Ukraine: A Panel Discussion on Recent Events in Ukraine

March 2nd, 2022
4:15pm-6:00pm

The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley is convening a panel discussion on recent events in Ukraine, with Professor Steven Fish (Political Science, UC Berkeley), Professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko (Economics, UC Berkeley), and Dr. Edward Walker (ISEEES, UC Berkeley). Each speaker will deliver remarks on the current situation in Ukraine, which will be followed by a moderated Q&A session.

Panelist/Discussants: Steven Fish, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley; Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Edward Walker, Research Associate, ISEEES, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)

REGISTER TO ATTEND

The Future of Money: Mobile Money, Social Media, and Cashless Economies

April 14th, 2022
11:00am-12:30pm

Co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

How does the shift away from cash economies affect relationships of debt and belonging? Through studying forms of cashless payment, such as mobile money and apps, this panel of scholars will ask questions about how the social connections made through money are changing, and what the implications might be for our understanding of money, trust, and social connection.

Please join us on April 14 for a Matrix panel discussion featuring Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; and Kevin Donovan, Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

REGISTER

Panelists

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years. She is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include The making of a catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian economy, Aleph Books forthcoming 2022; When governments fail: Covid-19 and the economy, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press 2021 (co-edited); Women workers in the informal economy, Routledge 2021 (edited); Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India, Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2009; co-edited Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2014; co-edited After Crisis, Tulika 2009; co-authored Demonetisation Decoded, Routledge 2017; She has published more than 200 scholarly articles. She has received several prizes, including for the 2015 Adisheshaiah Award for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (www.networkideas.org), an international network of heterodox development economists, from 2002 to 2021. She has consulted for international organisations including ILO, UNDP, UNCTAD, UN-DESA, UNRISD and UN Women and is member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the Commission on Global Economic Transformation of INET, the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). In 2021 she was appointed to the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato. She writes regularly for popular media like newspapers, journals and blogs.

Lana Swartz is assistant professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia. She is author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale 2020) and co-author of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT 2017). She is currently working on two projects: a collaborative project about the promises and perils of CBDCs, and a book-length project about scams in the digital economy.

Kevin P. Donovan is an anthropologist and historian at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently writing a book on the history of economic decolonization in East Africa, focusing on central banks, the politics of price, and smuggling. In addition, he and Emma Park are working on a book about digital money, intimate infrastructures, and the corporate-state in Kenya. Writing on these topics is available at https://kevinpdonovan.com/.

Cryptography and the Future of Money

March 2nd, 2022
10:00am

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy

JOIN THE WEBINAR VIA ZOOM

The emergence of cryptocurrencies and digital payment systems poses a number of fundamental questions to the social sciences. What, after all, is money and who should be allowed to issue it? On the one hand, competition from private digital currencies could spur innovation, improve the efficiency and speed of payments, increase financial inclusion, and at the very least jolt public actors into upgrading an old and creaky payment system. On the other hand, money is a public good and private competition could trigger momentous — and perhaps unwelcome — changes to the economic, social and political infrastructure. Even public options, such as Central Bank Digital Currencies, could profoundly reshape the financial system. Around the world, monetary institutions are watching these developments with anxiety, and calls for a coordinated response are growing.

Join us on March 2, 2022 for a panel discussion on “Cryptography and the Future of Money,” featuring Markus K. Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the Economics Department at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance; Stefan Eich, Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University; and Christine Parlour, the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. The panel will be moderated by Barry Eichengreen, the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy.

This event will be streamed online via Zoom. A link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.

REGISTER

Panelist Bios

Markus K. Brunnermeier is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the economics department at Princeton University and director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance. His research focuses on international financial markets and the macroeconomy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial and monetary price stability, and digital money. His recent book, The Resilient Society, won the Prize for the 2021 best business book in German and was listed among best economics books by the Financial Times.

Stefan Eich is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His research is in political theory, intellectual history, and the history of political thought, especially the political theory of money. He is the author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, May 2022), which offers a genealogy of constitutive debates about money as a political institution.

Christine Parlour is the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. Most of her work is in institutionally complex areas, such as market microstructure and banking. Her current work focuses on changes in the payments system and the effects on bank balance sheets. She has written for major finance and economics journals. She has been on the Nasdaq Economic Advisory Board and is currently on the steering committee for the New Special Study of Securities Markets.

