Team on Digital Transformations in Property and Development to discuss how state, corporations, and grassroots actors are employing digital technologies to remake global land, housing, and property.
Panelists included Hilary Faxon, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley; Elizabeth Resor, PhD student in the UC Berkeley School of Information; Julien Migozzi, Research Associate in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford; Luis F. Alvarez León, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Dartmouth College; and Jovanna Rosen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. The panel was moderated by Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley.
The event was co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).
Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive.
In this panel, recorded on April 4, 2022, a group of experts discussed contemporary social and economic impacts of wildfires in California during another record-breaking fire season. How have fires changed during the last five years, and with what impacts on the economy? How might policy-makers and economists respond to the changing fire season?
The panel featured Bruce Riordan, Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network; Steve Pyne, an urban farmer and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, and author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next; Dave Jones, Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE); and Luiz Oliveira, Senior Associate Economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The panel was moderated by Bruce Riordan, Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network.
Recorded on March 2, 2022, this "Matrix on Point" panel featured presentations by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the Economics Department at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance; Stefan Eich, Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University; and Christine Parlour, the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. Moderated by Barry Eichengreen, the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
In this Matrix on Point event, recorded on March 15, 2022, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars discussed the Ukraine-Russia War conflict and its implications. Panelists included John Connelly, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor in the Department of History; Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor in the Department of Economics; Gérard Roland, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science; and Katerina Linos, the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law. Daniel Sargent Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley, moderated.
In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews David M. Henkin, the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at UC Berkeley, about his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Make Us Who We Are. Henkin’s primary field of research is US history, and his interests include 19-century urban history, the history of reading and writing, and popular culture. He lives in San Francisco, California, and Bozeman, Montana.
On February 3rd, 2022, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Studies in Higher Education hosted an online “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, by Charlie Eaton, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Eaton reveals in his book, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.
In this recording, Professor Eaton, who earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, was joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.
A video of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/tag/watch/.
In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Biz Herman, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research’s Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, and a Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Lab. Her dissertation, Individual Trauma, Collective Security: The Consequences of Conflict and Forced Migration on Social Stability, investigates the psychological effects of living through conflict and forced displacement, and how these individual traumas shape social life.
In the podcast, we talk about Biz’s research on mental health and social stability at the Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan.
About Biz Herman
Biz Herman is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley, a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research’s Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, and a Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Lab. Her research examines the ways in which experiencing trauma and violence — both at the individual level (personal traumas) and collective level (national tragedies) — shape sociopolitical outcomes relevant to peace and security.
Her book project, Individual Trauma, Collective Security: The Consequences of Conflict and Forced Migration on Social Stability, investigates how the psychological consequences of living through conflict and forced displacement shape intergroup dynamics, prosocial behavior, and support for peace and reconciliation efforts.
Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the University of California Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation (IGCC) Dissertation Fellowship, the Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship in International & Comparative Studies, the Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies, and the Georg Eckert Institute Research Fellowship. Along with collaborators Justine M. Davis & Cecilia H. Mo, she received the IGCC Academic Conference Grant to convene the inaugural Human Security, Violence, and Trauma Conference in May 2021. This multidisciplinary meeting brought together over 170 policymakers, practitioners, and researchers from political science, behavioral economics, psychology, and public health for a two-day seminar on the implications of conflict and forced migration. She has served as an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict’s Innovation Lab, which applies research findings from cognitive and behavioral science to the study of social conflict and belief formation.
In addition to her academic work, Biz is an Emmy-nominated photojournalist and a regular contributor to The New York Times. In 2019, she pitched and co-photographed The Women of the 116th Congress, which included portraits of 130 out of 131 women members of Congress, shot in the style of historical portrait paintings. The story ran as a special section featuring 27 different covers, and was subsequently published as a book, with a foreword by Roxane Gay.
In this episode of the Matrix podcast, Julia Sizek (a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley) interviews Clare Ibarra, a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley, and Naomi Schoenfeld, a public health nurse practitioner and recent PhD from the joint UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley medical anthropology program.
Both Ibarra and Schoenfeld study the history and present of socialist science and medicine in Cuba. Ibarra examines the scientific exchange between Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, whereas Shoenfeld researches the Cuban cancer vaccine and its history.
On the podcast, Sizek, Ibarra, and Schoenfeld discuss the history of science and medicine in Cuba and its relationship to the socialist project, as well as how Cuba has developed vaccines during the current pandemic.
