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.
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.
Part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series
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 UC 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.
“This is such a quintessentially important topic — how people find meaning in their lives, and how the institutions they are part of shape those meanings,” Fourcade said in her opening remarks. “I’m excited because it’s Silicon Valley, which I’m a bit obsessed about… and I’m excited because the book is really a beautiful exemplar of a classical sociological approach to religion, and also a classical sociological approach to work.”
“I came to the study of work in Silicon Valley by accident,” Chen explained in her presentation of the book. “I was interested in capturing religious presence among the non-religious, so I started first by looking at religion and spirituality in secular spaces. And I started by studying yoga practitioners. I asked yoga practitioners about how, when, and why they practiced yoga, but they kept talking to me about work. I had gone in thinking that yoga was the sacred practice because of its connection to Hinduism. But I was mistaken. Yoga wasn’t sacred, work was. Yoga practitioners told me stories about how they had sacrificed and surrendered their time, energy, and devotion to work. And according to Emile Durkheim, they had set their work apart and made it sacred. So I’ve realized that I’d been looking for the sacred in the wrong place. If I really wanted to understand religion and contemporary where America, I needed to be studying the workplace.”
Chen said that her ethnographic fieldwork included spending time with workers in tech firms; she interviewed more than 100 people in the industry. “I had many gourmet lunches, I attended exercise and dance classes, I attended professional development seminars and executive coach trainings. And yes, I even participated in trance dance. I meditated with tech workers a lot,” she said.
Some workers have largely abandoned their traditional religious practices after joining Silicon Valley firms, Chen said. “America’s highly skilled have not abandoned religion; instead, they find it at work,” she said. “More and more companies have become America’s new temples, churches, and synagogues. People are not selling their souls at work, rather work is where they find their souls.”
She described meeting one tech worker who “used Christian language to describe the company’s mission, saying over and over again to me that he had a ‘burden to come up with this thing that’s going to change the world’ …and that ‘you’ve got to drink the Kool Aid, you have to believe that your company is one of those one out of 10 that’s going to make it’.”
She pointed out that companies have embraced their role as providers of “spiritual cultivation” largely because it serves their interests by boosting workers’ productivity and sense of commitment. “Professionals are looking to work for identity, meaning, purpose, and even transcendence — and companies, for their part, have taken up spiritual care and spiritual cultivation as ways to make their workers more productive,” Chen explained. “In response to the broad economic changes of the late 20th century, such as the rise of global capitalism, and the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial flash knowledge economy, corporate America has changed its organizational culture and labor management practices in order to elicit the full discretionary effort of its highly skilled workers. Corporate managers have shifted their metaphor of employees in the company from cogs in an efficient, well-oiled machine to something that increasingly resembles a religious congregation, with members who belong to a shared community and believe in a higher and transcendent goal. Today, companies are not just economic institutions, they’ve become meaning-making institutions that offer a gospel of fulfillment and divine purpose in a capitalist cosmos. And there’s no better example of this than Silicon Valley’s tech industry…. Workplaces are now in the business of providing meaning and purpose for their workers because this translates to higher performance.”
Chen coined the phrase “techtopia” to describe this new merging of organizational culture and spiritual connection. “In techtopia, people naturally direct their devotion to work because they live in a social ecosystem where all of the community’s material, social, and spiritual rewards are concentrated in the institution of work,” she said. “In techtopia, work is like a big powerful magnet that attracts all of the time, energy, and devotion of a community away from the smaller and weaker social institutions, like families, faith communities, and other civic organizations. The problem with techtopia is that it may be making elite workers happy, whole, and productive, but it leaves everyone else broken. Work monopolizes so much of the time, energy, and devotion of a community and fulfills so many of elite workers’ needs that people disinvest from public in civic life, and this corrodes the collective capacity to build and sustain a common good.”
In her response, Arlie Hochschild drew contrasts with Silicon Valley based upon her research on Americans living in “red states,” most notably Louisiana, as detailed in her renowned book, Strangers in Their Own Land, for which she lived among communities that have not gained from the economic benefits of the digital age. “We sadly have a Red America and a Blue America,” Hochschild said. “I’ve been spending the last six years of my life in Red America. What is that story? It’s almost the opposite of this story. Religion has been liquefied there, too, but it’s gone a different direction. Red and Blue America since the 1970s have come to represent different economies in general. Blue America attracts highly educated workers and it’s a new service sector. Red states are in older industries that are more vulnerable to offshoring and automation. Upward mobility for Blue, downward mobility for Red. And even under the four years of the Trump presidency, most of the new jobs went to the Blue states, to urban, educated people in knowledge industries.”
