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Matrix on Point: The Struggle for Hong Kong

Published October 13, 2020

“Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times.” These words, appearing in English and Chinese on the signs of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, appeal for action, recognition, and solidarity. Such utterances are now prohibited, after the Beijing government passed a new national security law on June 30th. Chinese authorities maintain that this recent legislation is intended to prevent foreign intervention and separatist sedition, but critics in and beyond Hong Kong have argued that the new law grants Beijing unprecedented powers and that it will lead to the curtailment of civil liberties and free speech. Western commentators have sometimes described Hong Kong as a canary in a coal mine, a bellwether for democracy in Asia. Yet for China, it is the concept of “one country, two systems” that best captures the enduring and complex bond that links Hong Kong to the mainland.

On October 1, 2021, Social Science Matrix hosted a “Matrix on Point,” co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, that considered both the history and future of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Panelists included Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Alex Chow, a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography; and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. Thomas Gold, Professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

The panel was presented as part of the Matrix Solidarity Series, which features talks and panels that explore—and critique—the ethical foundations, concrete implementations, and prospective designs that foster connectedness, inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality. These conversations are meant to serve as an argument on behalf of the premises and practices of solidarity, and an exposition on the potential of the social sciences to contribute to it.

Panelists

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on global and comparative issues, globalization, political sociology, and other areas, with a regional focus in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa. She has published three award-winning monographs on China, and has co-edited the volume: Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Alex Chow is a social activist from Hong Kong and current doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and a former Vice-President (External) of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union. Chow was an organiser of the 2014 Occupy Central with Love and Peace campaign, a non-violent civil disobedience campaign aimed at promoting democracy in Hong Kong. He served time in jail for storming the government’s headquarters before the 2014 Occupy protests began. Chow earned his master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy positions in Law and in Literary Journalism. A cultural historian with a strong interest in connecting China’s past to its present and placing both into global perspective, his publications include Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2018). He received his PhD from Berkeley (History, 1989).

Thomas B. Gold (moderator) is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught in the Sociology Department from 1981 to 2018. From 2000-2016 he served as Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP), a consortium of North American universities that administers an advanced Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies, founding Director of the Berkeley China Initiative and Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Gold’s research focuses on many aspects of the societies of East Asia, primarily China and Taiwan. His co-edited (with Sebastian Veg) volume, Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong, will be published later this year by the Institute of East Asian Studies Press.

Matrix Lecture

The Code of Capital

Published September 29, 2020

A Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor provided an overview of her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.

On September 21, Social Science Matrix was honored to co-sponsor a virtual Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University and Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation.

In her lecture, Pistor discussed her book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, which argues that the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. The book was lauded as one of the Financial Times‘ Best Books of 2019 in the field of economics and one of the Financial Times‘ Readers’ Best Books of 2019.

The event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Network for a New Political Economy and introduced by Steven K. Vogel, Chair of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

“One of the core questions that the book addresses is the question of, what is capital?” Pistor explained. “What I’m basically arguing in the book is that capital is a wealth-generating asset. And what we have to understand is the legal DNA, if you want to call it that, or the ‘code of capital.’ We have to understand what kinds of features create assets that are really wealth-generating.”

As an example, Pistor noted how a piece of land is only considered to be “capital” when it is classified as such by the law. “If you take land, it’s just a piece of dirt,” she said. “If you want to monetize land, you have to graft certain legal protections for the holder of land rights onto that land. That’s not natural. It’s a social decision. One of the critical questions is, who makes this decision on behalf of whom, and who has access to or control over the decision-makers? Let me just take away the punch line: lawyers are really important here, including private transactional lawyers who work mostly in private offices behind closed doors.”

Pistor explained that different legal frameworks work together to “code” capital, including property law, trust and corporate law, bankruptcy law, and contract law. She said that all capital has certain shared characteristics, including priority, with the law determining who has rights to assets, with some rights stronger than others; and durability, the ability “to extend rights that we bestow on asset holders over time and to protect these rights from too many other competing claimants.”

Another defining attribute of capital, Pistor said, is universality, which ensures that the priority and durability rights are protected not only between two people who entered into transaction with one another, but are “actually enforced against the world,” Pistor said. “The state comes in here because it will enforce these titles, not only against parties to the transaction, but against anybody” Another defining trait is convertibility, the ability to convert assets into other assets, such as cash. “Three out of those four, and then you have something that I would call capital,” Pistor said.

