Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba

March 17th, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

NEW LOCATION: This event will be held on March 17 at 4pm in 315 Wheeler Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus.

This event has reached capacity.

Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Registrants on the wait list will be admitted based on availability starting at 4:05pm.

Please join us on March 17 from 4pm-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Sabbagh-Khoury will be joined in conversation by Zeus Leonardo, Professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley, and Keith Feldman, Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chair for the new Palestinian and Arab Studies Program at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

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

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Asian American Research Center, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Sociology.

About the Book

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn ‘Amer.

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

Panelists

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at UC Berkeley. She received her doctorate at Tel Aviv University and completed research posts at Columbia, New York, Brown, and Tufts Universities. Her work centers on settler colonialism, memory, gender, and political and historical sociologies. Her research focuses on the political and historical sociology of Israeli and Palestinian Societies. She co-edited two volumes entitled Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society (published in Hebrew, Arabic and English).

Keith Feldman is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Race and Gender, the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Center for Middle East Studies. Feldman is the author of the book A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, and is currently at work on Patterns of Life: Race, Aesthetics, and the Proximate Archives of U.S. Imperial Culture.

Zeus Leonardo is a Professor in the School of Education and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis at UC Berkeley. His current research interests involve the study of ideologies and discourses in education with respect to structural relations of power. In particular, he engages critical theories to inform his analysis of the relationship between schooling and social relations, such as race, class, culture, and gender. His research is informed by the premise that educational knowledge should promote the democratization of schools and society.

Ussama Makdisi is a Professor of History and Chair for the new Palestinian and Arab Studies Program at UC Berkeley. A leading scholar of modern Arab history, Makdisi has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history, US–Arab relations, and US missionary work in the Middle East. Makdisi is also the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors, including the Berlin Prize and being named a Carnegie Scholar. Makdisi’s most recent book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World was published in 2019 by the University of California Press and explores the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Arab world.

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Mainstreaming Psychedelics

March 6th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

Micro dosing concept. Dry psilocybin mushrooms and natural herbal pills on white background. Psychedelic magic mushroom as medical supplement.

Psychedelics are steadily moving from the fringes of counterculture to the heart of mainstream society, driven by a growing body of research and shifting public perception. Once relegated to underground movements, substances like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are now being explored for their potential in treating mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety. High-profile studies at institutions like Johns Hopkins and Stanford have highlighted their therapeutic benefits, while cities like Denver and Oakland have decriminalized their use. In addition, psychedelic retreats, wellness practices, and even art and tech industries are embracing these substances as tools for creativity, self-discovery, and healing. As psychedelics shed their stigma, they are catalyzing a broader conversation about mental health, spirituality, and the boundaries of human consciousness.

This panel will feature Diana Negrin, Lecturer of Geography at UC Berkeley; David Presti, Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley; Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; and Graham Pechenik, a patent attorney and founder of Calyx Law. Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

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

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Program in Critical Theory, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Center for Research on Social Change, the UC Berkeley Department of English, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

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Panelists

Charles Hirschkind is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and Europe. His publications include books, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford 2005), and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2020).

Diana Negrin is a Lecturer in Geography at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on identity, space and social movements in Latin America and the United States. Since 2003, Professor Negrin has conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit. Her new book, Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City, sheds light on the racialized history, urban transformation, and contemporary Indigenous activism of a region of Mexico that has remained at the margins of scholarship. Professor Negrin’s current project seeks to document the impact of global entheogen commodification on sacred Indigenous lands caused by the agro-industrial expansion and peyote tourism, focusing on the preservation of Indigenous rights and the defense of ancestral lands against extractive practices.

Graham Pechenik is a registered patent attorney and the founder of Calyx Law, a law firm specializing in cannabis and psychedelics related intellectual property, especially as it relates to drug discovery and development. Graham is also editor-at-large of Psychedelic Alpha, where he writes about psychedelics IP, provides data for patent trackers, and helps to maintain the Psychedelic Law and Policy Tracker with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics; he is the founding steward of the IP Committee of the Psychedelic Bar Association, where he is also on the Board of Directors; he is a member of Chacruna’s Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants as well as their outside General Counsel; and he is an advisor to numerous organizations and investment funds in the field of psychedelics and other frontier mental health technologies.

