Matrix on Point: New Directions in Gender and Sexuality

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

silhouettes over rainbow colors

While the last 20 years have marked a significant change in increased acceptance of varied gender expressions and sexual orientations, these changes haven’t made the importance of gender and sexuality as concepts disappear. If anything, they’ve become more relevant for understanding the world today. This panel will bring together a group of graduate students from the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and political science for a discussion of gender and sexuality through the lens of such topics as medicine, transnational migration, and marriage.

The panel will feature David Pham, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies; Emily Ruppel, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology; and Soosun You, a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Laura C. Nelson, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

This will be a hybrid event (presented in-person and online). Register to receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

REGISTER HERE

Co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender (CRG). This event is part of the Matrix on Point series, 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.

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Panelists

David PhamDavid Pham is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He holds an MA in Ethnic Studies (2019) from the department and an AB in Sociology (2017) from Vassar College. His research interests include: Asian American literary and cultural studies; queer of color critique; gender and sexuality studies, women of color feminisms; visual culture; theories of racialized subjectivity.

Emily RuppelEmily Ruppel is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in labor, medicine, and gender/sexuality. Her dissertation focuses empirically on job training programs for disabled workers, using historical research to trace the growth of this industry since the 1970s and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate contemporary labor practices. Other projects address the co-construction of gender and autism in scientific discourse, class dynamics in LGBTQ communities, and the causal effects of social networks on health. Her work has been published in journals including Sexualities, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, and Family Relations and has been funded by Policy Research, Inc. and recognized by the Disability in Society section of the American Sociological Association. She holds an M.A. from Berkeley and a B.A. from Smith College, both in sociology.

Soosun YouSoosun You is a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her work focuses on addressing various challenges to gender equality. Her dissertation examines how politics of the marriage market has shaped the feminist and antifeminist movements in South Korea (and East Asia more broadly). She examines how the anti-natalist and pro-natalist government campaigns and policies have affected different dimensions of women’s empowerment using both qualitative and quantitative methods such as in-depth interviews, surveys, and natural experiments.

Laura NelsonLaura C. Nelson (moderator) is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.  She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford, and holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley with a focus on housing and community economic development.  Her current research project is a study of breast cancer as a medical, cultural, personal, environmental, political and transnational phenomenon in South Korea. Her first book, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (Columbia University Press, 2000) utilized ethnographic and media materials to examine ways how institutions shaped consumer culture in pursuit of national goals during the period 1960-1997.  The text examines the response of South Koreans, particularly women, in various social positions as political conditions and consumer oriented messages evolved. Before joining the GWS faculty in 2013, Laura taught for eleven years in the Anthropology Department at California State University, East Bay, where she served as chair from 2008-2013.  In addition to her academic positions, Laura’s career includes work in applied anthropology in the US: public policy evaluation, microenterprise development, and building employment linkages to poorly-connected communities.

 

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Authors Meet Critics: Sharad Chari, “Gramsci at Sea”

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

Sharad Chari

Please join us on Tuesday, November 28 at 12pm Pacific for an in-person “Authors Meet Critics” panel featuring Gramsci at Sea, by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor in Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Professor Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.

Professor Chari will be joined in conversation by Leslie Lane Salzinger, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

REGISTER TO ATTEND.

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Panelists

Sharad ChariSharad Chari is an Associate Professor in Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and affiliated to Rhetoric, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asian Studies, the Center for African Studies, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and Global Metropolitan Studies. He is also part of the Marxist Institute of Research, and a research scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa. His recent and forthcoming works included the co-edited Ethnographies of Power (Wits 2022, with Melanie Samson and Mark Hunter), this book, and the forthcoming Apartheid Remains (Duke, 2024). His abiding interest is in spatial histories of the racial capitalist present in South India, South Africa and the Indian Ocean, and he is currently finishing a book that bends an account of the life of Black lesbian activist and filmmaker Beverley Palesa Ditsie in a critique of sexuality in the new/ old South Africa.

 

Colleen Lye (Ph.D, Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Most recently, Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Lye is writing a book that reconstructs Asian American literary and theoretical contributions to marxism in the United States since the 1960s, with an emphasis on Asian American perspectives into questions of racial capitalism and social reproduction.