In red states, Hochschild said, religious zeal has converged with political devotion. “When I studied Louisiana for Strangers in their Own Land, I hung around the highly religious. There the church is elaborated. There you get your gyms and childcare enveloped within a large, invitational church that is beefed up because of the distress around it. But that church, especially evangelical churches, have turned to Donald Trump, and I think we are seeing the sanctification of a charismatic leader. And he has become in way a cult leader…. What I think we’re seeing on on the Right, and why religion is being sucked into a faith in this man, is that we have to think about pride and shame. And that a lot of this downward mobility for people who really believe in the American dream… they’re feeling bad for things they’re not responsible for. This is a structurally induced shame. But it’s felt, and I think it makes them very susceptible to the kind of things that Trump came along and said: ‘You are suffering. I see it. And look how I am suffering. The Deep State is attacking me, the nefarious press is attacking me, the Democratic Party is attacking me, the liberal elite is attacking me. I’m taking it for you.'”
In her remarks, Morgan Ames pointed out that Silicon Valley “continues to be a heterogeneous place with many cultural influences,” and that Chen’s book builds upon the work of other scholars, such as communications scholar Fred Turner, Douglas Thomas, Steven Levy, Gabriella Coleman, and UC Berkeley’s AnnaLee (Anno) Saxenian. “The thread that you follow in Work Pray Code is a thread I know well myself as a former technology worker. And now as a social scientist who, for almost two decades now, has been studying these ideological underpinnings of this complicated place, industry, and belief system colloquially known as Silicon Valley. Your account also echoes those of a number of other scholars hailing from communication, information science, anthropology, media studies, and beyond who have similarly turned their analytic eye to this fascinating and fraught side of inquiry.”
Ames pointed out that “the technology world is not the first to shape worker beliefs toward corporate interests and encourage their workers to find higher meaning in their jobs. Indeed, it takes a page from white collar and even blue collar manufacturing a longstanding capitalistic practice to control not only the labor, but also the hearts and minds of their workers. Even with this corporate maternalism, though, the technology world has very high levels of worker burnout, which may seem surprising given the amenities that tech workers enjoy. But as you vividly illustrate, when considered in the context of the limitations of investing one’s whole self into the corporate bottom line, however it might be camouflaged, it makes a lot more sense.”
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.
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.
Part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series.
On Friday, September 9, 2022, Social Science 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 looks back to the 20th century to explore how experts and officials have come to approach challenges like pandemics and cyberattacks as catastrophic risks that demand a constant state of preparedness.
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.
Aihwa Ong
“The current series of relentless crises raises questions about the nature and scope of the government of modern living,” Ong said in her opening remarks. “We know the welfare state can barely keep up with the proliferation of uneven life chances across the world. Meanwhile, governments are menaced by countless known and unknown threats looming on the horizon. So how can catastrophic events be predicted, regulated, or even tamed? How did a sense of vulnerability develop in the United States? Do the expertise of emergency and politics of precarity protect the living, or are they merely experiments with our fragile future? These are some of the themes dealt with by The Government of Emergency.”
Andrew Lakoff
Andrew Lakoff introduced the book by explaining that its central themes emerged from an initial “puzzle” related to modern life in the United States. “Although most of the book is based on historical material from the mid-20th century, our research actually began with a puzzle in the present,” Lakoff explained. “We were looking into novel formations of security in the United States in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9-11 and the anthrax attacks that followed — formations like biosecurity and homeland security. We came upon a series of government plans, strategy documents, think tank reports, and so on, which we could not make sense of in terms of familiar understandings of collective security, whether national defense or social welfare. These plans and programs were not oriented to the defense of national territory against an external enemy, nor toward managing problems of population security, like endemic disease or poverty — the traditional task of biopolitics. Rather, they focused on potential future events whose probability from the perspective of the experts charged to deal with them was difficult to calculate, but whose consequences might be catastrophic — not only terrorist attacks, but also natural disasters, environmental accidents, or outbreaks of infectious disease.”
