Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures

April 8th, 2024
3:30pm-5:00pm

Join us on April 8 for an Author Meets Critics panel on the book, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures, by Professor Youjin Chung, Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape is a feminist ethnography that traces the lived experiences of diverse rural women and men as they struggled for survival and meaning in the shadow of a stalled large-scale agricultural land deal.

Professor Chung will be joined by discussants Mariane Ferme, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; Michael Watts, Professor Emeritus of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Sai Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology will moderate the event.

>Co-sponsored by Center for African Studies, Center for Race and Gender, Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, and the Climate Equity and Environmental Justice Roundtable.

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Russia’s Challenge – A Declining Power’s Quest for Status

September 6th, 2023
12:00pm

Since 2014, Russia has emerged as the most assertive challenger to the US-led international order. With its annexation of Crimea, intervention in Syria, meddling in Western elections, and 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders see Russia as the most pressing threat to global peace and stability. Its war in Ukraine has shaken international politics to its foundations and could be a decisive turning point in world politics. Russia not only presents a challenge to US leadership and the liberal international order, it is also challenges International Relations (IR) theories, which have traditionally focused on rising powers as the most likely candidates to challenge existing hegemonic orders, ignoring the role that declining great powers (such as Russia or Austria-Hungary) play in power transitions. Russia’s assertive and aggressive international behavior is motivated and shaped by its status concerns as a declining power. Russia’s leaders are determined to arrest Russia’s decline and preserve its status as a great power in the international system and are prepared to adopt the most risky, aggressive, and destabilizing foreign policies to achieve this end.

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES) and the Institute of International Studies.

Andrej Krickovic is Associate Professor of International Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, in Suzhou, China. He recently left his position as a tenured professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow after 10 years in Russia. His primary areas of research are IR Theory and International Security with an empirical emphasis on Russian and Chinese Foreign Policy. His articles have been published in leading journals such as International Studies Review, The Chinese Journal of International Relations, International Politics, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Andrej received his PhD in Political Science from Berkeley.Admission Information: Free and open to the public.

Contact Info: Zachary Kelly, 510-643-3230, ISEEES@berkeley.edu

Access Coordinator: Disability Access & Compliance, access@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-6456

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The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament

May 3rd, 2023
3:30pm-5:00pm

Part of Berkeley Geography's Spring Colloquia Series

Presented as part of the UC Berkeley Department of Geography’s Spring 2023 Colloquia Series, this talk will feature Professor Orlando Patterson presenting “The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament.”

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About Orlando Patterson

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 6 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.

He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for Non-Fiction which he won in 1991 for his book on freedom; the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association; co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on pluralism from the American Political Science Association; and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including the University of Chicago, U.C.L.A and La Trobe University in Australia. He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999. Professor Patterson has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.

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Consent and Legitimacy: A Revised Bellicose Theory of State-Building with Evidence from around the World, 1500–2000

March 9th, 2023
2:00pm-4:00pm

On March 9, Andreas Wimmer, Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University, will deliver at talk at Social Science Matrix entitled “Consent and Legitimacy: A Revised Bellicose Theory of State-Building with Evidence from around the World, 1500–2000.” A paper related to the talk can be found here.

Abstract

This research builds on the large literature that discusses if frequent international wars enhance state-building, as famously argued by Charles Tilly. It integrates key insights of that literature and a series of additional arguments into a more comprehensive and systematic model of bargaining between rulers and ruled. The model specifies the conditions under which wars are likely to build states: if there are political institutions enabling such bargaining and expressing the consent of the ruled, if the population contributed substantially to the war efforts by providing soldiers and taxes, and if rulers are legitimized either through nationalism or success at war. The paper expands the empirical horizon of existing quantitative research by assembling two measures of state development, ranging from the early modern period to the present.

Professor Wimmer has also offered to meet with faculty and students between 10 and 1pm on Friday March 10. Sign up here: https://www.wejoinin.com/sheets/tukkm.

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Film Screening: Madalena, by Madiano Marcheti

September 14th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Less than a month before Brazil’s most important elections since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, Berkeley Geography and Social Science Matrix are hosting the filmmaker Madiano Marcheti.