Barry Eichengreen (moderator) is George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). His most recent books are In Defense of Public Debt, with Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves and Kris Mitchener (Oxford University Press 2021) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Migration, Trauma, and Resilience

March 31st, 2022
12:00 PM

A presentation of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative

they have no idea what it is like
to lose home at the risk of
never finding home again
have your entire life
split between two lands and
become a bridge between two countries
–Rupi Kaur

Migrants face trauma before, during, and after migration. The degree of the trauma may vary depending on the type and journey undertaken to reach the final destination, but it is present. On March 31, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative will present a talk with Ms. Tsui Yee, a leading immigration lawyer, Dr. Gunisha Kaur, anesthesiologist and human rights researcher, and Ms. Leah Spelman, Executive Director at the Partnerships for Trauma Recovery. The panel, moderated by Prof. Khatharya Um of Ethnic Studies, will assess the extent of this trauma and how it manifests itself in the lives of migrants as they navigate their new realities. The talk will spotlight the need to study, research, and alleviate trauma in a social, economic, political, and legal framework.

This event is presented by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Social Science Matrix will be co-sponsoring this event, along with UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS), Center for Race & Gender, Institute of Governmental Studies, Othering and Belonging Institute, Asian Pacific American Student Development, and the Center for Research on Social Change.

REGISTRATION LINK

Panelists

Tsui Yee: Tsui H. Yee is the founder of Law Offices of Tsui H. Yee P.C., and has been practicing immigration law since 1999. She represents clients in family- and employment-based petitions and applications; removal (deportation) defense; asylum; and other immigration matters. Ms. Yee graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Tufts University. She is admitted to practice law in the State of New York; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; and the U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Since 2016, Tsui has been selected to New York Metro Super Lawyers in the field of immigration law. She is a member of the New York City Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Federal Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of New York, and the New York Inn of Court.

Gunisha Kaur: Gunisha Kaur is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, and Co-Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights. Dr. Kaur has dedicated her career as a physician-scientist to advancing the health of forcibly displaced individuals such as refugees and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive background in neuroscience research as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. Her research has been supported by several funders including the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, and Cornell University. Dr. Kaur’s academic writing on forcibly displaced populations has been published by the highest impact medical journals including The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. She has translated her medical and scientific expertise in mainstream outlets including Time, CNN, and NBC News. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University in 2006, graduated from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and completed her Anesthesiology Residency training at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital in 2014. She earned a Master’s Degree in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.

Leah Spelman: Leah Spelman serves as the Executive Director of Partnerships for Trauma Recovery (PTR), a Berkeley-based nonprofit providing mental health care and case management services to refugees, asylum seekers, and other international survivors of human rights abuses. Prior to joining PTR, Ms. Spelman was the Chief Operating Officer for Days for Girls International, a Seattle-based nonprofit focused on women’s health. Prior to Days for Girls, Ms. Spelman lived in Jordan, conducting research under a Fulbright Grant when Syrian refugees first began entering the country in large waves. Ms. Spelman has an MPH in Global Health from the University of Washington, with a focus on global mental health and culturally-aware approaches to trauma care. She holds a BA in International Affairs with a concentration in Middle East Studies from George Washington University, and speaks Arabic, Spanish, and French.

Khatharya Um (moderator): Professor Khatharya Um is Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Um has received numerous awards for her community leadership and service, including congressional recognitions from Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. She is the first Cambodian American woman to receive a Ph.D.

California Spotlight: The Social and Economic Impacts of Wildfires

April 4th, 2022
12:30pm-1:45pm

Part of the Social Science Matrix "California Spotlight" Series

Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive. In this panel, we’ll discuss the contemporary social and economic impacts of wildfires in California during another record-breaking fire season. How have fires changed during the last five years, and with what impacts on the economy? How might policy-makers and economists respond to the changing fire season?

Co-sponsored by the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE). This panel discussion is presented as part of the Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series.

Panelists

Steve Pyne is currently an urban farmer and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is best known for his work on the history of fire and humanity, most recently his book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. He has published 35 books, most of them dealing with fire, but others on Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, the Voyager mission, and with his oldest daughter, an inquiry into the Pleistocene. His fire histories include surveys of America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth.

Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE). He is also a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones is a candidate for the California State Senate. He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021, and served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018 and regulated the largest insurance market in the United States. He founded and chaired the Sustainable Insurance Forum (SIF), an international network of insurance regulators developing climate risk regulatory best practices. Jones was the first US financial regulator to require disclosure of investments in fossil fuel assets due to concerns about climate change related transition risk, the first to call for divesting investments in thermal coal, and the first to conduct climate risk scenario analysis of insurers’ investment portfolios. Jones is a graduate of DePauw University and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Luiz Oliveira is a Senior Associate Economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which he joined in 2018. His expertise focuses on applied economic policy, developed over his career as a member of several macroeconomic policy and analysis teams at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group and the Federal Reserve System. Luiz’s research focus includes macroeconomic forecasting, inflation, and climate risks.

Bruce Riordan (moderator) is the Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network, a collaborative of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers working on top climate issues. Previously, Mr. Riordan was the Director of the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network (BayCAN) and the Coordinator of the Climate Readiness Institute. He has been working on climate change solutions for the Bay Area and California for nearly 20 years.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Mapping the Brain: Functional Brain Mapping for Understanding Health, Aging, and Disease

January 20th, 2022
5:00pm Pacific

A Conversation with Jack Gallant, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

All of human experience — our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, plans and actions — reflect the coordinated activity of a complex network of hundreds of distinct areas and modules within the brain. Disorders of these brain networks that occur during development, aging, or due to neurological disease, can have profound effects on quality of life. Therefore, understanding how information is represented and processed in this network during daily life is a major challenge for medicine. Addressing this fundamental problem will require advances in the software algorithms used to process and model brain data, and in the development of new neuroimaging hardware.

UC Berkeley is at the forefront of research development in both these areas. Professor Jack Gallant’s computational neuroimaging laboratory focuses on functional mapping of these representations under naturalistic conditions that occur in daily life. His team has developed novel algorithms and software for creating high-dimensional, high-resolution functional brain maps in individual people. These functional maps reveal how the brain represents information during daily life. In this talk, Professor Gallant will summarize this technology and its potential applications in the areas of development, learning, aging and for diagnosis and monitoring of mental disorders.

In his capacity as head of the Henry J. Wheeler Brain Imaging Center at Berkeley, Prof. Gallant will also give an overview of the NexGen MRI Scanner. This is an ongoing project at UCB that will create the highest-resolution functional brain scanner available for routine human use.

About the Speaker

Jack Gallant is Chancellor’s Professor and Class of 1940 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He is affiliated with the departments of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with the programs in Bioengineering, Biophysics, Neuroscience, and Vision Science. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and Washington University Medical School. His research program focuses on computational modeling of human brain activity.

REGISTER

Sarah Vaughn: “Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation”

April 22nd, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability

Please join us on Friday, April 22, 2022 from 12pm-1:30pm Pacific for an “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation, by Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Professor Vaughn will be joined in conversation by Stephen Collier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

About the Book

In Engineering Vulnerability, Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources, but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and more broadly, future life on a warming earth.

About the Panelists

Sarah E. Vaughn is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies. She received her B.A. in 2006 from Cornell University, majoring as a College Scholar with a focus in Anthropology, Sociology, and Inequality Studies. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. Her research advances understandings of climate change in the Circum-Caribbean while tracking the affective, ethical, and political components of dignity and belonging. At stake in her research are questions about the role climate change has in shaping the materiality of expertise, an ethics of (re)distribution, and narrative form. She is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology and Medicine, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Program in Development Engineering.

Stephen Collier studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. Collier examines both contemporary and historical topics, and is engaged with a number of sub-disciplinary fields, including science and technology studies, actor-network theory, governmentality studies, and cultural geography. Collier’s current research examines urban resilience as a significant new paradigm and practice in city and regional planning. He has conducted fieldwork on urban resilience in New Orleans and New York, with ongoing comparative projects in other U.S. cities that examine how urban governments are developing and financing resilience interventions. Collier’s ongoing work on resilience builds on longer-term research on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States, which resulted in a co-authored book, The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). Collier is co-editor of Limn, a scholarly magazine on contemporary problems that arise at the intersection of science, technology, and expert knowledge. He has edited issues of Limn on systemic risk, disease ecologies, design and development, and public infrastructure.

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the visual arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and co-editor of Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2020). He is currently writing a book on Indian Ocean art histories in the age of Anthropocene extinction.

Daniel Aldana Cohen (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serves as a faculty affiliate in the graduate program on Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project. He is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-23). In 2018-19, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019). He is currently completing a book project called Street Fight: Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century City, under contract with Princeton University Press.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

View Map

Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa

March 7th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Please join us on Monday, March 7th from 12pm-1:30pm PST for an “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa, by Martha Wilfahrt, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science. Professor Wilfahrt will be joined in conversation by Scott Straus, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Leonardo Arriola, Associate Dean of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for African Studies, will moderate.