 

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9001.html), analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.”

 

James Vernon (moderator) is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is a historian of Britain and its empire with broad comparative and theoretical interests in the relationships between the political and the social as well as the nation and the world. His books include Politics and the People (1993), Hunger. A Modern History (2007), Distant Strangers. How Britain Became Modern (2014), and the last volume of the Cambridge History of Britain, Britain since 1750 to the Present (2017).   He is editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) and ‘The Berkeley Series in British Studies’ with University of California Press, as well as co-editor (with Simon Gunn) of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011) and (with Colleen Lye and Christopher Newfield) “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University” in Representations (2011). His work has been supported by the British Academy, the ESRC, the ACLS, the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation.  He is currently writing a book about the racialized and globalized formation of neoliberalism in Britain after empire told though Heathrow Airport.  He is trying to avoid twitter @James11Vernon.

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Simon Johnson: “Power and Progress”

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

Simon Johnson

Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

Please join us as Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses his recent co-authored book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, based on a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence. Johnson will be joined in conversation with Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley.

Presented by the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative (BESI). This will be a hybrid event (in-person and via Zoom). Registrants will receive a Zoom link on the day of the event.

REGISTER HERE

About the Book

Power and Progress book cover A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again be—brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.

With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances.

About the Author

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae.

Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.

His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support.

Johnson was previously a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors, and a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to early 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group.

“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research papers on long-term economic development, corporate finance, political economy, and public health are widely cited.

“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail”, Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013.

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U.S. Industrial Policy at the Crossroads 

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

factories at sunset

The Biden administration has resurrected industrial policy with a vengeance, reviving old intellectual debates about the virtues and vices of industrial policy and sparking new ones. This program brings together scholarly debates about industrial policy with a discussion of the practical challenges of designing and implementing industrial policy in the United States.

The first panel (3:10-4:30 PM) will review the lessons from the study of the comparative political economy of industrial policy and apply them to the US today. The second panel (4:40-6 PM) will examine the economic and political impact of US industrial policy on European and Asian partners, and assess the potential for collaboration and conflict. We will have a 10-minute break between the two sessions.

Panel 1: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on US Industrial Policy (3:10-4:30 PM)
Panel 2: The New US Industrial Policy: Cooperation or Conflict with our Allies? (4:40-6)

Panelists

  • Todd Tucker, Director, Industrial Policy and Trade, The Roosevelt Institute
  • Kate Gordon, former Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm
  • Laura Tyson, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business
  • John Zysman, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley Department of Political Science
  • Paul Pierson, John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative
  • Steve Vogel, Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and Political Economy

This will be a hybrid (in-person and online) event. Registrants will be sent a Zoom link on the day of the event.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

 

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible.

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Peter Spiegler: “Marketcrafting”

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

Peter Spiegler

We are witnessing a sea change in policy, toward an embrace of the state shaping markets toward certain social and economic ends. This talk will feature Peter Spiegler, Senior Researcher at The New Institute of Political Economy, celebrating the launch of Spiegler’s new report, “Marketcrafting(co-authored with Chris Hughes), which argues for a specifically progressive marketcrafting vision that can achieve major policy goals in a just and equitable manner while also minimizing inflationary impacts.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

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POSTPONED: Jedediah Purdy: “Thinking Democratically”

Jedediah Purdy

Please note that this event has been postponed to a future date to be determined. If you register through the link below, we will notify you when the event has been rescheduled.

If we took democracy seriously, what would that mean for thinking about questions such as ecology, constitutionalism, the rule of law, political economy, and social trust?

Please join us for a talk by Jedediah Purdy, the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke Law School (formerly the William S. Beinecke Professor at Columbia) and the author of seven books on these themes, most recently Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope (Basic Books 2022). He is working on a book on democratic trust.

David Singh Grewal, Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, will moderate.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and Social Science Matrix.

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Speaker

Jedediah S. Purdy re-joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from Columbia Law School, where he was the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law and co-director of the Constitutional Democracy Initiative. He previously served on the Duke Law faculty from 2004 to 2019, most recently as the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law.

A prolific scholar, Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. He is the author of two books forthcoming in 2022, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Scary, Flawed, and Our Best Hope (Basic) and a new Norton College edition of Thoreau’s writings, including Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and essays on slavery.