The goal of the governmental plans, Lakoff said, was to “ensure the ongoing function of critical infrastructures — systems of transportation, energy, food, water, and communication — in the aftermath of such potential events. And they generated knowledge about the vulnerability of these systems and how to mitigate this vulnerability, not through the analysis of patterns of incidents in the past… but rather through techniques of imaginative enactment, such as scenario-based exercises, computer simulations, or catastrophe models…. We came to call this formation of expert knowledge and political administration ‘vital systems security,’ in contrast to sovereign state security or population security. And we found elements of its guiding practices not only in federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security or the CDC, but also in local emergency management offices, as well as in multilateral organizations like the World Health Organization.”
“Vital systems security is arguably one of the dominant governmental rationalities of our time,” Lakoff said. “Of course, to say that it is dominant is not to say that it is successful in achieving its aims. Indeed, it more typically fails. But crucially, it provides norms such as ‘resilience’ and ‘preparedness,’ against which such failure is measured. And it is mostly taken for granted as a political obligation, even as it continually fails.”
The scholars approached their research not as history, but as “geneaology,” Lakoff explained, tracing the lineage of systems put in place over the past several decades. “We looked for moments in which what are now fairly ubiquitous expert techniques and governmental practices were invented, often for other purposes, and we traced how they were gradually assembled into a coherent schema or apparatus,” he said.
Stephen Collier
In his remarks, Stephen Collier provided a more detailed overview of the content of the book, which chronicles the emergence of “vital systems security” from the era prior to World War II. “Through World War II, emergency government was about the management of economic crises — whether economic downturns, industrial strikes, or mobilization for war,” Collier said. “By the late 1950s, emergency government had come to refer to something quite different. Namely, it came to refer to preparedness for a future event that disrupts the vital systems upon which modern life depends. The book shows how vital vulnerable systems came into being, or at least became the objects of sort of systematic knowledge and management for the first time. And this event in thought corresponded to the emergence of new ways of acting and governing in particular.”
The first section of the book, Collier explained, covers the period roughly from the early 1930s to 1945, an era marked by the Depression and World War II, when experts (primarily economists) “assembled a novel knowledge infrastructure” for mapping and managing vital systems. At the same time, a group of government reformers created new methods for managing ongoing emergency situations.
“A central challenge for these reformers was the one that was most famously formulated by Carl Schmitt, the German jurist, who was an explicit point of reference for some of the Reformers that we traced in this part of the book — namely, can liberal constitutional democracies manage crisis situations and remain democratic?” Collier explained. “In response, these reformers devised a set of mechanisms for governing emergencies that they thought were compatible with democracy. These were things like the delegation of legislative authorities to the executive, and the use of so-called ‘reorganization power,’ through which the president could create administrative agencies and other apparatuses to manage emergency situations.”
The second part of the book, Collier said, addresses the period between 1945 and the early 1950s, when “many of the actors and government offices that were involved in mobilization turned to a new problem, which was the prospect of a Soviet attack on American vital systems, using airplanes, long-range bombers, and atomic weapons…. The problem of emergency government was being beginning to shift during this period. Rather than managing a specific, ongoing crisis, it was mutating into an ongoing task of preparedness for a future catastrophe that might arise at any moment.”
This evolution continued, Collier explained, as the focus of emergency government shifted from mobilization planning toward a new mindset of constant emergency preparedness or emergency management. “The ‘government of emergency,’ which is understood not as a kind of sporadic task that emerges during specific crises, but an ongoing task of preparedness, had become an obligation of the government,” Collier said. “We think of this mutation of emergency government — and the creation of what we refer to in the book as an emergency state — as a very significant episode in American political development.”
Michael Watts
In his commentary, Michael Watts noted that The Government of Emergency’s central themes are deeply resonant in the era of climate change, pandemics, and other threats. “If you needed a ringing endorsement of the relevant saliency of emergency government on a global scale, take a look at the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report,” Watts said. “It’s an annual inventory and compendium of all of these vulnerabilities inherent in vital systems and the forms of emergency government, what they call effective mitigation, that we do or do not have. That report says that the most effective and currently well-established mitigation measures are in the realms of — wait for it — financial stability and weapons of mass destruction.”