About the Book

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer to this question: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. Drawing on a multi-method research design, the book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization.

About the Panelists

Martha WIlfahrt studies African Politics and Political Economy of Development with a focus on historical legacies, redistributive politics and state-society relations. Her current research interests revolve around two themes. The first focuses on historical legacies in contemporary African politics, with a particular interest in the persistence of social norms and the role of concept formation in the ‘historical renaissance.’ Work from this first area of focus has been published in Comparative Politics, The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, World Development and World Politics, as well as Cambridge University Press, which just released her first book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics. A second, ongoing stream of research studies the politics of field research in the Global South.

Scott Straus works on violence, human rights, and African politics. His most recent books are Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (US Holocuast Memorial Museum, 2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. His 2006 book on the Rwandan genocide, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press), also won several awards, including the best 2006 book in political science from the Association of American Publishers. He also has co-edited, with Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda: State-Building and Human Rights in Rwanda (UW Press, 2011) and, with Steve Stern, The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents (UW Press, 2014). Straus has published articles in American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Politics and Society, Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, African Affairs, Terrorism and Political Violence, Genocide Studies and Prevention, The Journal of Genocide Research, and other journals; he translated The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (Zone 2003); and he has received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. In 2009, Straus was awarded the campus-wide William Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2011 he was named a Winnick Fellow at the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to his academic career, Straus was a freelance journalist in Africa.

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.

Leonardo Arriola (moderator) studies the challenges associated with representation and governance in multiethnic societies. His research examines inter-ethnic political cooperation, party competition under ethnic polarization, and political violence in divided societies. His award-winning research has been published in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of Politics along with books published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. His work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Carnegie Corporation of New York, U.S. Department of Defense, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He is co-editor of Africa Spectrum, an interdisciplinary journal published by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), an associated senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway, and a board member of the African Studies Association (ASA).

REGISTER TO ATTEND

View Map

Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education

February 3rd, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education

Please join us on February 3rd, 2022 from 12-1:30pm PST for an “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, by Charlie Eaton, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Professor Eaton will be joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel will be moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.

This event will be broadcast via Zoom. We will send a link to registrants prior to the event.

REGISTER

About the Book

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.

About the Panelists

Charlie Eaton investigates the role of organizations in the interplay between economic elites and disadvantaged social groups. His primary current project asks how the rising power and wealth of finance has contributed to rising inequality in America since the 1980s. The project particularly examines how private equity, hedge funds, investment banks, commercial banks and their leaders entered the field of higher education administration and finance. Private financiers expanded their role in higher education as the post-industrial economy made a college degree an increasingly necessary prerequisite for Americans to attain economic success and security. In entering the higher education field, financial organizations became increasingly powerful intermediaries between financial markets, government, universities, and students — offering insights into broader processes of financialization by which financial elites ascended to the pinnacle of power and wealth in America. Eaton’s research on the financialization of higher education has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Eaton graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a B.A. in politics in 2002. He then worked as a union organizer for 7 years, mostly in California’s Central Valley. Eaton received his Ph.D in sociology from University of California, Berkeley in 2016. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University from 2016 to 2017 before joining the faculty in sociology at UC Merced.

Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999. His research focuses on inequality and tax policy. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he created the top income share series that show a dramatic increase in US inequality since 1980. The data have been widely discussed in the public debate. His 2019 book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, joint with his colleague Gabriel Zucman, narrates the demise of US progressive taxation and how to reinvent it in the 21st century. He received numerous academic awards, including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2010, and a Honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.

Jonathan D. Glater is a Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He was previously a Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and prior to that at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He is a coauthor with Michael A. Olivas and Amy Gajda on the forthcoming, fifth edition of The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court. He has written extensively for law reviews on higher education opportunity, frequently exploring the implications of rising student indebtedness. With Dalié Jiménez, he helped establish the Student Loan Law Initiative, a partnership with the Student Borrower Protection Center dedicated to research on student debt. Professor Glater began law teaching at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016. He visited at Stanford Law School in 2016. Before entering the legal academy, Professor Glater spent nearly a decade as a reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of articles on the legal profession, legal education, criminal and civil cases in the news, as well as on higher education finance and student debt. Prior to joining the Times, he worked as an associate at the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and at the Buenos Aires, Argentina firm of Marval, O’Farrell, & Mairal. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.A. in international relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College.