Purdy’s most recent book, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, explores how the land has historically united and divided Americans, shows how environmental politics has always been closely connected with issues of distribution and justice, and describes humanity as an “infrastructure species. In his previous book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, he traced the long history of environmental law as a central feature of American political and cultural life. His other books include For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination, and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Nomos, and Ecology Law Quarterly, among others. He has published essays on topics ranging from Elena Ferrante’s novels and socialism to natural disasters and the Green New Deal in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal.

Purdy clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York City. A member of the New York State Bar, he is a contributing editor of The American Prospect and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He was active in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and was voluntarily arrested for civil disobedience in 2013.

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California Spotlight: From Boom to Doom in San Francisco

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

downtown San Francisco

During the peak of the most recent tech upswing, downtown San Francisco was booming. Now, after the pandemic and a new round of tech layoffs, commentators fear that the so-called “doom loop” has come to valuable commercial real estate. While boom and bust cycles are not new to The City, what can we learn from the struggles of commercial real estate?  

Join us on October 31, 2023 as a group of panelists will discuss the current state of commercial real estate in San Francisco — and what lies ahead. Panelists include Ted Egan, Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco; Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University; and Nancy Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. Amir Kermani, Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS), Haas School of Business, and the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

This panel is presented as part of the California Spotlight and Matrix on Point event series. This will be a hybrid event, presented both in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus) and online. All registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Panelists

Ted Egan is the Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco, and directs the Office of Economic Analysis in the City Controller’s Office, which prepares independent economic analysis of major new city legislation. Since he joined in 2007, his office has published over 100 economic impact reports on policy issues like the minimum wage, affordable housing, business taxes, land use planning, sporting events, and short-term rentals.  During this time at the City, he has served as an expert witness on the economics of same-sex marriage, and won a Good Government award for his work redesigning the City’s business tax.  He also currently serves on the Data Users Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nicholas BloomNicholas Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on working from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the Frisch Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He was elected to Bloomberg50 for his advice on working from home.

Nancy WallaceNancy Wallace is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. She serves as chair of the Real Estate Group and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. Wallace is an expert in mortgages, mortgage-related securities, and other real estate topics.

Amir KermaniAmir Kermani is Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines monetary policy, household finance, financial intermediation, and political economy.

 

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Matrix on Point: One Year of Protest in Iran

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

iran protester with flag

Since the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police, women have led protests in Iran. While gender issues have been at the center of these protests, protesters have connected gender inequality to other problems of the authoritarian regime, including the struggling economy and ethnic inequality. In response to these protests, the Iranian government has detained and killed protesters. In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will discuss current events in light of Iran’s history and the significance of gender in contemporary protest movements. 

Panelists include Sholeh Asgary, an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer at UC Berkeley, and Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

This panel is presented as part of Matrix on Point event series. This will be a hybrid event, presented both in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus) and online. All registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event. Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and the Berkeley Initiative for Iranian Studies (BIIS).

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Panelists

Sholeh Asgary Sholeh Asgary (b.Iran 1982) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works implicate the viewer participant in future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary is a Bay Area Now 9 triennial artist and a 2023 Artadia Finalist. Such institutions as Headlands Center for the Arts, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, The Lab, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and ARoS Kunstmuseum have supported her work. Asgary is a UCLA Art|Sci Collective member and a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts.

 

Minoo Moallem is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She is currently Director of Media Studies. Professor Moallem received her MA and BA from the University of Tehran and her Ph.D. from Université de Montréal. She has also done postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley from 2008-2010 and the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at San Francisco State University from 2001-2006. Professor Moallem is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation As a Transnational Commodity, Routledge, 2018; Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005, and the co-editor of several books and special issues.

 

 

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Zach Bleemer, “Metrics that Matter”

Metrics that Matter book talk

Colleges sell themselves by the numbers — rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists — but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to?

Zach BleemerThis talk will feature Zachary Bleemer, Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, who co-authored a new book, Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students, that explores popular metrics used by future and current college students, with chapters focusing on colleges’ return on investment, university rankings, average student debt, average wages by college major, and more. The authors draw on decades of scholarship from many academic fields to pair each metric with a concrete recommendation for alternative information, both qualitative and quantitative, that would be more useful and meaningful for students to consider.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), UC Berkeley Department of Economics, and the Berkeley School of Education.