Pistor emphasized that the subtitle of her book, “How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality,” relates to how the law is “a representation of the centralized means of coercion… As lay people, we may think of law as a relationship between the citizen and the state by which the state governs its citizens. And we might also think about civil and political rights, or human rights more generally, and realize that actually, citizens can also use the law, which is a creature of the state, against the state itself, in order to protect their own individual, civil, and political rights. And then there’s this third dimension, which is really what my book is all about, which is that citizens can harness the centralized means of coercion of the state for their own means when they want to organize their relationship with other citizens. It is this horizontal relationship between citizens — or actors that don’t have to be citizens — who want to harness the law to avail themselves of the coercive powers of the state to organize their private rights.”

The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries.

Pistor drew upon legal history to explain how, starting with land, the same “core modules” have been used “time and again” to code capital. “We can see a lot of capital creation and a lot of also skill development for how to code capital,” she said. “Once lawyers and their clients understood the mechanism, they realized that the same legal coding techniques could be applied to different types of assets.”

“One of the questions I asked myself in the towards the end of the book is whether the legal code might be replaced at some point or is already being replaced by the digital code,” Pistor said. “The beauty of digital code is that it is highly scalable. We don’t even have to rely on a centralized state power at the territorial nation-state level, but we can create digital relations across national boundaries. In the book, I come out with the question, is this a new kind of code, and will it replace the legal code? Or is it more complementary, where the legal code will encode the digital code, rather than the other way around? I think that question is still open.”

Pistor argued that the processes through which capital is “coded” through legal mechanisms need to be reformed to reduce wealth inequality. “We have to get at the system,” Pistor said. “It’s not enough to chop off a head of a ruler, what you really have to do is get at the system. The system, of course, is resistant. So you have to use an approach I call “strategic incrementalism….” It’s basically taking a page out of the script that lawyers and capital holders have used over centuries to say, okay, how did you do this, and what did you need to accomplish this? And how much do we have to take back to so that we can make sure that we can cherish our democratic values and get the upper hand in governance again?”

Watch the lecture and Q&A above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Homelessness and the Bay Area Housing Crisis

Published September 28, 2020

On September 21, 2020, a panel of researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners joined a "Matrix on Point" discussion focused on homelessness and the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis.

What are the institutional barriers contributing to homelessness in California, and what can be done to alleviate them? What are the consequences of the criminalization of the homeless, and what are these residents’ rights and civil liberties? These questions were at the heart of a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion recorded on September 21, 2020, which brought together researchers, advocates, and medical practitioners panel to explore the Bay Area’s housing crisis and homelessness.

Panelists for the 90-minute presentation included Chris Herring, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University; Margot Kushel, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations; and Tomiquia Moss, Founder and CEO of All Home, a new organization dedicated to finding regional solutions to the homelessness and housing crisis in the Bay Area.

“The three people here have probably done more than anybody to help us understand the causes of homelessness in the Bay Area,” said the panel’s moderator, Carolina Reid, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning and the Faculty Research Advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

During the panel, each speaker gave a roughly ten-minute presentation; these were followed by a Q&A, with questions asked by Reid and submitted by members of the audience. The speakers reinforced that homelessness is not an unsolvable problem, but that its root causes are often ignored. In her comments, for example, Kushel noted that the primary driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing for “extremely low-income” (ELI) residents. “Homelessness is not caused by mental health and substance use problems,” Kushel emphasized. “The more we blame this problem on highly stigmatized medical conditions, the more it lets us off the hook for solving the fundamental problems that have brought us to this point. We have an extraordinary shortage of…housing that is available and affordable to people who make less than 30% of the area median income.”

Kushel also stressed the major contributing impact of structural racism, noting that a disproportionately large percentage of homeless people in the Bay Area are people of color. “There’s no way we can have an honest conversation about homelessness without talking about the ongoing effects of structural racism,” Kushel said. “We are still very much living with the downstream effects of redlining and other forms of discrimination.”