“What I liked about the book was that it really does delve into the innards of the security state and Cold War bureaucratic,” Watts said. “Any authors that are prepared to take on a 47-volume strategic bombing survey, which they do, I hold in the highest regard. The granularity of the narrative is compelling, but they’re always tacking back to look at how the logics of future catastrophe run aground, or confound some of the founding principles and ideological convictions of American politics and political economy.”
Cathryn Carson
Cathryn Carson — a historian whose work focuses on the 20th century and the rise of nuclear weapons — described the book as “incisive, careful, and far-seeing.” She said that she regarded The Government of Emergency “as a story of the conceptualization and ordinary practice of securing threatened infrastructures, the ones that sustain collective life in modern societies.”
“The subject matter of the book is nominally the systems of industrial and urban modernity, not just how they grow or get built and crumble over time, but the possibilities of catastrophic breakdown and the cascading social failures that follow,” Carson said. “And then you pay attention to the emerging expectation that it’s the responsibility of government to respond to and mitigate and, probably most important, prevent, as far as possible, that kind of breakdown, through a kind of prophylactic planning called preparedness.”
Carson hailed the book’s examination of the infrastructure of “vital systems, the multi-layered and complex systems that sustain urban and industrial life, which is itself a mid-20th century notion of systems. And then you look at those systems’ vulnerability, and the counter-move of preparedness that you wrap up in the term ‘security’ — a term with meanings far beyond this text.”
Carson said that the book gives new shape to our traditional understanding of the Cold War. “As a historian, I want to say I am deeply impressed by the history in here,” she said. “What you show us is how civil defense strategies, which historians have written about, actually come out of things like supply chain management, those techniques of the 1930s and 1940s, the new sciences of administration…. To me, it’s simply good history.”
Professor DeLong was joined in conversation by Robert Brenner, Professor Emeritus and Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA. The talk was moderated by Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).
From one of the world’s leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied
Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.
Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.
Panelists
Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a weblogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 and 1987. He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993 and became a full professor in 1997. Professor DeLong also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He worked on the Clinton Administration’s 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort.
Robert Brenner is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, and the author of several books, including The Economics of Global Turbulence: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso, 2006) and Property and Progress: the Historical Origins and Social Foundations of Self-sustaining Growth (Verso, 2009). He is an editor of Against the Current and New Left Review.
Steven K. Vogel is Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of the advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan. His most recent book, entitled Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (Oxford, 2018), argues that markets do not arise spontaneously but rather are crafted by individuals, firms, and most of all by governments.
Co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies and River-Lab, at UC Berkeley
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, panelists Danielle Zoe Rivera and Jessica Ludy drew upon their research on these topics and discuss pathways to improving on the current situation.
Danielle Zoe Rivera is Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design. Rivera’s research examines movements for environmental and climate justice. Her current work uses community-based research methods to address the impacts of climate-induced disasters affecting low-income communities throughout South Texas and Puerto Rico. Rivera teaches on environmental planning and design, community engagement, and environmental justice. Her work has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association, Environment and Planning, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining the University of California Berkeley, Rivera taught Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Jessica Ludy (she/her) is the Flood Risk Program Manager and Environmental Justice Coordinator for the San Francisco District US Army Corps of Engineers. Through the Army Corps’ “Technical Assistance Programs,” Jessica and her team partner with communities in the San Francisco District Area of Responsibility to identify and implement solutions for equitable, just, and sustainable climate adaptation. Jessica also leads the San Francisco district’s efforts to implement the federal government’s priorities to advance social and environmental justice. Jessica’s work is informed and inspired by collaborations and scholarship of researchers and colleagues both inside and out of the federal government, and by the decades of environmental and disability justice leadership from indigenous peoples, people of color, and other historically-marginalized groups. Jessica is a co-chair of the Social Justice and Floodplain Management Task Force at the Association of State Floodplain Managers. Prior to the Army Corps, she worked on flood risk management and floodplain restoration as an environmental consultant, a Fulbright scholar, and at nonprofits. Jessica completed her Master’s in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley in 2009.
Presented as part of the Matrix on Point event series
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.
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
Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research
Recorded on April 29, 2022, this talk features John Sides, William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy, is forthcoming this fall. He is an author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and The Battle for the Meaning of America, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election, and Campaigns and Election: Rules, Reality, Strategy, Choice.