Jennifer Johnson-Hanks is the Executive Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science (L&S). She previously served as Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Senate and Professor of Demography and Sociology. Johnson-Hanks is a cultural demographer whose empirical work focuses mostly on family variation and change, with a focus on whether and how intentions matter, especially in contexts of uncertainty. Her first book, Uncertain Honor, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. It explores the relationship between population rates and cultural practices through a study of the transition to motherhood among educated women in Southern Cameroon. Co-authoring with Phil Morgan, Chris Bachrach, and Hans-Peter Kohler, Johnson-Hanks published Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a theory of Conjunctural Action in 2011. Her third book, How We Count, is forthcoming. Drawing examples from demography, sociology, economics, and political science, this book argues that quantitative methods are essential tools for understanding society, but only if we change how we use them: focusing more on the dynamics of social groups than on differences between individuals, and thinking more deeply about the social processes that produce the data we observe. Johnson-Hanks earned her BA from Berkeley, and her MA and PhD from Northwestern, all in Anthropology.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Adapting Flood Risk Management to Climate Change: Examples from the EU and the US

November 29th, 2021
9:00am-11:00am PST

Fall 2021 3rd EU-US Knowledge Exchange Webinar

It has been an intense summer in terms of flooding all over the world, especially with recent flooding disasters in Germany, China, Turkey, Afghanistan, and more recently in the United States with Hurricane Ida. A recent study has shown that the risk of flooding in northwestern Germany was increased by a factor of 1.2 to 9 due to climate change.

The increasing number of extreme events makes it necessary to shift our current management approaches, which are largely historically based statistical values such as 100-year flooding frequencies that may no longer hold true. But how do different countries include climate change in flood risk assessment, mapping, and management?

In this webinar we will discuss this topic with experts from the EU and the US by looking at examples from two EU member states, Sweden and Spain, and the State of California and the City of Miami in the United States.

The Fall 2021 3rd EU-US Knowledge Exchange Webinar is hosted by Social Science Matrix and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), with the collaboration of the EU Working Group on Floods (WGF). This event is part of the project “Residual Risk of Extreme Floods: A Challenge for the Sustainable Development Goals” (RREFlood), funded by the Belmont Forum and the National Science Foundation.

REGISTER

Agenda

All times are listed in Pacific Time

9:00 am: Welcome

Marion Fourcade, Director UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix

09:05 am: Introduction

David Powers, CDM Smith – ASFPM International Committee co-chair
Anna Serra-Llobet, University of California Berkeley – ASFPM International Committee co-chair

9:10 am: The EU Floods Directive: Consideration of Likely Impacts of Climate Change

Ioannis Kavvadas and Clemens Neuhold, EU Working Group on Floods

9:20 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the EU: the Case of Sweden

Barbro Näslund-Landenmark, Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency

9:30 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the EU: the Case of Spain

Juan Francisco Arrazola-Herreros, Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge

9:40 am Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the US: the Case of California

Romain Maendly, California Department of Water Resources

10:00 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the US: the Case of Miami

Michael Schmidt, CDM Smith

10:30 am Q&A and Discussion

11:00 am: Adjourn

Speakers

Ioannis Kavaadas joined the European Commission in 2007. He served six years in European Union Delegations, initially in Addis Ababa as an infrastructure advisor and later in Beijing as a head of the Section responsible for development and cooperation in areas as small and medium enterprises, energy and environment/climate change. In 2013 he joined the Commission’s Directorate General for Environment as a policy officer. He is currently a team leader in the Water Policy Unit, where he implements the Floods Directive. He also co-chairs the EU Working Group on Floods.

Clemens Neuhold is the Deputy Director of the Flood Risk Management Directorate in the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Regions and Tourism. He is responsible for the implementation of the EU Floods Directive in Austria at the national level as well as for international coordination. In the frame of the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) for the EU Water Framework Directive and Floods Directive at EU level, he is co-chairing the EU Working Group on Floods. He is also strongly involved in international coordination of the Rhine, Elbe, and Danube river basins, and he chairs the Flood Protection Expert Group of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR).

Barbro Näslund-Landemark is an expert in natural disasters at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB). Barbro is responsible for the implementation of the European Floods Directive in Sweden. She is the contact point at national and international levels and is in this role representing Sweden at the EU implementing process of the Floods Directive. Barbro was part of the Swedish negotiation team for the Floods Directive before it came into force in 2007. Barbro is also a former co-chair of the EU Working Group on Floods. She has participated in international projects and has worked abroad on missions regarding natural disasters’ prevention and disaster risk reduction. She is an internal project leader for a bilateral flood research project between FEMA and Sweden.

