Racial Capitalism: What’s in a Name?

April 20th, 2022
4:00pm

Racial capitalism has become a widely used term – but how should we define it and what specific forms does it take? This talk by Catherine Hall will focus on 18th-century Jamaica and the ways in which two separate sets of practices – racisms and capitalism – intersected to form a system embedded in both the metropolitan and the colonial states.

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Her recent work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002), Macaulay and Son (2012) and Hall et al, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). Between 2009-2015 she was the Principal Investigator on the ESRC/AHRC project “Legacies of British Slave-ownership,” which seeks to put slavery back into British history. Her new book will be Edward Long and Lucky Valley: Racial Capitalism and the History of Jamaica.

This talk is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix, Department of Geography, Center for British Studies, Critical Theory Program, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and Department of History.

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Matrix on Point: Organize! Power and Collective Action

May 5th, 2022
4:00pm-5:30pm

What can we learn from historical and contemporary cases about building organizations that engage, mobilize and manage to wield influence on the political process? What kinds of infrastructural choices best support engagement and success in the long run? Our panelists will explore the varied and changing terrain of collective action to reflect on the nature, promises and pitfalls of associational power in the 21st century. This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy and Organizing.

Panelists

Arisha Hatch is the vice president and chief of campaigns at Color Of Change, leading campaigns on civic engagement, voting rights, criminal justice, and corporate and media accountability. Arisha is a leader and innovator in the racial justice movement. She organized Black People’s Brunches, which brought together more than 12,500 civic-minded Black people in 2018 to discuss a host of social justice issues and helped to set the organization’s agenda for 2019 and beyond. Since joining Color Of Change in 2012, she has ushered in groundbreaking victories for Black communities. She championed getting payment processors like Mastercard and PayPal to ban the use of their platforms by white supremacists, persuaded Saturday Night Live to add two Black women to its cast and writer’s room mid-season and successfully led efforts to remove Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter and R. Kelly from RCA. Before coming to Color Of Change, Arisha worked as a lawyer and organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She later served as the national organizing director of the Courage Campaign, where she helped lead groundwork for progressive change in California. In 2020, Arisha was named one of Essence Magazine’s Woke 100 and The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans. Her editorial writing has been published by Essence, The Root, The Grio and TechCrunch, and she is a regular commentator on political and social justice topics for major news outlets. Arisha was born in Texas and raised in Southern California. She has degrees in economics, creative writing and feminist studies from Stanford University, and she received her doctorate in law from Santa Clara University in California.

Liz McKenna is a postdoctoral scholar at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Liz studies left and right-wing social movements in the United States and Brazil, using multiple methods to examine when civil society organizations safeguard against authoritarianism, and when they become the primary carriers of it. She is the co-author of Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2. Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford University Press, with Hahrie Han) and Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (University of Chicago Press, with Hahrie Han and Michelle Oyakawa). Liz received the 2021 American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation on politics and organizing in contemporary Brazil. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a political and community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. In 2022, she was named a Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. Her latest book was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. She has previously published three books: How Organizations Develop Activists; Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America; and, Moved to Action. Her award-winning work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.

Michelle Oyakawa is an assistant professor of sociology at Muskingum University in Ohio. She studies the intersection of race, religion, and social movements through her research on leaders and organizations. She received her PhD in sociology from The Ohio State University in 2017. Her work has been published in academic journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and the Journal of Community Psychology, and she is coauthor of two books about mobilization: Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (with Hahrie Han and Liz McKenna; University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Smart Suits, Tattered Boots: Black Ministers and Mobilization in the 21st Century (with Korie Edwards; New York University Press, forthcoming).

Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute, Stanford University. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and six books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). One of her most recent books, In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law. Her research continues to focus on how to improve the quality of government and how to generate a better political economic framework. She is also committed to understanding and improving supply chains so that the goods we consume are produced in a manner that sustains both the workers and the environment.

Marshall Ganz: As Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. He entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. He left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review and elsewhere. His newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement was published in 2009, earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world.

Lisa García Bedolla (moderator) is Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of political and educational inequalities in the United States. She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.

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Matrix on Point: The War in Ukraine and its Consequences

March 15th, 2022
4:00pm-5:30pm

Cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues

LIVESTREAM

In the last three weeks, Russia’s political ambitions in Ukraine have escalated into a full-fledged invasion and war. As politicians attempt to negotiate a ceasefire, thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians have likely been killed, and more than two million people have fled the country into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries. The conflict has upended international relations, raised questions about the dependence of the United States and Europe on Russian fossil fuels, and strained infrastructures of refugee assistance and resettlement. How does the war change what we thought we knew about geopolitics, international macroeconomics, the European refugee crisis, and the conduct of modern warfare?