Marcheti’s first feature-length movie, Madalena, which premiered last year, shows a Brazil rarely seen on film. Set in the agroindustrial interior of Mato Grosso do Sul, the film offers a profound reflection on the imbrications of political power, race, masculinity, agroindustry, and anti-LGBTQI violence in contemporary Brazilian society. Melding the genres of science fiction and social realism it is at turns deeply dystopian and at others utopic, imagining other social relationships and environmental refugia amidst crumbling liberal and developmentalist myths.

Please note the screening will take place on Sept. 14 at 3:30pm in McCone Hall, Room 575.

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The Quantum Age

March 4th, 2022
3:10pm-5pm

Quantum technologies have provided capabilities that seem strange, are powerful, and at times, frightening. These capabilities are so different from our conventional intuition that they seem to ride the fine border between science fiction and fantasy. Yet some quantum technologies can be commercially purchased today, and more are just around the corner.

In Law and Policy for the Quantum Age (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Chris Hoofnagle, Professor of Law in Residence at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and Simson Garfinkel, Senior Data Scientist in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, explain the genesis of quantum information science and the development of related technologies: quantum sensing, computing, and communication.

This seminar will feature Professor Hoofnagle discussing the book, which uses scenario analysis to consider four futures for quantum technologies. It then considers how policymakers might anticipate the benefits and risks of quantum technologies.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Information Access Seminar and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.

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The Invention of Humanity, East and West

March 16th, 2022
4:00pm

Part of the "In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics" series, presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities

Watch the Livestream Here

An academic commonplace has the early 5th-century Greeks inventing the first theories of consciousness, the polis, and the self, in what used to be dubbed “the Greek miracle.” This conversation considers a still more fundamental question: which civilizations gave rise to the notion of a shared humanity, and why? As panelist Siep Stuurman writes in his book The Invention of Humanity, “common humanity and equality are not primeval facts” that simply awaited discovery by people in one specific time and place. Instead, such ideas were “novel and potentially disruptive ways” of perceiving a broad range of human relationships.

This conversation focuses on two early masterworks by two celebrated historians, Herodotus and Sima Qian, who somehow came to imagine that all inhabitants of the known world — regardless of ethnic origin, native place, or status — constitute a single human community whose contours must be explored if people are to learn how to prosper and flourish. The impact of their ruminations on Western and Chinese culture has arguably been as profound and enduring as that of any religious leader.

This event is part of a yearlong series grounded in the conviction that for the United States to engage in dialogue with China has become essential. If we are not simply to challenge but to co-exist with China, we need a better understanding of the country’s complex contemporary reality — which in turn requires engagement with the longstanding historical and cultural roots from which today’s reality has sprung.

Complicating this project is the fact that over the past thirty years, much of what we thought we knew about China’s past and present has changed dramatically. From ancient trade routes, to the role of classical learning, to the May Fourth Movement, to the notion of democracy in a Chinese context, many of the major phenomena in Chinese history and society have been significantly reconceptualized by scholars.

Presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, “In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics” brings together Chinese and Western panelists to engage in cutting-edge dialogue on the history and current state of Chinese art, culture, and politics. Offering innovative, thoughtful approaches to the study of China, the conversations aim to provide rich intellectual resources as the US and China chart an unknown but surely entangled future.

Participants:

Siep Stuurman is emeritus professor of the history of ideas at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His panoramic book The Invention of Humanity (2017) traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents, civilizations, and epochs to argue that the notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. He is also the author of François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality, which was awarded the George Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association.

Li Wai-yee is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University and an expert on the work of ancient historian Sima Qian, considered the father of Chinese historiography. Her books include The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (2007); Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2014), which won the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association of Asian Studies; and, most recently, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs About Courtesans (2020).

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On Chinese Democracy

March 2nd, 2022
4:00pm

Part of the "In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics" series, presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities

Click Here to Watch the Livestream.

Presented as part of the series, “In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics,” presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, this conversation considers the groundbreaking work of University of Hong Kong political philosopher Ci Jiwei, author of Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis (2019). One of the leading thinkers to envision a realistic path to democracy for the People’s Republic of China, Ci aims to provide a distinctive model of “democracy with Chinese characteristics,” based on the country’s own traditions — for example, its impressive track record of meritocratic social mobility.

Ci argues that four decades of reform have created a readiness for democracy among the Chinese people, resulting in a disjunction between popular expectations and political reality. The inherent tensions in a largely democratic society without a democratic political system will, he asserts, trigger an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy for the current government.

