Making Sense of the Elections of 2024

Presented by the Berkeley Global Democracy Commons

national elections map

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The American election will close out a year of momentous elections around the world. Almost two decades on from the financial crisis of 2007 that helped unleash a wave of authoritarian, populist and nativist movements in democracies around the world, our panel of faculty will consider what new social and political forces have shaped the elections in 2024. What do those election results tell us about the health or fragility of global democracy, and how might we better understand the outcome of the American election as part of a broader global process?

Presented by the Berkeley Global Democracy Commons, this panel will feature UC Berkeley scholars from diverse disciplines, including James Vernon (History), Alison Post (Political Science), Dylan Riley (Sociology), Aarti Sethi (Anthropology) and Kwanele Sosibo (Art History).

 

 

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Marion Fourcade: The Ordinal Society

Ordinal Society book cover

Join us on December 5, 2024 for a talk by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix, celebrating the publication of her book, The Ordinal Society, co-authored with Kieran Healy.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).

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About the Book

Marion Fourcade
Marion Fourcade

A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world.

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.

While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

About the Speaker

Marion Fourcade is Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton University Press, 2009) and numerous articles on valuation, knowledge, and politics in comparative perspective. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, Harvard University Press 2024), describes the social and economic consequences of a new regime of knowledge that sees and scales people by way of behavioral data harvested through digital environments.

Professor Fourcade is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award, the Society for the Social Studies of Science’s Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book in science and technology studies, and the Lewis Coser award for theoretical agenda setting. She has held Visiting Professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University and is an External Scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

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Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Authoritarian Absorbtion book cover

Please join us on Wednesday, November 13 at 12pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China, by Yan Long, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Professor Long will be joined in conversation by Matthew Kohrman, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law, and the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. The panel will be moderated by Tom Gold, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

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About the Book

Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China’s pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state’s inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state’s domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China’s AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.

Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China’s subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems.

About the Panelists

Yan Long
Yan Long

Yan Long is Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. She is a political and organizational sociologist studying the interactions between globalization and authoritarian politics across empirical areas such as public health, civic action, urban development, and digital technology, with a geographic focus on China. Long’s recent research investigates the urban politics around COVID-19 testing in China. ​​​​She concentrates on how community mobilization facilitates or undermines the utilization of digital tools in public health measures. Her past papers include “Selling under Stigma: The Relational Gender Dynamics of Becoming Biolaborers in China” (Social Science & Medicine); “Dance with Glauthoritarian Urbanization: An Entrepreneurial Megacity in the Making through the Lenses of Civic Organizations” (Global Perspectives, with Wei Luo); and “Relational Work and Its Pitfalls: Nonprofits’ Participation in Government-Sponsored Voluntary Accreditation” (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. With Wei Luo and Wenjuan Zheng).

Matthew Korman
Matthew Korman

Matthew Kohrman is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and, by courtesy, Department of Medicine; Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People’s Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume–Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives–expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

Rachel Stern
Rachel Stern

Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science and currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. Her research looks at law in Mainland China and Hong Kong, especially the relationship between legal institution building, political space, and professionalization. Stern is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence (Cambridge University Press 2013), as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization and lawyers in contemporary China. Stern is currently part of a collaborative effort to analyze the 60+ million Chinese judicial decisions placed online following a 2014 policy change. This massive expansion in the public record of court activity promises to re-shape our understanding of Chinese law and, beyond China, of authoritarian legality. Before joining Berkeley Law and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Stern was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows. She also currently serves as series editor for the Law and Society series at Cambridge University Press.

Thomas GoldTom Gold (moderator) is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1981 until 2018. His research focuses on social, political and cultural change in China and Taiwan. His most recent book is “Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong”, co-edited with Sebastian Veg.

 

 

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Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Partisan Nation book cover

Please join us on Wednesday, October 9 at 4pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era, by Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler. The authors will be joined in conversation by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Mark Danner, Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, will moderate.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

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About the Book

A provocative exploration of how America’s democratic crisis is rooted in a dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today’s nationalized, partisan politics.

The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble.

In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.

Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.

About the Authors

Paul Pierson
Paul Pierson

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at  Berkeley, where he also directs the newly established Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI). Pierson is the author or co-author of six books and numerous journal articles, along with a wide range of popular writings on American politics and public policy. Four of his books have been co-authored by Jacob Hacker. Their latest book is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Previously, the two wrote American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper—a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Prior to this Pierson wrote Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (2004) and Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (1994). Material from each of these books received major prizes from the American Political Science Association. A former Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his recent honors include election to the American Academy of Political and Social Science as the 2022 Robert A. Dahl Fellow.