Recorded on November 16, 2021, this video presents an “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India, by Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment with DCRP and Global Metropolitan Studies. Professor Balakrishnan was joined in conversation by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus, and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley.
Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India explores new spatial forms of urbanization by focusing on land contestations along infrastructural and economic corridors in liberalizing India. The book explores the production of private mega-enclaves amidst agricultural fields along these corridors. These corridor urbanizations defy our familiar binaries of city and village and our inherited disciplinary silos of agrarian and urban studies. Instead, the book shows how current urban development accretes onto older histories of agrarian capitalism, thus constituting processes of what Balakrishnan calls “recombinant urbanization.”
This panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and Institute for South Asia Studies (https://southasia.berkeley.edu).
Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and the prison abolition movement point to the long histories of police violence and mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere, demanding new approaches to approaching the history and present of policing.
In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on October 25, 2021, UC Berkeley graduate students were joined by outside experts in discussing the impacts of policing on the lives and health of officers and the communities they serve, as well as how contemporary policing practices are related to an unjust past.
Panelists included Kimberly Burke, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a Research Fellow at the Center for Policing Equity; Matthew Guariglia, Policy Analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Brie McLemore, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program; and Eduardo Duran, a PhD student, researcher, and instructor in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program.
The Matrix On Point discussion series promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
One could say that, by definition, music is the most diasporic of art forms. It is movement itself. It is hybridity. It passes from place to place and from time to time, heedless of natural or social borders. Music belongs everywhere, and yet it is always from somewhere. Diasporic themes and histories have been central not only to the creation and commodification of new musical forms, but also to the emergence of global identities and solidarities.
In this conversation, recorded on October 28, 2021, the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, together with the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Cal Performances, and the Black Studies Collaboratory, took advantage of the precious artist-in-residency of Angélique Kidjo on the UC Berkeley campus to open a conversation about the global circulation of African musical forms and musicians, its worldwide significance, and its social power.
Angélique Kidjo was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies; Ivy Mills, Lecturer, Visual and Literary Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora; and Victoria Grubbs, Lecturer and Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow.
In this episode, Julia Sizek, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, interviews Dr. Victoria Massie, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Faculty Affiliate for the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), the Medical Humanities Program and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (CSWGS) at Rice University in Houston.
A recent alumna of the Ph.D. program in Sociocultural Anthropology and the Designated Emphasis in Science & Technology Studies programs at UC Berkeley, Massie's work draws on black feminist kinship studies at the intersection of racial capitalism and biocapitalism to understand the centrality of emerging biotechnologies for mobility for people of African descent, with a focus on Cameroon. Outside of her work as anthropologist, Massie is a creative non-fiction writer.
On the podcast, Sizek interviews Massie about her research tracking diasporic connections between the US and Cameroon, and the wider world of genetic ancestry testing.
Produced by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. Listen to other episodes here. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has become increasingly popular as an online tool for conducting social science research. What are the specific advantages and downsides of using online crowdsourcing tools like MTurk for conducting research? What practical and/or moral dilemmas might emerge in the course of the research process, and what concrete strategies have scientists developed to address them?
Presented as part of the Social Sciences and Data Science event series, co-sponsored with the UC Berkeley D-Lab, this panel discussion, recorded on October 1, 2021 brought together researchers from diverse disciplines, who shared their experience with the MTurk platform and discussed social and ethical aspects of MTurk more generally.
Moderated by Serena Chen, Professor and Chair of Psychology and the Marian E. and Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Distinguished Chair for Innovative Teaching and Research at UC Berkeley, the panel featured Ali Alkhatib, Interim director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco; Stefano DellaVigna, Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at UC Berkeley; and Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
In this episode of the Matrix podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Hector Callejas, a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies and a 2021-2022 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion fellow. Callejas specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies and Latin American studies. He researches and teaches on the relationship between Indigeneity, race, space, and power in the Americas. His dissertation theorizes the territorial turn in Latin America from a settler colonial perspective. It draws on extensive ethnographic and archival research on transnational Indigenous politics in contemporary El Salvador.
In the podcast, we discuss his research and how Indigeneity is understood in El Salvador, as well as contemporary Indigenous movements in El Salvador.
Produced by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus.
In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Xavier Buck, Deputy Director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, a nonprofit that has preserved and promoted the legacy of the Black Panther Party for over 25 years.
Buck graduated with a PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021. His work blends organizing and educational pursuits in the service of sustaining movements for Black lives, and he has previously been a fellow at Prosperity Now, the Education Trust – West, and the Digital Equity Initiative at the City & County of San Francisco.
