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

December 3rd, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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.

This event will be presented in-person at Social Science Matrix as part of the Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Latinx Research Center.

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About the Book

cover of Sin Padres, Sin Papeles, showing a group of teenagers walking near a downtown city

Each 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.

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

October 25th, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm

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 Thursday, 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 Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy. 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

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Professor Mo specializes in behavioral political economy, comparative political behavior, the political economy of development, and social policy research. First, she is substantively interested in the economic, political, and social consequences of increased inequality. Second, she is focused on understanding democratic citizenship and the development of informed interventions aimed at promoting the values and behaviors that define effective citizenship today. Professor Mo has published research in numerous outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Behavior, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and World Development.

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 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).

G. 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

September 17th, 2024
2:00pm-3:30pm PT

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

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 UC Berkeley the Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS). 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

October 21st, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm

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 and the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

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Panelists

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

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

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

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

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Matrix on Point: War is Back

September 30th, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm

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 the University of California at Berkeley.

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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 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 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

September 16th, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Milena Britto, Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor 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), and the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s 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.

Clarissa Rojas is a scholar activist, poet, mama, and movement maker. Her 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.

Milena Britto is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender, race, literature and strategies of legitimation in the cultural field. She is also a curator, publishing editor, and has worked in several positions of cultural public policy.

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

May 8th, 2024
2:00pm-3:00pm

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

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 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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Children of the Plantationocene

April 16th, 2024
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

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Join the Department of African American Studies for a talk from our first scholar in residence of the Banned Scholars Program: Dr. Alisha Gaines.

In “Children of the Plantationocene,” Alisha Gaines considers two interrelated questions: MacArthur Genius Tiya Miles’s 2020 query in The Boston Globe, “What should we do with plantations?;” and Christina Sharpe’s question in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, “how do we defend the dead?” In a sociopolitical moment mired by miseducation, Gaines seeks refuge in Saint Toni Morrison’s novel, A Mercy, to reconcile the place and value of the plantation to and for Black Americans. In so doing, she insists we can begin to understand how slavery’s afterlives shape the ecological presents we all inherit.

Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with UNC Press (Spring 2017). The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. Black for a Day constructs a genealogy of mostly white liberals who temporarily “become” Black under the alibi of racial empathy. Its genealogy includes: the magical racial change of a white Senator in the 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow; journalist Ray Sprigle’s four weeks as a Black man in the South in 1948; journalist and memoirist, John Howard Griffin’s, five weeks as a Black man in 1959; Grace Halsell’s stunt as a Black woman in Harlem and Mississippi for six months in 1969; and the families of the Sparks and the Wurgels switching races for reality television in 2006. The project’s epilogue then turns to the cultural nerve struck by the viral media story of Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP chapter president who was “outed” for claiming she was Black.

An award-winning educator, her interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature and culture, Black queer theory, media and performance studies, narratives of passing, and Black Southern studies.

For more information about the event, please contact: Barbara Montano at bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

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Alisha Gaines and Robin D. G. Kelley in Conversation

April 19th, 2024
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Join us on April 19 at 12:00pm as the Department of African American Studies Banned Scholars Program presents a conversation between Alisha Gaines and Robin D. G. Kelley. The scholars will discuss the defense of academic freedom and public higher education and the importance of Black study in the face of the current racist backlash.

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Presented by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Department of English, and the Department of Geography.

Speakers

Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of English and affiliate faculty of African American Studies at Florida State University. She is also the Co-Humanities Director of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School in Edgard, LA. She earned a PhD in English and a certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University in 2009. From 2009-2011 she held a Carter G. Woodson postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with UNC Press (Spring 2017). An award-winning educator, her interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature and culture, Black queer theory, media and performance studies, narratives of passing, and Black Southern studies.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research has explored the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music and visual culture; Surrealism, Marxism, among other things. His essays have appeared in a wide variety of professional journals as well as general publications, including the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, Counterpunch, Souls,Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text ,The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor. His books include, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); The lonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) [Vol. 10 of the Young Oxford History of African Americans series]; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

For more information, contact: Barbara Montano, bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324.

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Caste, Education, and Social Struggle in India and the United States

April 22nd, 2024
3:30pm-5:00pm

Please register to join us on Monday, April 22 at 3:30pm for a panel on “Caste, Education, and Social Struggle in Modern India,” featuring Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Shailaja Paik, the Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Moderated by Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and 2023-2024 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Program in Critical Theory, Department of English, Global Metropolitan Studies, The Center for Race and Gender, Institute of South Asian Studies, and Department of Anthropology.