David Presti is a Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. His areas of interest and expertise include human neurobiology and neurochemistry, the effects of drugs on the brain and the mind, the clinical treatment of addiction, the evolving conversation between cognitive science and Buddhist philosophy, and the scientific study of mind and consciousness. Professor Presti is the author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (Norton, 2016), Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal (Columbia, 2018), and the public-education course Psychedelics and the Mind (edX, 2023).

Poulomi Saha (moderator) is an Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Professor Saha works at the intersections of American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. They are interested in questions of racialization, regulation of gender and sexuality, and politics of resistance. As a Flourish Fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Professor Saha explores the intersections of mysticism, psychedelics, and critical theory from spiritual, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives. Their project aims to rejuvenate the emancipatory potential of critical theory through the lens of psychedelic experiences.

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Virtual Realities and Digital Spaces

February 24th, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

The future of virtual reality (VR) is poised to be transformative, reshaping industries, enhancing human connection, and redefining how we work, play, and learn. From gaming and entertainment to education and healthcare, virtual realities and digital spaces continue to evolve, offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation. However, the evolution of the metaverse also necessitates careful consideration of its societal and environmental impacts.

The panel will feature Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley; Emma Fraser, Assistant Teaching Professor in Media Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley; and Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation and Design in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Alex Saum-Pascual, Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media, Department of Geography, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of Media Studies, and the Department of Film & Media.

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Panelists

Clancy Wilmott is an Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation and Design in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Wilmott received her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Manchester with a multi-site study on the interaction between mobile phone maps, cartographic discourse and postcolonial landscapes. Professor Wilmott researches critical cartography, new media and spatial practices. She is the author of Mobile Mapping: Space, Cartography, and the Digital published in 2020 by Amsterdam University Press. She has also published papers in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Big Data and Society, the Leonardo Electronic Almanac and the Journal of Television and New Media, amongst others.

Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, conducts research on global internet infrastructure, with a focus on the subsea cables that carry almost 100% of transoceanic internet traffic. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015). Starosielski’s most recent project, Sustainable Subsea Networks (https://www.sustainablesubseanetworks.com/), is working to enhance the sustainability of subsea cable infrastructures.

Emma Fraser is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Media Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at UC Berkeley. Fraser teaches digital media methods, digital storytelling, game studies, and new media theory and practice to graduate and undergraduate students. Her research considers digital culture, space and place, modern ruins, and visual media in relation to urban experience and the writings of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. Fraser also researches and writes about games and play across sociology, geography, game studies and media and cultural theory.

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (2018) and numerous articles, special issues, and book chapters on digital art and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her digital poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals internationally, has been studied in specialized monographs and anthologies of digital literature. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, the advisory board of the Arts Research Center, and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. She is also one of the editors of the Electronic Literature series at Bloomsbury Academic Press.

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Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order

February 10th, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Please join us on February 10 from 4pm-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, by Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow.

Professor Barrera de la Torre will be in-person to introduce the book, and Professor Ince will present remotely. The authors will be joined in conversation by Dylan John Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; and Anna Stilz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.

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About the Book

The logic of the state has come to define social and spatial relations, embedding itself into our understandings of the world and our place in it. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre challenge this logic as the central pivot around which knowledge and life orbit, by exposing its vulnerabilities, contradictions and, crucially, alternatives.

Society Despite the State disrupts the dominance of state-centred ways of thinking by presenting a radical political geography approach inspired by anarchist thought and practice. The book draws on a broad range of voices that have affinities with Western anarchism but also exceed it.

This book challenges radicals and scholars to confront and understand the state through a way of seeing and a set of intellectual tools that the authors call ‘post-statism’ In de-centring the state’s logics and ways of operating, the authors incorporate a variety of threads to identify alternative ways to understand and challenge statism’s effects on our political imaginations.

Panelists

Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre is an Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. His interests are at the intersections of political and historical geographies, political ecologies, and critical cartographies. Professor Barrera de la Torre’s work focuses on peoples’ relation to their land/territory/landscape while engaging wide-reaching environmental policies, colonialism, and statism. His research is grounded on collaborative methods, mainly social mapping, and videography, highlighting the multiple geographies and ways of knowing that can inform epistemic and social justice efforts. Professor Barrera de la Torre has worked closely with communities in Oaxaca for over a decade on a range of issues, such as forest conservation, agrarian change, social mapping, and local knowledges. Currently, he is in the final stage of a feature documentary film exploring the consequences of and experiences around the international carbon offset market in Indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico.