In the podcast, we discuss Buck’s work in public history, including his @historyin3 channel (which can be found on TikTok and Instagram), his current work at the Huey P. Newton Foundation, and his dissertation research, which shows how Black experiences in Louisiana from 1927 to 1945 were integral to Black political organizing, cooperative economics, and government partnerships in California from 1945 to 1975.
Produced by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. Stream the episode above, or listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.
On August 31, 2021, the United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending a 20-year war against the Taliban that began following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Recorded on September 7, 2021, this "Matrix on Point" panel discussion featured a panel of scholars discussing the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences of the withdrawal. The panel featured Omar Sharifi, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Humanities, American University of Afghanistan, and Country Director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies; Robert Crews, Professor of History, Stanford University; Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor in the Global Policy Area of the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs; and Georgi Derluguian, Professor of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu Dhabi. Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, moderated the panel.
Co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Institute of International Studies (https://iis.berkeley.edu/), this panel was presented as part of the Matrix on Point Event Series, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
In this podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Juliana Friend, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on the intersection of technology, privacy, and culture.
Her dissertation, “Don’t Click Here! Porn, Privacy, and Digital Dissidence in Senegal,” examines how digital dissidents are transforming the idea of sutura (discretion or modesty), a concept used to describe the appropriate relationship between private and public life in Senegal.
Her research shows how citizenship, subjectivity, and nation are being redefined in online spaces by eHealth activists and women who work with pornographic images. Her dissertation research has been featured in The Conversation, and she was a 2020-2021 Charlotte W. Newcombe fellow.
This interview focuses on the concept of sutura and Juliana’s research on the topic in Senegal.
In this episode, Julia Sizek, a Phd candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, interviews scholars Hannah Zeavin and Valerie Black about teletherapy, which describes all forms of remote therapy, from letter-writing to chatbots. Both of these UC Berkeley researchers study the history and experience of these tools of therapy, which are often assumed to be more impersonal than and inferior to forms of in-person therapy, but which have seen a surge during the pandemic. They discuss the past and present of teletherapy, how the ongoing pandemic has affected mental health care, and the business of artificial intelligence-based therapy.
Valerie Black is a PhD Candidate in anthropology at Berkeley completing her dissertation, “Dehumanizing Care: An Ethnography of Mental Health Artificial Intelligence.” Her multisited dissertation research has been conducted in Silicon Valley at a mental health chatbot company and in Japan at a mental health videogame company. Her research concerns how chatbots and other AI health might reshape our understanding of care and labor. She was recently awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to complete her work on her dissertation.
Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at Berkeley, and sits on the Executive Committee for the Berkeley Center for New Media.she received her PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2018. Her research considers the role of technology in American life. Her book (2021, MIT Press), The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, is a transnational history of mediated and distance therapy, starting with Freud himself. Her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2023), considers the history of techno-parenting in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Youjin Chung is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Equity at the University of California Berkeley, with a joint appointment in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Her work encompasses the political economy of development, feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, and African studies. She draws on ethnographic, historical, and participatory visual methods to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and socio-ecological change in Sub Saharan Africa with a focus on Tanzania. She is interested in understanding how agrarian landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles articulate with capitalist forces, and how these processes of uneven encounter reshape the identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.
She is currently working on a book manuscript, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape, which examines the gendered processes and outcomes of a stalled large-scale agricultural land deal in coastal Tanzania. Her second project, tentatively titled Flesh and Blood, investigates the role of gender, race, and species in the making of the “livestock revolution” in Tanzania and the wider region.
Previously, Dr. Chung was Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She received her PhD and MSc in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, Jesus College. She completed a Dual BA in International Studies, and Journalism and Communication at Korea University.
Learn more about Social Science Matrix at Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.. Visit Professor Chung's website: https://youjinbchung.net/
On May 14, 2021, Social Science Matrix convened a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion focused on the long (and continuing) struggle for racial justice in America. At the center of the discussion: the critical momentum of Black-led protests and the Black Lives Matter movement from the past year, situated within the larger historical context of social movements for racial justice in the United States and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.
The panel featured Monica Bell, Associate Professor of Law & Sociology at Yale Law School; Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; and Brandon M. Terry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. The panel was moderated by Christopher Muller, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues.
On May 7, 2021, UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix presented a Matrix Book Salon featuring the book, Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
Professor Stephens-Dougan was joined in conversation by Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley.