Eric Schickler
Eric Schickler

Eric Schickler is the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies American politics, with a focus on the U.S. Congress, American political development, political parties, and polarization. He is the author of three books which have won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics: Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (2001), Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the United States Senate (2006, with Gregory Wawro), and Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (2016, with Douglas Kriner; also winner of the Richard E. Neustadt Prize for the best book on executive politics). His book, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, was the winner of the Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book on government, politics or international affairs published in 2016, and was co-winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in history and politics from the previous two calendar years. He is also the co-author of Partisan Hearts and Minds, which was published in 2002. Schickler was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017.  He received his B.A. from New College of Florida and his Ph.D. from Yale University.

About the Panelists

Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science. Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in Sept. 2018. His latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in May 2022.

Didi Kuo
Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: The Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Mark Danner

Mark Danner (moderator) is a writer, reporter and educator who for more than three decades has written on war, politics, and conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and written extensively on American politics, from Reagan to Trump. Danner holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at UC Berkeley and is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. Among his books are The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, The Secret Way to War, Stripping Bare the Body and Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has written and co-produced two hour-long ABC News documentaries and an eight-part documentary series on US foreign policy and genocide. Danner’s work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Carey McWilliams Award, a Guggenheim, and an Emmy. In 1999, Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association, and a resident curator at the Telluride Film Festival. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy and America’s role in the world.

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How Efficiency Fails: Prediction in the Public Interest 

Presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

Anne Washington

Please join us on Thursday, October 10 at 2pm for a talk by Anne Washington, Assistant Professor of Data Policy at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS) and the UC Berkeley School of Information. This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

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Abstract

Can predictive algorithms serve the public interest? Organizations that streamline for algorithmic efficiency may place additional burdens on individuals experiencing predictions. History suggests that initiatives intended to serve everyone can distribute resources unevenly. Drawing on STS theory and public policy, I argue that public interest predictions are conceptually different. Examples from automated government systems illustrate how to identify when beneficence is shared.

About the Speaker

Anne L. Washington, PhD studies the societal impact of computing, with an emphasis on public interest technology. As a computer scientist trained in interpretive ethnography, she draws on a wide range of methods. The National Science Foundation has funded her research multiple times including a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award. She testified before Congress on artificial intelligence in financial services in 2019 and has directed the Digital Interests Lab since 2020. Her top-selling book, Ethical Data Science: Prediction in the Public Interest  was published in December 2023 by Oxford University Press. She is an Assistant Professor of Data Policy at New York University and currently is serving as a 2024-2025 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, CASBS, at Stanford University.

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Authors Meet Critics: “Sin Padres, Ni Papeles,” by Stephanie Canizales

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Sin Padres, Sin Papeles book cover

Please register to join us on Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 12:00pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States, by Stephanie Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Professor Canizales will be joined in conversation by Kristina Lovato, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare, and Caitlin Patler, Associate Professor of Public Policy. Sarah Song, Professor at Berkeley Law, will moderate.

About the Book

cover of Sin Padres, Sin Papeles, showing a group of teenagers walking near a downtown cityEach year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.

 

About the Panelists

Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a Resident Scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Stephanie’s research specializations include international migration and immigrant integration; children, youth, and families; inequality, poverty, and mobility; and race and ethnicity. She uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic research methods to understand the causes of Latin American-origin migration to the U.S. and how immigrant children, youth, and families fare once there. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles inform her scholarship and motivate her commitment to public scholarship.

Kristina Lovato, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare. She is a member of the Latinx and Democracy cluster at UC Berkeley and serves as the Director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare (CICW) in the School of Social Welfare.  Dr Lovato’s scholarly work and teaching is directly informed by her dedication to community- engaged social justice. She has spent the past 20 years working at the intersection of child wellbeing and immigration issues as a bilingual social work practitioner, educator, and researcher. Her research utilizes intersectional, qualitative, and mixed method approaches to examine the impact of immigration policy on Latinx and immigrant child and family wellbeing. She aims to enhance culturally responsive maltreatment prevention strategies and improve child welfare and other social service system responses to meet the needs of immigrant youth and Families.