Anthony Ince is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. He is a political and social geographer with a particular interest in agency, social movements, and migration. His current research explores the role of civic virtue and citizenship in the dynamics of European far-right and anti-fascist struggles. Professor Ince has been central in developing the field of anarchist geographies and serves as the co-lead of Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research on Anti-Fascism and the Far-Right (CIRAF).

Dylan John Riley is a Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Professor Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses, argues against state centered accounts of official information that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society.

Anna Stilz is a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, 2009), which dealt with questions about the moral importance of political citizenship and state authority. Her second book, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2019), investigates whether there is a good ethical justification for organizing our world as a system of sovereign territorial states, and explores the limits to a state’s justified power over its territorial boundaries. Professor Stilz is working on a new book project on the challenges that climate change poses to the territorial states-system, including climate displacement and the large-scale changes in land use and global governance that may be necessary to adapt to a warming climate.

Jake Kosek is an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. He is coauthor of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke University Press, 2003), which explores the intersections of critical theories of race and nature, and author of Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke University Press, 2006), an ethnography that examines the cultural politics of nature, race, and nation amid violent struggles over forests in northern New Mexico. Professor Kosek’s current research builds on his past work on nature, politics, and difference, using conceptual insights not only from geography but also anthropology, science studies, and theories of history to develop new approaches to natural history as both an object of critical inquiry and a conceptual tool.

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New Directions in the Study of Fringe Politics

February 4th, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

road signs showing alt left and alt right

Fringe politics today is highly diverse and dynamic, reflecting the rapid social, technological, and economic changes of the 21st century. While the term “fringe” suggests ideas or movements outside the political mainstream, many fringe ideologies have increasingly influenced, or even reshaped, national and global political landscapes.

This panel brings together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of geography, anthropology, and sociology for a discussion on politics on the fringe through the lens of such topics as QAnon, religious studies, and California secessionism. The panel will feature Josefina Valdes Lanas, PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley; Alexis Wood, PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley; Peter Forberg, PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Department of Sociology, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.

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Panelists

Josefina Valdes Lanas is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She researches religious imagination and mystical practices in contemporary Catholicism in its relation to neo-liberal economics and secular citizenship. Using the methods of linguistic anthropology, Lanas analyzes spiritual exercises deeply entrenched in Christian theology that are being transformed by the moral governance of liberal ideologies.

Alexis Wood is a PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley, researching the growing intersections between climate change, digital geographies, and rural socio-political movements. She is particularly interested in secessionist state movements, and how participants incorporate heightened levels of climate anxiety with existing feelings of rural marginalization in the physical and digital landscapes. Wood is both a theorist and geospatial analyst, a human geographer and a physical geographer, and looks to integrate these often separated fields/specializations through experimental geospatial methods and cartography.

Peter Forberg is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. He joined the department in 2023 after completing a BA in sociology and an MA in digital studies of language, culture, and history at the University of Chicago. Forberg is interested in how new media and technology are altering processes of governance, political organizing, and knowledge production and has published work in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, American Behavioral Scientist, and Frontiers in Sociology.

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the newly established Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI). Pierson is the author or co-author of six books and numerous journal articles, along with a wide range of popular writings on American politics and public policy. Professor Pierson’s latest book is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, which shows how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans.

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California Spotlight: The Future of California Agriculture

January 30th, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the California Spotlight event series

a large-scale farm in california with sprinklers spraying water

As one of the nation’s agricultural powerhouses, California’s farming industry stands at a critical juncture. Climate change, labor availability and migration, and rapidly evolving technologies are reshaping the landscape of agriculture in the Golden State. This panel will bring together experts to analyze these changes and explore their implications for agricultural communities and rural economies.

The panel will feature Federico Castillo, Lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and Project Scientist at the College of Natural Resources; Julie Guthman, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz; Eric Edwards, Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. Timothy Bowles, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS); the Berkeley Food Institute; the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI); and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).

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Panelists

Federico Castillo is a lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a project scientist at the College of Natural Resources in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. He is an environmental and agricultural economist with graduate and undergraduate degrees from UC Berkeley. His research interests center on the socio-economic impacts of climate change, particularly as it relates to the agricultural sector. Dr. Castillo currently serves as Deputy Director for the University of California Planetary Health Center of Expertise and is co-lead of the Latinx and the Environment Program at UC Berkeley.