In her comments, Tomiquia Moss agreed that structural racism is a root cause that must be addressed, but she also noted that an improved regional approach is necessary to help cities find a common solution. “The Bay Area counties are doing incredible work on the ground, trying to support people experiencing homelessness every day, but they’re doing it all in in silos,” Moss said. “Our cities are scrambling, trying to figure out what to do…. We have this very fractious system by which we are trying to solve one of the most fundamental social problems of our time…. When we think about regional approaches to homelessness, the first thing we have to think about is the region actually has to operate as one place.”

Moss said that much of the work of her organization, All Home, is to “try to figure out, how do we bring stakeholders together to look at best practice and borrow lessons-learned and to strategize around resource-sharing, and to assess what assets need to be brought to the table in order for us to do a much better job across geographies in order to address the homelessness and housing crisis…. People talk regionally, but they act very locally. Land-use decisions and zoning changes are held at the local level, and we don’t really have a lot of regional, state, or federal governance that forces us to work as a region.”

Addressing income inequality should be another priority, Moss said. “People are simply unable to afford the rents that we demand in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “And then we blame them for being poor…. We haven’t actually solved the fundamental math problems of wealth inequality.”

In his remarks, Chris Herring presented research he had conducted while earning his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley; his enthnography-based dissertation focused on the impacts of anti-homeless laws, such as laws banning panhandling, camping, or lying on sidewalks. “These are laws that prohibit life-sustaining activities that homeless people have no choice but to undertake in public,” Herring said. “These laws have been spreading nationwide and have been growing at the fastest rate in their history over the last 10 years.”

Herring said that the increased criminalization of homelessness was driven in part by “urban development in areas where used to folks used to be able to camp without receiving complaints.” Gentrification, he said, has led to a “different type demographic of folk moving to the city, who are more likely to call the police.” Accompanying this has been the proliferation of “business Improvement districts” through which groups of property owners, merchants, and esidents hire private security firms who call the police when homeless residents refuse to move.

The criminalization of homelessness is a major issue, Herring said, because it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. “One of the things that folks feared most was the destruction of their property,” Herring said. “In fact, they feared the destruction of their property more than arrest. And what I saw happening was that arrests were actually used as a means to dispossess people of their property.” Herring said he is continuing to work on reforms, such as reforming the dispatch so that police officers are not first responders to homeless-related ordinances.

Ultimately the panelists agreed that, while homelessness is a complex issue, there are solutions available that must be adopted from all levels of government. “We are at a precipice in our time where we don’t have the luxury of not figuring out what the foundational challenges are to actually ending homelessness in the Bay Area,” Moss said. “Homelessness is solvable. It’s not just about finding someone housing. It is about figuring out how we bring our most vulnerable residents inside and helping them not just subsist in our communities, but to thrive.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

Race and Public Opinion: Today in Historical Context

Published September 21, 2020

An online panel discussion — presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix — focused on the history of race and public opinion.

Recorded on September 10, 2020, this online panel discussion – presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix – focused on the history of race and public opinion.

The panelists included: Desmond Ang, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government;

Hannah Walker, Assistant Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin;

Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor of Politics, Princeton; and

Angela X. Ocampo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, LSA Collegiate Fellow, University of Michigan. The event was moderated by Amy Lerman, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley; and David Brookman, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

For more about Social Science Matrix, visit https://matrix.berkeley.edu. For more about the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, see https://citrincenter.berkeley.edu/.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Workshop/Symposium

2020 Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics

Published March 21, 2020

For the second straight year, Matrix hosted a two-day workshop focused on the economics of climate change.

On January 31-February 1, Social Science Matrix was honored to host the Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics, which was co-sponsored with support from Sara Miller McCune. This two-day conference brought together leading scholars from universities around the world — including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford — for a series of presentations and discussions focused on applying the tools of micro- and macroeconomics to understand and tackle the challenge of climate change.

Over the course of the two days, the scholars discussed and debated such topics as whether the government should rebate carbon tax revenue; dynamic responses to carbon pricing in the electricity sector; the climate and ocean in the social cost of carbon; whether environmental markets cause environmental justice; and commodity price volatility under anticipated climate change.

The goal of the workshop was to explore recent advances in climate economics, with an emphasis on the linkage between empirical and numerical modeling methods. A major stated goal of the workshop was to bring junior and senior researchers together. The program consisted of presentations from an outstanding group of invited leading senior researchers, as well as a select group of junior researchers (PhD students and post-doctoral students).