Caitlin Patler is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Dr. Patler is a sociologist whose research examines US immigration and criminal laws, legal statuses, and law enforcement institutions as drivers of socioeconomic and health disparities. Dr. Patler also studies the spillover and intergenerational consequences of systemic inequality for children and household wellbeing. Dr. Patler has received multiple grants and awards for her research on undocumented immigrant young adults, the impacts of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the US immigration prison system. She serves on the Editorial Board of Social Problems. 

Sarah Song (moderator) is the Milo Rees Robbins Chair in Legal Ethics Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at UC Berkeley. She is a political theorist with a special interest in issues of democracy, citizenship, migration, and inequality. She teaches in the Ph.D. Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) at Berkeley Law, including courses in political and legal philosophy, citizenship and migration, and feminist theory and jurisprudence. Song is the author of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which won the 2008 Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. Her second book, Immigration and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), explores the values and principles that shape and ought to shape public debate about immigration. The book examines the origins of the plenary power doctrine in U.S. immigration law, analyzes normative arguments for the modern state’s right to control immigration, and considers policy implications for reforming immigration law.

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Matrix on Point: Shifting Alignments in the 2024 Election

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is shaping up to be another pivotal contest that could significantly reshape the nation’s political landscape for years to come. This panel will examine the shifting demographic and political forces that are redefining the traditional bases of the Democratic and Republican parties and their efforts to build new electoral coalitions. Panelists will analyze voter trends and realignment along key dimensions, including gender, age, race and ethnicity, and explore how issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, and threats to democracy are motivating different segments of the electorate.

To be held on Friday, October 25, 2024 from 12:00pm-1:30pm, this panel will feature Ian Haney López, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley; David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley; and Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science. Moderated by G. Cristina Mora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy), and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Travers Department of Political Science, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

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Panelists

 

Ian Haney Lopez

Ian Haney López is Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley. His focus for the last decade has been on the use of racism as a class weapon in electoral politics, and how to respond. In Dog Whistle Politics (2014), he detailed the fifty-year history of coded racism in American politics. Ian has since actively promoted the idea of a race-class fusion as the basis for a multi-racial progressive majority. He co-chaired the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice, along with Dorian Warren and Ana Avendaño, and founded the Race-Class Narrative Project, along with Anat Shenker-Osorio and Heather McGhee. In his latest book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (2019), Ian explains Trump’s complex relationship with dog whistling and further develops the race-class response.

David HollingerDavid Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. His work has broadly focused on religion in American society and American intellectual history, and he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His books include Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (2022), When this Mask of Flesh is Broken: The Story of an American Protestant Family (2019), and Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (2017).

Omar Wasow is an Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science. His research focuses on race, politics and statistical methods. His paper on the political consequences of the 1960s civil rights movement was published in the American Political Science Review. His co-authored work on estimating causal effects of race was published in the Annual Review of Political Science. Before joining the academy, Omar was the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com. Under his leadership, BlackPlanet.com became the leading site for African Americans, reaching over three million active users a month. Omar also worked to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on programs like NBC’s Today Show, CNN’s American Morning and public radio’s Tavis Smiley show. Similarly, Omar tutored Oprah Winfrey in her first exploration of the Net in the 12-part series ‘Oprah Goes Online’.

Cristina MoraG. Cristina Mora (moderator) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy) and the Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses mainly on questions of census racial classification, immigration, and racial politics in the United States and Europe. Her book, Making Hispanics, was published by the University of Chicago Press and provides the first historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” panethnic category in the United States. She is currently working on two new book projects funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. The first, California Color Lines: Racial Politics in an Era of Economic Precarity (w. T. Paschel) examines the contradictions of racial politics in nation’s most diverse and seemingly progressive state. The second, Race and the Politics of Trust in an Age of Government Cynicism (w. J. Dowling and M. Rodriguez-Muniz) provides the first mixed methods examination of race and political trust in the U.S.

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Exploring the Roles of Segregation by Location and Lender on Racial Inequality Mortgage Access

Presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

Jacob Faber

Please join us on September 17, 2024 for a lecture by Jacob Faber, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service in New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, with a joint appointment in NYU’s Sociology Department. Professor Faber’s talk will focus on the role of inequality across lending institutions in contributing to racial discrimination in mortgage lending.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the Department of Sociology. This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

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Abstract

A rich, multidisciplinary literature has established wide racial disparities in access to home mortgage finance. This paper leverages data on over 28 million mortgage applications submitted between 2007 and 2022 to investigate the intersecting roles of segregation across geographies and segregation across lending institutions in shaping these disparities. While the literature has largely focused on spatial inequality as a driver of racial inequalities in mortgage approval rates, my results suggest that inequality across lending institutions may be an even more important contributor.