Professor Sides has published articles in all the leading political science journals. He helped found and serves as publisher of The Monkey Cage, a site about political science and politics at the Washington Post, and has written for a wide range of media outlets. Sides received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
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.
Arisha Hatch is the vice president and chief of campaigns at Color Of Change, leading campaigns on civic engagement, voting rights, criminal justice, and corporate and media accountability. Arisha is a leader and innovator in the racial justice movement. She organized Black People’s Brunches, which brought together more than 12,500 civic-minded Black people in 2018 to discuss a host of social justice issues and helped to set the organization’s agenda for 2019 and beyond. Since joining Color Of Change in 2012, she has ushered in groundbreaking victories for Black communities. She championed getting payment processors like Mastercard and PayPal to ban the use of their platforms by white supremacists, persuaded Saturday Night Live to add two Black women to its cast and writer’s room mid-season and successfully led efforts to remove Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter and R. Kelly from RCA. Before coming to Color Of Change, Arisha worked as a lawyer and organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She later served as the national organizing director of the Courage Campaign, where she helped lead groundwork for progressive change in California. In 2020, Arisha was named one of Essence Magazine’s Woke 100 and The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans. Her editorial writing has been published by Essence, The Root, The Grio and TechCrunch, and she is a regular commentator on political and social justice topics for major news outlets. Arisha was born in Texas and raised in Southern California. She has degrees in economics, creative writing and feminist studies from Stanford University, and she received her doctorate in law from Santa Clara University in California.
Liz McKenna is a postdoctoral scholar at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Liz studies left and right-wing social movements in the United States and Brazil, using multiple methods to examine when civil society organizations safeguard against authoritarianism, and when they become the primary carriers of it. She is the co-author of Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2. Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford University Press, with Hahrie Han) and Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (University of Chicago Press, with Hahrie Han and Michelle Oyakawa). Liz received the 2021 American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation on politics and organizing in contemporary Brazil. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a political and community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. In 2022, she was named a Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. Her latest book was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. She has previously published three books: How Organizations Develop Activists; Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America; and, Moved to Action. Her award-winning work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.
Michelle Oyakawa is an assistant professor of sociology at Muskingum University in Ohio. She studies the intersection of race, religion, and social movements through her research on leaders and organizations. She received her PhD in sociology from The Ohio State University in 2017. Her work has been published in academic journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and the Journal of Community Psychology, and she is coauthor of two books about mobilization: Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (with Hahrie Han and Liz McKenna; University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Smart Suits, Tattered Boots: Black Ministers and Mobilization in the 21st Century (with Korie Edwards; New York University Press, forthcoming).
Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute, Stanford University. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and six books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). One of her most recent books, In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law. Her research continues to focus on how to improve the quality of government and how to generate a better political economic framework. She is also committed to understanding and improving supply chains so that the goods we consume are produced in a manner that sustains both the workers and the environment.
Marshall Ganz: As Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. He entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. He left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review and elsewhere. His newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement was published in 2009, earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world.
Lisa García Bedolla (moderator) is Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of political and educational inequalities in the United States. She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.
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.
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.
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.
About the Book
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.
About the Panelists
Sarah E. Vaughn is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies. She received her B.A. in 2006 from Cornell University, majoring as a College Scholar with a focus in Anthropology, Sociology, and Inequality Studies. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. Her research advances understandings of climate change in the Circum-Caribbean while tracking the affective, ethical, and political components of dignity and belonging. At stake in her research are questions about the role climate change has in shaping the materiality of expertise, an ethics of (re)distribution, and narrative form. She is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology and Medicine, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Program in Development Engineering.
Stephen Collier studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. Collier examines both contemporary and historical topics, and is engaged with a number of sub-disciplinary fields, including science and technology studies, actor-network theory, governmentality studies, and cultural geography. Collier’s current research examines urban resilience as a significant new paradigm and practice in city and regional planning. He has conducted fieldwork on urban resilience in New Orleans and New York, with ongoing comparative projects in other U.S. cities that examine how urban governments are developing and financing resilience interventions. Collier’s ongoing work on resilience builds on longer-term research on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States, which resulted in a co-authored book, The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). Collier is co-editor of Limn, a scholarly magazine on contemporary problems that arise at the intersection of science, technology, and expert knowledge. He has edited issues of Limn on systemic risk, disease ecologies, design and development, and public infrastructure.
Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the visual arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and co-editor of Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2020). He is currently writing a book on Indian Ocean art histories in the age of Anthropocene extinction.
Daniel Aldana Cohen (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serves as a faculty affiliate in the graduate program on Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project. He is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-23). In 2018-19, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019). He is currently completing a book project called Street Fight: Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century City, under contract with Princeton University Press.
Part of the celebration of Berkeley Psychology’s 100 Year Anniversary
Recorded on April 27, 2022 as part of an ongoing series of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley, this video featured talks by three UC Berkeley Psychology faculty members: Professors Robert Knight, Sheri Johnson, and Jason Okonofua. The presentation was moderated by Serena Chen, Professor and Chair of Berkeley Psychology, and includes remarks by Raka Ray, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences at UC Berkeley, and Carol Christ, Chancellor of UC Berkeley. The cutting-edge research of each of these faculty and their students uniquely illustrates how psychological science can contribute to solving a broad range of big problems at both the individual and societal levels.
Physiology of Human Cognition: Insights from Direct Brain Recording with Implications for Health and Disease
How do we think, remember, speak, and socialize? Discovering the physiological substrate of these human behaviors presents one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. Evidence obtained from electrodes inserted into the human brain for treatment of medication refractory epilepsy provides unprecedented insight into the electrophysiological processes supporting human behavior. In this talk, Professor Bob Knight, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, reviews findings with implications for understanding brain function in health and how these findings might be used for development of neuroprosthetic devices for treatment of disabling neurological disorders.
Understanding and Managing Impulsivity
For decades, scientists have considered the role of impulsivity in contributing to mental health and behavioral outcomes. In the last 20 years, researchers have shown that one form of impulsivity—the tendency to engage in rash and regrettable behavior during states of high emotion—is particularly related to poor outcomes. In this talk, Sheri Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, reviews some of the outcomes tied to this form of impulsivity, and highlights new treatment development work.
Sidelining Bias: A Situationist Approach to Reduce the Consequences of Bias in Real-World Contexts
Bias and bias-reduction have become ubiquitous topics of research, policy, and practice. In this talk, Jason A. Okonofua, Assistant Professor of Psychology, introduces an approach to study and mitigate societal consequences of bias that begins with the presumption that people are inherently complex, that is, including multiple, often contradictory patterns of selves and goals. When we conceptualize the person this way, we can ask when biased selves are likely to emerge and whether we can sideline this bias—alter situations in potent ways that elevate alternative selves and goals that people will endorse and for which bias would be non-functional. My research shows how sidelining bias has led to meaningful improvements for thousands of individuals in real-world outcomes, including higher achievement and reduced school suspensions for youth and recidivism to jail for youth and adults.
Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a weblogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 and 1987. He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993 and became a full professor in 1997. Professor DeLong also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He worked on the Clinton Administration’s 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort.
Robert Brenner is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, and the author of several books, including The Economics of Global Turbulence: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso, 2006) and Property and Progress: the Historical Origins and Social Foundations of Self-sustaining Growth (Verso, 2009). He is an editor of Against the Current and New Left Review.
Steven K. Vogel is Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of the advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan. His most recent book, entitled Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (Oxford, 2018), argues that markets do not arise spontaneously but rather are crafted by individuals, firms, and most of all by governments.
Danielle Zoe Rivera
Jessica Ludy
Sarah E. Vaughn 
Stephen Collier 
Sugata Ray
Daniel Aldana Cohen
How do we think, remember, speak, and socialize? Discovering the physiological substrate of these human behaviors presents one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. Evidence obtained from electrodes inserted into the human brain for treatment of medication refractory epilepsy provides unprecedented insight into the electrophysiological processes supporting human behavior. In this talk, Professor 
For decades, scientists have considered the role of impulsivity in contributing to mental health and behavioral outcomes. In the last 20 years, researchers have shown that one form of impulsivity—the tendency to engage in rash and regrettable behavior during states of high emotion—is particularly related to poor outcomes. In this talk, 
Bias and bias-reduction have become ubiquitous topics of research, policy, and practice. In this talk,