Recorded on April 19, 2021, this Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel featured the book Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millán, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
In "Redistributing the Poor," Lara-Millán, an ethnographer and historical sociologist, takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered.
By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.
Panelists included: Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University; and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law.
This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS). Learn more about Matrix at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
Recorded on March 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.
ABSTRACT
One of Friedrich Hayek's most celebrated essays — "Competition as a Discovery Procedure" (1968) — tells us tantalizing little about the existence of other such procedures. Hayek's insistence that competition is the surest and most reliable technique of eliciting innovation is well reflected in today's digital landscape, dominated as it is by digital platforms, with their stated goal of facilitating market exchange. Yet, beyond Hayek's favorite bugbear of central planning, there surely must be other ways of "discovery" — even if they do not currently "scale" as well as the techniques of competition. This talk will explore the intellectual and political benefits of placing "discovery" at the center of our debate about the future of the digital public sphere and suggest potential directions for adequate policy-making on the issue.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013). He is also the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University.
This lecture is presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by the UC Berkeley D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event was also co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group.
Recorded on April 22, 2021, this "Matrix on Point" discussion — sponsored by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism — featured a group of distinguished panelists approaching questions of objectivity, disinformation, and the construction of truth from a media-consumption (rather than media-production) perspective, focusing on how internet users find information, how algorithms play a deterministic role in search results, and how lies propagate and solidify.
This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
PANELISTS
Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Senior Faculty Researcher, Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life
Sun-ha Hong, Assistant Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and author of Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, 2020)
Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The New York Times; author of three books, including "Futureproof: Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation," a guide to surviving the technological future; and the host of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast about the many ways the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior.
Moderated by David Barstow, Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at Berkeley Journalism and a former senior writer for the New York Times.
Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
Recorded on February 19, 2021, this episode features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.
Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC), which explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns. Dr. Donovan's research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements.
Recorded on February 11, 2021, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel discussion, features Professor Steven Weber, a political scientist and professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information, discussing his book, "Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order," together with Vinod K. Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science, and Homa Bahrami, Senior Lecturer in the Haas School of Business. The panel was introduced by Marion Fourcade, Director of Matrix, and moderated by AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.
"Bloc by Bloc" puts forward a compelling model for global organization that integrates modern developments in technology and governance. Weber argues that the global political economy is decomposing into regional systems that are more densely linked internally and much more loosely linked to each other. But the new regions are not defined by familiar physical boundaries like mountains and oceans. They are defined by technology rules and standards, which means we need to re-envision a region as a logical not physical space, with no need for geographic contiguity.
The panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (https://cltc.berkeley.edu).
In this podcast, Michael Watts interviews Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley.
Professor Herman's research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context.
Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – through high diplomacy and on-the-ground examinations of race, labor, sex and law – to reveal the origins and impact of inter-American “security cooperation” on domestic and international politics in the region. She has also authored past and forthcoming articles and book chapters on the global politics of anti-racism, the Cuban literacy campaign, the Brazilian labor justice system, and U.S.-Latin American relations.
She is currently working on a new book project on Antarctica, Latin America, and the World.
Prior to entering academia, she spent several years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil working as a freelance translator, researcher, and documentarian. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she was Assistant Professor of International Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
She received her Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in Literature and History from Duke.
How well can ordinary people do in identifying the veracity of news in real time? In this lecture, recorded on Feb. 1, 2021, Professor Tucker reported on preliminary findings from a study focused on this important question. Using a unique research design that involved crowdsourcing popular news articles from both mainstream and suspect news sources that have appeared in the past 24 hours to both ordinary citizens and professional fact checkers, Professor Tucker researched the characteristics of those likely to incorrectly identify false news stories as true, the results of interventions to attempt to reduce the prevalence of this behavior, and the prospects for crowdsourcing to serve as a viable means for identifying false news stories in real time.
This lecture was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Recorded on February 3, 2021, this podcast features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Professor Allen’s lecture focuses on the findings of "Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century," a report by the American Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Allen served as co-chair of the Commission, which convened weekly for two years in support of this project. As detailed in the report, the Commission was established to “consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens…. Through its recommendations, the Commission has looked to increase citizens’ capacity to engage in their communities, counter rising threats to democratic self-government, and rebuild trust in political institutions.” (To learn more, visit https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose.)
The lecture was introduced and moderated by Henry Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography.
Clancy comes to UC Berkeley from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where she received her PhD in Human Geography with a multi-site study on the interaction between mobile phone maps, cartographic discourse, and postcolonial landscapes.