Eric Edwards: Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Environmental Science from UC Santa Barbara and an MBA from the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester. Recent publications include “The Capitalization of Property Rights to Groundwater,” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics; “Creating American Farmland: Institutional Evolution and the Development of Agricultural Drainage,” in the Journal of Economic History; and “Water, Dust, and Environmental Justice: The Case of Agricultural Water Diversions,” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Julie Guthman is Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz and Principal Investigator in the UC Agri-food Technology Research (AFTeR) Project. Guthman’s research interests include California agriculture, alternative food movements, food and agricultural technology, international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental health, political ecology, race and food, nutritional health, and critical human geography. Past publications include The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food; Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California; and Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Guthman received a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She was the recipient of a 2023 Distinguished Career Award from the American Association of Geographers, the 2022 Martin M. Chemers Award for Outstanding Research in the Division of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, and the 2020 American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award.

Timothy Bowles (moderator) is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and a member of the Berkeley Agroecology Lab. Bowles’ research focuses on supporting transformation of our agricultural system from one reliant on intensive, synthetic inputs to one based on ecological processes. He is interested in how diversified, biologically-based farms affect soil health, resource-use-efficiency, and resilience to environmental change, especially drought. This research lies at the intersection of agroecology, soil ecology, and biogeochemistry with a focus on plant-soil-microbe interactions. He uses several approaches, including on-farm research across agricultural landscapes, historical data synthesis from long-term trials, and field and greenhouse experiments. He has a PhD in Ecology from the University of California, Davis and a B.A. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Vanderbilt University.

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New Directions in the Study of Labor

December 2nd, 2024
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

silhouettes of various people representing the labor workforce

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In this panel, an interdisciplinary group of UC Berkeley graduate students will explore the evolving dynamics of work, management, and labor organization. The panel will feature research by three current Berkeley PhD students: William Darwell (Jurisprudence and Social Policy), Kristy Kim (Economics), and Vera Parra (Sociology). The panel will be moderated by John Logan, Visiting Scholar at the UC Labor Center.

Their studies focus on the impact of pension systems on workforce participation, labor union organizing in automotive supply chains across North America, and how different political and economic systems influence workplace management practices.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the Berkeley Law Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy.

Panelists

William Darwall is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law working on social, political, and legal theory of work, the workplace, and its management. Will’s dissertation employs a critical historical account of the emergence and ongoing development of the science of management to reframe and reconstruct normative debates over the legitimacy and appropriate legal regulation of workplace hierarchy, authority, and control. Special attention, here, is paid to the present and future of techniques and technologies of workplace management, as the workplace as we know it dissipates, if not disappears. Prior to graduate work, Will co-founded and managed a worker-cooperative cafe and bar in Philadelphia, PA.

Kristy Kim, a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics, researches issues at the intersection of public and behavioral economics. Her job market paper studies how changes in retirement benefits affect labor supply and workforce composition. Her other research focuses on the distributional impacts on tax-preferred property inheritances and behavioral welfare measures.

Vera Parra, a PhD Student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, interested in labor history, political economy, and organizing in the 21st century. She is researching the recent history of auto industry organizing drives, both in the US and Mexico. She is interested in examining how green industrial policy– in particular the transition to EVs and attempts to secure a North American supply chain– shape organizing conditions on both sides of the border.

John Logan (moderator) is Professor and Director of Labor Studies at San Francisco State University and a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is an expert on the anti-union industry and anti-union legislation in the U.S., and comparative labor issues, particularly how multinational companies treat employees and unions differently in the U.S. compared to European countries.

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Making Sense of the Elections of 2024

November 21st, 2024
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Presented by the Berkeley Global Democracy Commons

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

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

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Marion Fourcade: The Ordinal Society

December 5th, 2024
4:00pm-5:30pm

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

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), the School of Information, and the Department of Sociology.

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About the Book

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

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

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

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

About the Speaker

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

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

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Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

November 13th, 2024
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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

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About the Book

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

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

About the Panelists

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

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

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

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

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

October 9th, 2024
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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

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About the Book

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

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

Eric Schickler

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

About the Panelists

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

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

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

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How Efficiency Fails: Prediction in the Public Interest

October 10th, 2024
2:00pm-3:30pm

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

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

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

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Abstract

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

About the Speaker

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

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