“There’s been this realization that climate really is a problem that we need to solve — and we need to solve it now,” said James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. “Berkeley is actually the leading place right now for climate economics research. It’s playing a central role, it has great people, and it’s terrific to come here.”

The workshop was hosted by the Berkeley Climate Economics Group, which is led by David Anthoff, from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, Max Auffhammer, from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics & International Area Studies, and Solomon Hsiang, from the Goldman School of Public Policy. Social Science Matrix has supported the work of these researchers since 2015; they have convened a series of Matrix Research Teams focused on using economics to understand the potential impacts of climate change in the U.S. and around the world.

“Social Science Matrix really has been an invaluable support for us to get this from an idea that a couple of faculty had to get this to a regular, established place where climate economics can happen,” said Anthoff. “We’re really the only place that organizes a regular meeting that is focused on specifically targeting climate change economic questions.”

Watch a video about the workshop above or on YouTube.

Matrix Lecture

Alexandra Gillies, “Crude Intentions”

Published March 20, 2020

A video featuring a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, author of Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.

Recorded on March 4, 2020, this video features a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, an expert on oil-sector corruption and author of the book “Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World.” This event was co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

About the Book

Billions of dollars stolen from citizens are circling the globe, enriching powerful individuals, altering political outcomes, and disadvantaging everyday people. News headlines provide glimpses of how this corruption works and why it matters: President Trump’s businesses struck deals with oligarchs and sold property to secretive shell companies; the Panama Papers leak triggered investigations in 79 countries; and corruption scandals toppled heads of state in Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. But how do these pieces fit together? And if the corruption is so vast and so tied up with powerful interests, how do we begin to fight back?

To find answers, Crude Intentions examines the corruption crisis that erupted during the recent oil boom. From 2008 to 2014, oil prices shot through the roof. Motivated by more than nine trillion dollars in new oil money, corruption followed apace. Examining the oil boom is like placing a drop of dye in the circulatory system of global corruption, and watching as it reveals the system’s channels and pathways. Company bosses signed off on risky schemes to snap up choice oil blocks. Politicians in Brazil and Nigeria stole billions to build up their election war chests. Kleptocrats in Angola, Azerbaijan, and Russia seized upon the oil wealth to cement their hold on power. And an army of bankers, accountants, and lawyers lined up to help these corrupt actors stash their loot in the global system of shell companies and tax havens that serve today’s super-rich. The money then bought yachts, mansions, and even a few foreign politicians.

Drawing on information exposed by intrepid journalists, prosecutors, and whistle blowers, Crude Intentions tells jaw-dropping stories of corruption and asks what we can learn from them. The cases reveal common tactics, but also vulnerabilities in this web of fraud. These are the starting points for building a smarter fight against corruption, in the oil sector and well beyond.

About the Author

Alexandra Gillies is an expert on oil-sector corruption. Her other recent work has focused on the Nigerian oil sector, national oil companies, commodity trading, and promoting transparency standards including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). She has authored academic articles on related topics and co-edited the volume “Smart Aid for African Development” (Lynne Reiner, 2009). She is an advisor to the Natural Resource Governance Institute. Alexandra holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Cambridge, where she researched the political economy of the Nigerian oil sector. She spent 2008 in Nigeria as a Fulbright Fellow. Prior to joining NRGI, she consulted for the World Bank, DFID, USAID and several political risk firms. She served as assistant director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Alexandra also holds degrees from the University of Ghana and Emory University.

Other Events

Immigration and the American Ethos

Published March 16, 2020

A panel on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy and Matthew Wright.

Recorded on March 6, 2020, this panel discussion focused on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, and Matthew Wright, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

Joining the authors as discussant was Nicholas Valentino, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan. The panel chair was Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at UC Berkeley.

This event was co-sponsored by the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.