Please join us for this essential Matrix on Point event. This is meant to be an open discussion, kicked off by UC Berkeley experts. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies.

This event will be held in person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, and will also be streamed live via Zoom.

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Panelists

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a native of Ukraine, is a Quantedge Presidential professor in the Department of Economics at U.C. Berkeley. A significant part of his research has been about monetary policy (effects, optimal design, inflation targeting), fiscal policy (countercyclical policy, government spending multipliers), taxation (tax evasion, inequality), economic growth (long-run determinants, globalization, innovation, financial frictions), and business cycles. Yuriy serves on many editorial boards, including Journal of Monetary Economics and VoxUkraine. Yuriy is a prolific researcher, with works published in leading economics journals and cited in policy discussions and media. Yuriy has received numerous awards for his research.

Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox professor of economics and professor of political science at U.C. Berkeley where he has been since 2001. He has received many honors including an honorary professorship from the Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2002 and the medal “De Scientia et humanitate optime meritis” by the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2018. The Association for Comparative Economic Studies created an annual dissertation fellowship in his name to recognize his contributions to the field. He is the author of over 150 journal articles, chapters in books, and books and has been published in leading economics journals on topics of transition, political economy, culture and comparative economics. He wrote the leading graduate textbook Transition and Economics published in 2000 and translated in various languages, including Chinese and Russian. In recent years, his research has broadened to developing economies in general with special emphasis on the role of institutions and culture.

John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor in the Department of History at U.C. Berkeley and the director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. His scholarship focuses on the history of East and Central Europe, with special concern for problems of religious and ethnic identity in multinational space. He has published Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, and From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, and is at work on a history of democracy in Europe, 1076 to present.

Katerina Linos is the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, where she also serves as Co-Faculty Director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law. Her research interests include international law, comparative law, European Union law, and migration law. To address questions in these fields, her work combines legal analysis with empirical methods. In 2017, Linos was awarded a Carnegie fellowship to study the European refugee crisis. She investigated how communication barriers frustrate fundamental rights, explored the potential of new technologies to facilitate refugee and migrant integration, and developed digital refuge. Linos’ research appears in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the California Law Review, and many others.

Daniel J. Sargent (moderator) is Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds faculty appointments in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, and he serves as co-director of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is writing an interpretive history of the postwar international order, titled Pax Americana: The Rise and Fall of the American World Order.

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Authors Meet Critics: “Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley”

September 30th, 2022
12:00pm-1:30pm Pacific

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

In this September 30 “Author Meets Critics” panel, Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, will present her book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Professor Chen will be joined in conversation by Arlie Hochschild, Professor Emerita in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and Morgan Ames, Assistant Professor of Practice in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society.

This hybrid event will be held in person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, on the UC Berkeley campus. We will also broadcast the event via Zoom and will send a link to registrants prior to the event.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Berkeley Haas Culture Initiative.

Register to attend.

About the Book

Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.

Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.

We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR).

Use the code WPC30 to purchase this book at a 30% discount from the Princeton University Press website.

Panelists

Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Religion, Race and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, was published by Princeton University Press. Professor Chen received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program. At UC Berkeley, Professor Chen is Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, a member of the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Religious Diversity Cluster at the Othering and Belonging Institute, and an affiliate in the Department of Sociology.

Arlie R. Hochschild‘s research focuses on the rise of the American right, the topic of her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. Based on intensive interviews of Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana, conducted over five years and focusing on emotions, she tried to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel as they do. In The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, she explored the shifting boundary between market and intimate life and methods by which individuals manage that boundary to keep personal life feeling personal. In 2013, she wrote So How’s The Family and Other Essays, a sampler of an applied sociology of emotion. It includes essays on emotional labor—when do we enjoy doing it and when not?—empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers. Earlier work was based on field work among older residents of a low-income housing project, (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform “emotional labor” (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a corporate culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), and Filipina nannies who’ve left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). Her work is available in 16 languages.

Morgan Ames is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at UC Berkeley. Morgan researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project. The book won the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, the 2020 Sally Hacker Prize, and the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize. Her next project extends the questions regarding the interaction between computers, ideology, and identity to explore the role that utopianism plays in discourses around childhood, education, and ‘development’ in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marion Fourcade (moderator) is Director of Social Science Matrix and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She specializes in the comparative history and sociology of the social sciences and in the study of classification and valuation processes. Her current work focuses on new forms of stratification, morality and profit in the digital economy.

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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)

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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