Juan Francisco Arrazola-Herreros is a member of the team in charge of the implementation of the Floods Directive in the Directorate-General for Water of the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. Specifically, he coordinates the flood hazard and risk mapping for the national flood information system (SNCZI) and he is in charge of reporting to the European Commission. He also runs a pilot program for urban adaptation to floods at National level.

Romain Maendly is a senior water resources engineer with the Climate Change Program under the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). Over the last twelve years at DWR, he has led, assisted, and collaborated on multiple plans and studies related to integrated water management. These include the Central Valley Flood Protection 2017 and 2022 Update. Under the Climate Change Program, Romain is leading the DWR’s Climate Action Plan Phase II, aiming to improve the consistency and scientific rigor of DWR’s approaches for analyzing climate change’s potential impacts while preserving both project management flexibility and efficiency.

Michael Schmidt is a Senior Vice President with 37 years of experience in sustainable and resilient stormwater and ecosystem programs for more than 400 projects in 33 States and eight countries. He has guided the implementation of over $1 billion of retrofit capital improvements, saving clients more than $365 million through innovation and synergies.

Marion Fourcade is Director of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Organizers

David Powers is a water resources engineer and hydrologist with 25 years of experience specializing in surface water issues at CDM Smith. Based in Richmond, Virginia, he works extensively on flood risk management projects around the country that include flood risk modelling and mapping, disaster recovery, and risk communication. In addition, David’s experience includes urban stormwater management and permitting, water quality assessments, and stream restoration projects. He has worked in the EU and has been involved in research on flood risk management and green infrastructure in the EU, China and the US. He serves as a co-chair for the Association of State Floodplain Managers’ (ASFPM) International Committee.

Anna Serra-Llobet is an environmental scientist whose research concerns to flood risk management policies. After finishing her PhD she interned at the Directorate General for the Environment at the European Commission (EU) in Brussels, working on the analysis of EU funded research related to hydro-meteorological risks (floods and droughts) and vulnerability assessment in Europe. Currently she is a researcher at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) of the University of California Berkeley, conducting comparative research on sustainable flood management strategies comparing the US and the EU. She serves as a co-chair for the Association of State Floodplain Managers’ (ASFPM) International Committee.

REGISTER

The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi

January 26th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Part of the Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" Series

Please join us on January 26, 2022 from 12-1:30pm for an online “Authors Meet Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press), by Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. Professor Kaicker will be joined in conversation by Asad Ahmed, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley; and Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. The panel will be moderated by Pradeep Chhibber, Professor and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies 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. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of South Asia Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

About the Book

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime that saw them only as the ruled.

Panelists

Abhishek Kaicker is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi is his first book.

Asad Q. Ahmed is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on Islamic intellectual history and is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz (Oxford), Avicenna’s Deliverance (Oxford), and Palimpsests of Themselves (UC Press).

Aarti Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She writes on agrarian life, debt and capitalism. She is also more broadly interested in comparative religion, cinema, media and visual cultures, the study of caste, structural violence and social-economic inequality in South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown Universities.

Pradeep Chhibber (moderator) studies the politics of India, political parties and party systems. His recent research is on the influence of ideology on party system change, religion and politics, elections and parties, and the politics of development in India. Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party System of India, co-authored with Rahul Verma, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The book lays out an ideological framework for understanding party system change in India since 1952. The book also explains the reasons behind the rise of the religious right-dominated party system in contemporary India. Religious Practice and Democracy (with Sandeep Shastri, Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the relationship between everyday religious practice and political representation in contemporary India.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Agriculture, Labor, and Markets

November 17th, 2021
12:00pm

Part of the Berkeley Cannabis Research Center's Webinar Series

The Berkeley Cannabis Research Center hosts monthly webinars focused on the intersection of cannabis policy, cannabis producing communities and the environment.

On November 17, the webinar will focus on the topic, “Agriculture, Labor, and Markets.” Panelists include: Amber Senter, Supernova Women, Workforce Development Initiative; Stella Beckham, UC Davis, Center for Health & the Environment; Keith Taylor, UC Davis, Department of Human Ecology; and Eduardo Blanco, Agriculture Labor Relations Board, Special Counsel. Moderated by: Hekia Bodwitch, Dalhousie University & Berkeley CRC.