About the Speaker

Jacob William Faber is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service in New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and holds a joint appointment in NYU’s Sociology Department. He is also a co-founder of the Redlining Lab. His research and teaching focuses on spatial inequality. He leverages observational and experimental methods to study the mechanisms responsible for sorting individuals across space and how the distributions of people by race and class interact with political, social, and ecological systems to create and sustain economic disparities. While there is a rich literature exploring the geography of opportunity, there remain many unsettled questions about the causes of segregation and its effects on the residents of urban ghettos, wealthy suburbs, and the diverse set of places in between.

His scholarship highlights the rapidly-changing roles of numerous institutional actors (e.g. mortgage lenders, real estate agents, check cashing outlets, and police officers) in facilitating the reproduction of racial and spatial inequality. Through investigation of several aspects of American life, he demonstrates that a pattern of “institutional marginalization” emerges as a powerful mechanism connecting segregation to socioeconomic disadvantage. His work has been published in American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, Social Forces, Housing Policy Debate, and other prominent journals.

Professor Faber’s scholarship has received recognition from several organizations, including the American Sociological Association (ASA), Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM), Association of Black Sociologists (ABS), Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). He was named co-winner of the 2021 Michael Harrington Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems for his scholarship on segregation and his engagement with policy makers to ameliorate its effects. In 2020, Professor Faber won NYU’s Making a Difference Award for his research and teaching on the hidden and unsettled causes of segregation by race. In 2018, he was named NYU Wagner’s Professor of the Year and won the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Research Prize.

Dr. Faber earned his PhD in Sociology from New York University and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. He also graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Master’s degrees in Telecommunications Policy and Urban Studies and Planning and a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science. Between stints at graduate school, Dr. Faber worked as a Senior Researcher for the Center for Social Inclusion, a racial justice policy advocacy organization.

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Matrix on Point: Voices from the Heartland

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

Patriotic display of American flags waving on white picket fence. Typical small town Americana Fourth of July Independence Day decorations.

Over the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia; Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas, talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie; and Lisa Pruitt has straddled the rural-urban divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of rural legal access.

As the nation braces for a decisive election, this conversation seeks to illuminate the frequently overlooked yet politically potent voices emanating from America’s rural heartlands and small towns. The panel will be moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies.

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Panelists

Arlie Hochschild
Arlie Hochschild

Arlie R. Hochschild is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, details rise of the right. Her latest book, ‘Stolen Pride: loss, shame and the rise of the right’   is based on six years of field work in eastern Kentucky and focuses on  the politics of pride and shame.  In particular, it focuses  on the  distress caused by   “structural shaming” in an era of  post-70s economic decline,  a shame  which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement.  

 

Lisa Pruitt
Lisa Pruitt

Lisa Pruitt is Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis. Pruitt’s work reveals how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales, (e.g., material spatiality, lack of anonymity) profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law.  This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory.

 

Jenny Reardon
Jenny Reardon

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017).  Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

 

Cihan Tuğal
Cihan Tuğal

Cihan Tuğal (moderator) studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Tuğal is currently working on a book that will incorporate these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.

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Matrix on Point: War is Back

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

Russia war damage building destruction city war ruins city damage car. Terror attack bomb shell of civilian bombed. Disaster area. 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine war torn city destroyed car burn out

War is back. Open military operations in Europe and the Middle East have driven an escalation of geopolitical tensions in those regions. The conduct of warfare is changing, too, fueled by the deployment and sometimes live-testing of new technologies. Meanwhile, a new cold war seems to be settling in. The growth of China’s economic power and worldwide influence has triggered proliferating sovereignty disputes and defensive trade and security policies. In this Matrix on Point panel, UC Berkeley experts will discuss these and other transformations, and offer their views on what to expect in the short to medium term.

Join us on September 30, 2024 for a panel discussion featuring Michaela Mattes, Associate Professor in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley; Andrew W. Reddie, Associate Research Professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and Founder of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab; and Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and Co-Director for the Institute of International Studies.