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Abstract

Perhaps no other arena in modern India is the site of such charged political and social contest as education. India is the most unequal society in the world wherein the hegemonic capture of socio-economic power by an oppressor savarna/“upper caste” minority has operated through violent control over knowledge, and the exclusion of the vast majority of oppressed Dalit-Bahujan/“lower-caste” communities from basic access to education. The power of education as a route out of intergenerational oppression was recognized by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, in his exhortation, “Educate! Organize! Agitate!”, and operationalized through affirmative action policies by reserving seats in educational institutions, that sought to democratize access to educational institutions of historically marginalized communities. Savarna/ “upper-castes” have responded by mobilizing a poisonous discourse of “merit” against affirmative action. Dalit and oppressed caste students are routinely subjected to humiliation and aggression, marked out as “undeserving” students, by their “upper-caste”/savarna classmates. This routinized humiliation is most tragically exemplified in the spate of suicides by Dalit and oppressed caste students in elite institutions of higher learning such as the IITs.

However caste discrimination is not sequestered in India. Fifty years of Indian immigration to the United States has operationalized caste as a virulent transnational structure of oppression. While Indian Americans represent themselves as “caste-less”, and caste as a quaint phenomenon of the past that has been left behind in India, caste is alive, well, and thriving in the United States. The CISCO case brought by a Dalit employee against his upper-caste employers, forcefully exploded the myth of castelessness in Silicon Valley, making caste a question of public discussion.

In the past three years anti-caste activists and scholars, and their allies, have succeeded in drawing attention to caste discrimination on US campuses. This struggle has succeeded in many universities, such as Brandies University, Brown University, and the University of California State University system, adding caste as a protected category in anti-discrimination codes. This panel reflects on, and draws linkages between, struggles over education in India and the transitional histories of caste struggle in the United States, with the hope that, through rigorous critical engagement with structures of oppression and the discourses they engender, it may be possible to build a more just and egalitarian future.

Panelists

Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a historical anthropologist whose work addresses the historicity and political economy of caste. She is particularly interested in the incorporation of caste into projects of governance and capitalist transformation, and how these projects in turn have shaped the social relations of caste. Her work also considers caste as an instrument of classification and management that has been imagined and deployed in relation to other categories of class, religion, and race. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, 2013), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), analyzes meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation. She is currently working on two projects, the first on Dalit politics in a gold mining company town in South India and the second on the transnationalization of caste in the United States.

Shailaja Paik is the Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She specializes in the social, intellectual, and cultural history of Modern India. Her first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit (“Untouchable”) women in urban India. My second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022) analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra.

Aarti Sethi (moderator) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and 2023-2024 Matrix Faculty Fellow. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. Her second project called Republic of Readers explores the relationship between reading literacy and libraries as sites of postcolonial democracy and citizenship.

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Shifting the Frame: The Labors of ImageNet and AI Data

April 17th, 2024
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Please join us on Wednesday, April 17 at 12:00pm for a lecture by Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). 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.

This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Criminal Law & Justice Center, and the Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS).

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Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and LaMDA have led a multi-billion dollar industry in generative AI, and a potentially much larger industry in AI more generally. However, these technologies would not exist were it not for the immense amount of data mined to make them run, low-paid and exploited annotation labor required for labeling and content moderation, and questionable arrangements around consent to use these data. Although datasets used to train and evaluate commercial models are often obscured from view under the shroud of trade secrecy, we can learn a great deal about these systems by interrogating certain publicly available datasets which are considered foundational in academic AI research.

In this talk, I investigate a single dataset, ImageNet. It is not an understatement to say that without ImageNet, we may not have the current wave of deep learning techniques which power nearly all modern AI technologies. I begin from three vantage points: the histories of ImageNet from the perspective of its curators and its linguistic predecessor WordNet, the testimony of the data annotators which labeled millions of ImageNet images, and the data subjects and the creators of the images within ImageNet. Academically, I situate this analysis within a larger theory and practice of infrastructure studies. Practically, I point to a vision for technology which is not based on practices of unrestricted data mining, exploited labor, and the use of images without meaningful consent.

About the Speaker

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Hanna has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the Scholars Council for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

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Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean

April 1st, 2024
3:30pm-5:00pm

Please register to join us for a lecture by Tone Huse, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, who will discuss her book, which presents an analysis of how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation. She discusses how living nature is wrested into the economy, but also shows how nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy.

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Abstract

We are constantly presented for visions of a new and expansive ocean economy. At a time when the ocean is challenged by climate change, pollution and over-exploitation it is to be drilled, mined, surveyed, grown and harvested to an unprecedented extent and magnitude. Associate Professor Tone Huse presents an analysis of how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation. She discusses how living nature is wrested into the economy, but also shows how nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy. The talk is based her recently published book Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT Press, 2023), co-authored with Kristin Asdal. The book engages with how the ocean and its beings are drawn into increasingly more and tighter economic relations – but also how nature acts in and co-modifies both state and capital. What is a good nature economy? How should we go about in studying the economic relations that are being spun around the ocean? And how are we to meet the great economization of the ocean?

Speakers

Tone Huse is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her current research focuses on the geographies and materialities of urban politics, economies, and planning in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland). Her work spans historical as well as contemporary research, is radically interdisciplinary, and committed to experimenting with new means for interacting with broad publics. Huse is the author of three books, including Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014), and the most recent co-authored Nature Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean.

Discussant: Sharad Chari, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography.

Moderator: Berit Kristoffersen, The Arctic University of Norway

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