Taking Ci’s work as their starting point, panelists ask how essential democratic values — such as the acknowledgment of intrinsic human diversity as the basis for creating democratic institutions, checks and balances among branches of government, and voluntary and open political participation — can be adapted and deployed within a Chinese context.

This event is part of “In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics,” a yearlong series grounded in the conviction that for the United States to engage in dialogue with China has become essential. If we are not simply to challenge but to co-exist with China, we need a better understanding of the country’s complex contemporary reality — which in turn requires engagement with the longstanding historical and cultural roots from which today’s reality has sprung.

“In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics” brings together Chinese and Western panelists to engage in cutting-edge dialogue on the history and current state of Chinese art, culture, and politics. Offering innovative, thoughtful approaches to the study of China, the conversations aim to provide rich intellectual resources as the US and China chart an unknown but surely entangled future.

Participants

John Pomfret, an author and journalist, has worked at the Washington Post for several decades, including as Beijing bureau chief and, currently, as a contributing writer for the Global Opinions section. He is a recipient of the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia, and the Shorenstein Award from Harvard and Stanford for his lifetime coverage of Asia. For his work on the Congo, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. His books include Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.

Shoufu Yin is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research on Chinese and Inner Asian political thought brings together cultural history and comparative philosophy in an effort to create new global intellectual histories. His current book project traces the history of early modern political thought through a study of the rhetorical curriculum that flourished in schools in East Eurasia between 1250 and 1650.

Information about online viewing will be posted several days before the event.

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The Promise and Perils of Media

March 9th, 2022
4:00pm

Part of the "In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics" series, presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities

Click Here to Watch the Livestream

What role do new and emerging forms of media play in shaping our perceptions of China’s complex contemporary reality? This conversation features panelists who have lived successful lives as academics publishing thoughtful books and essays, while also producing newer forms of media, including nuanced documentaries and influential websites. Speakers explore how the formats, origins, and conventions specific to various media platforms affect public opinion about China, both within and outside the Sinosphere. They also offer cautionary tales about the facile analyses, attention-grabbing stories, and truncated sound bites and posts that drive today’s media.

Participants

David Ownby is professor of Chinese history at the University of Montréal. He is the editor and translator of Xu Jilin’s groundbreaking 2018 book, Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique (2018). Ownby is well-known for his website Reading the China Dream, which explores intellectual life in contemporary China and spotlights areas of resistance in the Sinosphere.

Documentary filmmaker Carma Hinton grew up in Beijing and has co-directed thirteen documentary films on China. Her works include The Gate of Heavenly Peace, on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; Morning Sun, on the Cultural Revolution; and Small Happiness, on the sexual politics of rural China. Her numerous honors include two Peabody Awards, the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, and a National News and Documentary Emmy.

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Defending Against the Ravages of Disinformation

September 21st, 2021
12:00pm-1:30pm

Presented as part of the Berkeley Conversations event series

As the nation struggles against confusion and discord linked to an epidemic of disinformation, a panel of pre-eminent UC Berkeley scholars will convene next week to explore how to defend democracy from false information without compromising core American principles.

The online Berkeley Conversation, “Defending Against Disinformation,” will be held on Tuesday Sept. 21 from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. The event will be streamed live on YouTube and on Facebook.

“Defending Against Disinformation” features a panel of elite scholars who specialize in democracy, law, racial justice, communication and technology: Geeta Anand, dean of the School of Journalism; Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; Hany Farid, associate dean and head of the School of Information; Susan D. Hyde, chair of the Department of Political Science; and john powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. The panel will be moderated by Henry Brady, former dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Disinformation — the intentional dissemination of false information to shape political and social outcomes — is increasingly a feature of the U.S. political landscape. The effects are pernicious: By causing confusion, disinformation amplifies division and aggravates discord. By creating a false but widely accepted alternate reality, it can destabilize a society. Just in the past year, disinformation has had direct, harmful effects on efforts to check the spread of COVID-19, on initiatives for racial justice and on the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath.

Clearly, disinformation costs lives and erodes democracy. That raises a critical question: How can we counter and neutralize disinformation without compromising freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other core American values?

“Defending Against Disinformation” is open to the campus community, and to policymakers, journalists and the general public, without cost.

The event is sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, Berkeley Law, and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, with support from the Social Science Matrix.