The panel will be moderated by Vinod Aggarwal, Distinguished Professor and Alann P. Bedford  Endowed Chair in Asian Studies, in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute of International Studies.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

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Panelists

Michaela Mattes an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of international conflict and cooperation. She studies how adversaries can manage and resolve their disagreements, including the design and effects of security institutions, conflict management agreements, and military alliances. She also studies the effect of domestic politics on countries’ foreign policy behavior and especially their willingness and ability to pursue international cooperation.

Andrew W. Reddie is an Associate Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and Founder of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab. His research at the intersection of technology, politics, and security examines how emerging military capabilities shape international order—with a focus on nuclear weapons policy, cybersecurity, AI governance, and innovation. He is also a pioneer of the use of wargaming methods in both classroom and experimental settings. Andrew serves in faculty leadership roles at UC Berkeley’s Center for Security in Politics, the Berkeley APEC Study Center, and UC-wide Disaster Resilience Network. He is also an affiliate of UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies and the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Andrew received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019.

Daniel Sargent
Daniel Sargent

Daniel Sargent is Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and serves as Co-Director for the Institute of International Studies. His research on international policy and North America has been published in his 2015 book, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, and he also coedited the 2010 The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective.

 

Vinod Aggarwal
Vinod Aggarwal

Vinod Aggarwal is Distinguished Professor and holds the Alann P. Bedford  Endowed Chair in Asian Studies, Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at the University of California at Berkeley. His authored books include Liberal Protectionism, International Debt Threat, Debt Games, Le Renseignement Stratégique d’Entreprise, Une Nouvelle Approche des Phénomènes Sociaux. He has two forthcoming books: Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies and the Oxford Handbook on Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft.  He has also published over 160 articles and book chapters. His current research examines comparative regionalism in Europe, North America, and Asia, industrial policy, and the political economy of high technology economic statecraft.

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Authors Meet Critics: “Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex,” Juana María Rodríguez

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Puta Life book cover

Join us on Monday, Sept. 16 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Rodriguez will be joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.

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The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies.

About the Book

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work’s stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

Panelists

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). In 2023,  Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ with the prestigious Kessler Award, in recognition of her significant lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.

 

Courtney MorrisCourtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist and author of To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023), which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. She is a regular contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide, an ASME-award winning magazine about place.

 

Clarissa Rojas is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. She is a scholar activist, poet, mama, and movement maker. Rojas’s mother’s indigenous lineages in the Americas root her in the Arizona/Sonora deserts. Clarissa grew up in Mexicali/Calexico and San Diego/Chula Vista where her family migrated. She lives in Oakland in unceded Huichin and is faculty in Chicanx Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Davis. Clarissa co-founded INCITE! and has authored and co-edited multiple articles, special issues, and books on violence and the transformation of violence, including Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence and most recently her writing appears in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Abolition Feminisms.

 

Alberto Ledesma (moderator) is Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He grew up in East Oakland and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnic studies in 1996 and is a former faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He has held several staff positions at UC Berkeley, including director of admissions at the School of Optometry, and writing program coordinator at the Student Learning Center. He is the author of the award winning illustrated autobiography, Diary of A Reluctant Dreamer.

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Global Economic Developments: A View from the IMF

Gita Gopinath

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are invited to join us on May 8, 2024 from 2:00pm-3:00pm for a town hall meeting with Gita Gopinath, the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. The event will feature an interview of Dr Gopinath conducted by current UC Berkeley students on topics ranging from debt sustainability to economic fragmentation and the role of the dollar in the global economy, followed by an open question period.

Vishal Tummala
Vishal Tummala

Gopinath will be interviewed by two students:

Vishal Tummala, a first-year student in the Full-Time MBA program at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Previously, he worked at PIMCO on the product strategy team, focused on global macro and quant hedge fund investment strategies. He holds an undergraduate degree in Business Economics (with a minor in Mathematics) from UCLA, and is a CFA charterholder.

Victoria Mouro Assahina
Victoria Mouro Assahina

Victoria Mouro Assahina is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Economics and Data Science. She is interested in sustainability economics, macroeconomic policy, and behavioral economics. She was an Academic Affairs Director and is now co-president of the Undergraduate Economics Association at Berkeley.

 

Presented by Social Science Matrix and the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy.

Please note that this event is limited to UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff. Attendees will be asked to present Cal ID upon arrival.

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