Matrix On Point

Election Manipulation

Published March 10, 2020

Recorded on March 3, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel featured Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor's Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science. The event was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

With the 2020 general elections fast approaching and the nominee of the Democratic Party still undecided, this election year is bound to be contentious and fraught with anxieties. Foreign interference, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the census, the purging of voter registration logs, fake ballots, the malfunction and hacking of voting machines — each of these issues poses a distinct threat to the fairness and security of our elections. Although the right to vote is not constitutionally conferred, it is one of the central ideals of representative democracy. Given the reality of low voter turn-out and the peculiarities of the electoral college, the coordination and galvanization of blocks of like-minded voters can prove decisive in shifting elections. As such, many worry that voting rights are threatened by by both foreign and domestic forces who seek to sway elections in their favor.

Recorded on March 3, 2020 — the day of the “Super Tuesday” primary — this panel discussion consider a wide range of issues related to the security and fairness of our elections. The panel was presented by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix as part of the “Matrix On Point” discussion series, and was co-sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

The panel included Sarah Anzia, Michelle J. Schwartz Associate Professor of Public Policy & Associate Professor of Political Science; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor’s Professor of Law; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair of Political Science.

Watch the video of this event above or on YouTube.

Postcolonialism

Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial

Published March 10, 2020

In Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press), Laura E. Pérez — Professor of Ethnic Studies and and Chair of the Latinx Research Center at UC Berkeley — explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity.

In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez’s screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.

Recorded on February 27, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” featured Professor Pérez in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture, UC Berkeley; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, UC Berkeley.

About the Speakers

Laura E. Pérez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Laitnx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while achiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with Delilah Montoya, the multimedia exhibition “Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas” at 516 ARTS gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from January-March of 2009, and curated “Labor + a(r)t + orio: Bay Area Latin@ Arts Now” at the Richmond Art Center, CA (April-June 2011). She has published in numerous publications on feminism, Chicana/o, and hemispheric decolonial cultures. She is also co-editing a book on the multimedia artist, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, with Dr. Ann Marie Leimer.

Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Imperio. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the relationship between current literary practices and photographic languages, techniques and materialities. She is also the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2015) on photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, and of a book of essays on experimental writer Osvaldo Lamborghini (2008). She is guest editing a Special Issue of Film Quarterly on Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (forthcoming Spring 2016). She is currently at work on two book length projects. The first looks at instances of contemporary photographic production which have moved beyond the medium and material historical conditions of photography. The second one is a study of time as critique in contemporary aesthetics.

Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art since 1960 in the US, Europe, and Latin America; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009, named a best book of the year by Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the 2018 Robert Motherwell Book Award). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of two special journal issues (“Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016). With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and is travelling to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and the ICA in Philadelphia. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson (under advanced contract with Yale University Press).

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Other Events

The California Primary and Super Tuesday

Published March 3, 2020

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the "Super Tuesday" primary, this panel focused on California's role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included: John Pérez: Chair, UC Board of Regents and Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly; Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey; and David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times. The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the “Super Tuesday” primary, this panel focused on California’s role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included:

John Pérez, Chair, UC Board of Regents, Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly
Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey
David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times

The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

This event was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Authors Meet Critics

They Were Her Property

Published February 12, 2020

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this "Authors Meets Critics" panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. In discussing her book, Jones-Rogers engaged with two eminent colleagues: Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor in the Department of English, UC Berkeley; and Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley. (Learn more about the Authors Meet Critics series.)

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, They Were Her Property makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

They Were Her Property foregrounds the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and puts their reflections into conversation with other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records in order to show how white women’s pecuniary investments in the institution shaped their gender identities and to situate them at the center of 19th century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. As a whole, this book offers more expansive and differently gendered understandings of American slavery, the trans-regional domestic slave trade, and nineteenth-century slave markets.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is associate professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the winner of the 2013 Lerner-Scott Prize for best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history. She is working on two new projects: “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law, examines the ways that West African customs and laws influenced English thinking about matrilineal descent and may have influenced their decisions to implement matrilineal descent laws in their North American colonies; and “A Country so dreadfull for a White Woman” reconstructs the lives of nearly 300 British women and girls who travelled to the African littoral on Royal African Company slave ships and settled in the company’s forts and castles before 1750. Jones-Rogers earned her PhD in History from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history and vernacular culture. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017). A book on The Wild Tchoupitoulas—a landmark album of processional call-and-response music arranged as electric funk—is forthcoming in the 33 1/3 Series from Bloomsbury. A critical edition, The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love, is forthcoming from LSU Press. A co-edited collection of essays, Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Current research includes a collaborative work, Slavery and Conspiracy in the Atlantic World.

Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies, received her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Professor Salzinger is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and with the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix Lecture

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Race for Profit

Published January 28, 2020

In a Matrix Distinguished Lecture, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained how banks and the real estate industry have undermined black homeownership.

On January 24, 2020, Social Science Matrix was honored to host Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor discussed her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press and has been longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Global Metropolitan Studies.

Taylor began her lecture by describing how, in the 1960s, rat infestations were common in Black poor and working-class communities. “In the aftermath of riots in Philadelphia in 1964, a city commissioned report found that one hundred percent of reported rat bites happened in segregated, Black majority neighborhoods,” she said. “Housing segregation—maintained through a vexing combination of white terroristic violence, public policy, and the exclusionary practices of the private sector—insured the dilapidated and substandard condition of Black housing. These were the evidence of exclusion and enclosure and they boiled over into the electricity of successive waves of uprisings across the country.”

Poor housing conditions, she explained, were a major driver of riots in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities throughout the 1960s, and led the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, to call for historic changes to American housing policies. This led to Lyndon Johnson’s Housing and Urban Development Act, which sought to promote single-family homeownership for the poor. “At the heart of the legislation,” Taylor said, “was a low-income homeownership plan that aimed to transform low-income renters into homeowners…. The terms of the new homeownership program were a low $200 down payment, 20 percent of a participant’s income as their mortgage regardless of the cost of the house, and an interest rates capped at one percent. The inclusion of federal mortgage insurance for the first time meant that in the worst-case scenario—foreclosure or abandonment—the federal government was obligated to pay back the mortgage to the lenders. These terms kept the price of the homes manageable for low-income and working-class people.”

Yet this program led to corrupt practices by the real estate industry and banks, Taylor explained, as “speculators and brokers bought up cheap, dilapidated properties hoping to then flip them for higher prices in sales to people who would qualify for the new programs. Not only could money be made by flipping cheap properties, but brokers found it easy to bribe poorly paid FHA appraisers to inflate the value of the houses in the new urban market. Bankers made money on the front end of the real estate deal by securing the loan, and then they made money on the back end with expensive closing costs associated with selling the property. Everyone made money—except the poor Black families that were disproportionately saddled with these broken homes in cities across the country…. In narrowing their focus to ‘access’ alone, racial liberals overlooked the racist practices embedded within those institutions. This was shockingly clear in the real estate industry. Banks and the real estate industry had played a central role in creating the urban housing crisis—exemplified by the persistent presence of rats in Black housing—so the sudden involvement of these same private sector forces was a recipe for disaster.”

The program failed to remedy racial segregation and income inequality, Taylor said, as many families purchased homes that were in disrepair and had little chance of gaining value over time. “Miserable and dangerous housing conditions in the existing urban market led people to walk away from the homes they had recently purchased, and the numbers of defaults, foreclosures, and FHA insurance payments began to rise,” she said. “Where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accruable possibilities of its surrounding property, Black housing was marked by its exclusion and isolation, where value was extracted, not imbued. These racialized narratives of families, communities, and their built environments reinforced and naturalized the segregative practices among real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and the white public. Indeed, these perceptions of insurmountable difference steeped in the permanence of blood, race, and culture constituted the underwriting criteria that determined who was to be excluded and who should be included.”

Taylor noted that the trend continued in the 1990s and 2000s, as the rise of subprime lending — and the subsequent market collapse — led to unprecedented home losses for African Americans. “For more than fifty years now, the private sector has been viewed as most capable of ending the persisting urban housing crises,” Taylor explained. “And yet those crises have become even starker over time, creating even greater degrees of housing precariousness. This is especially true in the realm of homeownership…. The recurring perception of ‘risky’ Black buyers has opened pathways for the reemergence of naked, predatory practices in the real estate market. From rent-to-own schemes to the reappearance of LICs in lieu of conventional mortgages, real estate continues to pilfer African Americans in search of their American dream in the housing market. It is not history repeating itself. It is the predictable outcome when the home is a commodity and it continues to be promoted as the fulfillment and meaning of citizenship.”

Watch the full video of the lecture above or on YouTube.