At UC Berkeley, Professor Wilmott is teaching graduate-level combined theory/studio courses on locative media, cross listed courses in digital geographies, as well as core curriculum on geographic information systems in the Geography department.
In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, finalist for the 2011 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize.
In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years, activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Offering readings of the use of photography in the anti-lynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life.
In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Brittany Birberick, an anthropology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Birberick's dissertation project focuses on urban transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. More broadly, she writes and thinks about economies, migration, temporality, and aesthetics within an urban context. Her dissertation, “Paved with Gold: Urban Transformation in Johannesburg,” situates the city of Johannesburg historically, considering the extractive economy of gold that initiated its development to understand the city’s contemporary tensions: a dilapidated post-apartheid city aiming to be a world-class global city.
Her research takes place in Jeppestown, a neighborhood in Johannesburg, and focuses on the inhabitants and built environment of a single street. Today, Jeppestown is portrayed as either on its way to becoming a site of redevelopment by the Johannesburg Development Agency, artists, and private developers, or, if left unattended, a crime ridden area and hotbed of xenophobic violence.
The dissertation posits that rather than transformation and development projects leading to an inherently new city or inherently new object, Jeppestown, like many urban areas around the world, is caught in a back and forth between being a successful or failed urban space—a “good” or “bad” city.
Birberick received the Association for Africanist Anthropology's 2019 Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Essay Award for her essay, “Dreaming Numbers," which is an analysis of fafi, a street-based lottery game played by residents in Jeppestown. The piece investigates the ways in which dreams, gambling, and interpreting patterns become meaningful strategies for choosing the next winning number and reducing uncertainty in the city.
In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Professor Mariane C. Ferme, a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence, and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. Ferme's latest book, "Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone," draws on her three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, after studying Political Science at the University of Milano, Italy, and majoring in anthropology at Wellesley College. Her research has long focused on Sierra Leone, and West Africa more generally. It encompasses gendered approaches to everyday practices and materiality in agrarian West African societies, and work on the political imagination in times of violence, particularly in relation to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.
She has also done research on the ways in which international humanitarian legal institutions and jurisprudence shape that status in our collective imaginaries of figures of victimhood, criminality, and witnessing in times of war. The empirical focus of this work has been the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the developing jurisprudence in that setting about the forced conscription of child soldiers and the crime of “forced marriage.”
Her most recent fieldwork in Sierra Leone—carried out in 2015-16, with funding from the National Science Foundation—was an interdisciplinary research project on changing agrarian institutions and access to land in the country. The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea has made the contribution of anthropologists crucial to developing socio-culturally sensitive and acceptable strategies for public health interventions, and to understanding pathways of disease transmission. She has written on the ways in which understanding rural mobility, as well as healing and burial practices, in Sierra Leone and the neighboring countries sheds light on the patterns of EVD infection, and can help inform public health interventions to stem the spread of this disease.
In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale. At the heart of her work is an interest in how economic and transformations unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, with a particular concern for how urban struggles for justice coalesce around these changes. Within this broadly defined area, she examines two transformations as they relate to housing, a crucial vector of urban inequality and terrain of grassroots political contestation. First, the shift to a finance-oriented political economy; second, the growing global reach and power of digital platforms.
She is currently studying how platform business models are being developed for rental housing markets in San Francisco, London, and Berlin, and how activists are developing counter-platforms in pursuit of housing justice. A recent project investigated the emergence of corporate landlords in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, their development of new financial assets backed by rent checks, and how the tools of the post-2008 tech boom aided this process.
Fields has published widely on the relationships among housing financialization, movements for justice, and digital platforms in journals like Economic Geography; Housing, Theory, and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and; Urban Studies. She also regularly publishes reports, working papers, and essays with community groups like Right to the City and Greater Manchester Housing Action, and in venues ranging from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to Public Books. The National Science Foundation, British Academy, and Independent Social Research Foundation have supported her work.
Recorded in February 2020, this episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview between Professor Michael Watts, Emeritus "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography and Development Studies at UC Berkeley, and Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory. Keltner is also the Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center.
Professor Keltner’s research focuses the biological and evolutionary origins of emotion, in particular prosocial states such as compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and power, social class, and inequality. He is the co-author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, and The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Keltner has published over 200 scientific articles, written for many media outlets, and consulted for the Center for Constitutional Rights (to help end solitary confinement), Google, Facebook, the Sierra Club, and for Pixar’s Inside Out.