John Aubrey Douglass, Senior Research Fellow at CSHE, will be the moderator. This event will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

Register to attend.

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Michèle Lamont: “Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World”

Michele Lamont

Please join us on October 4, 2023 from 4:00pm-6:00pm for a talk by Michèle Lamont, author of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World.

Michèle Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is also the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association and her research has received numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from six countries. The author or coauthor of over a dozen books, she can be found on MicheleLamont.org.

Co-sponsored by Berkeley Law, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Immigration and Migration Initiative (BIMI), and the Center for Race & Gender (CRG), and the Transformations of Citizenship Leibniz Research Group.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

If you require accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in an event, please contact Ariana Ceja at centerrg@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible, and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Book

seeing others book coverIn this capstone work, Michèle Lamont unpacks the power of recognition—rendering others as visible and valued—by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition—from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay. She shows how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.

Decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Lamont argues, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: By reducing stigma, we put change within reach.

Just as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone did for a previous generation, Seeing Others strikes at the heart of our modern struggles and illuminates an inclusive path forward with new ways for understanding our world.

 

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Authors Meet Critics: Dylan Penningroth, “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights”

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

before the movement book cover

Please join us in-person on November 14 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, by Dylan Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies at Berkeley Law. Professor Penningroth will be joined in conversation by Ula Yvette Taylor, Professor and 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Waldo E. Martin Jr., the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship 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.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) graduate program, Berkeley School of Law, the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS), the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Book

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law—and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overturns this story, demonstrating that Black people had long exercised “the rights of everyday use,” and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights. Well-versed in the law, Black people had used it to their advantage for nearly a century to shape how they worked, worshiped, learned, and loved. Based on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses, Before the Movement recovers a vision of Black life allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Panelists

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. He is the author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (2023).  His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Before joining UC Berkeley in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).

Ula Yvette Taylor: Ula Taylor is a Professor of African American Studies and the 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education.  She is the author of several books including the most recent The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the UC Berkeley campus. Ula is most proud, however, of her former students who are transforming the field of Black Studies.

Eric Schickler: Eric Schickler is Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books, including Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (2016, with Douglas Kriner) and Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965. Schickler was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017.   

Waldo E. Martin Jr. (moderator), the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at UC Berkeley, is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (2005), as well as Brown v. Board of Education: A Short History With Documents (2021) and The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1985). He is a coauthor, with Mia Bay and Deborah Gray White, of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, With Documents (2021), and, with Joshua Bloom, of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2016). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he coedited Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia (2000). Aspects of the modern African American freedom struggle and the history of modern social movements unite his current research and writing interests. He is currently completing A Change is Gonna Come: The Cultural Politics of the Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of Modern America. 

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Authors Meet Critics: Massimo Mazzotti, “Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity”

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

Please join us in person on October 17, 2023 at 3:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity, by Massimo Mazzotti, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History and the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. Professor Mazzotti will be joined in conversation by Matthew L. Jones, the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, and David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Thomas Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, 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.

This event will be co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

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 Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Book

A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena.

The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics.

For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.

Panelists

Massimo MazzottiMassimo Mazzotti is a professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. His research focuses on the history and sociology of mathematics and technology. He has recently co-edited Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action 1500-2000. Between 2013 and 2023, he served as director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS).

Matthew L. JonesMatthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. He focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present (W. W. Norton, 2023). He has published two books previously, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (both with Chicago). He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and is currently a CIFAR fellow in the Future Flourishing project.

 

Dvid BatesDavid Bates is a Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His work examines the history of legal and political ideas, and the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition. His books include Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France, and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political. He is currently completing a book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, that probes the emergence of human thinking as an entanglement of machine technologies, somatic processes, media practices, and social/political organization.

 

Thomas LaqueurThomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. His work has been focused on the history of popular religion and literacy; on the history of  the body— alive and dead; and on the history of death and memory. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Threepenny Review, among other journals and is a founding editor of Representations. Laqueur is a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton 2016). He is working on a book called “The Dog’s Gaze in Western Art” to be published by Penguin next year.

 

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