Consequential Sentences: Computational Analyses of California Parole Hearing Transcripts

April 1st, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

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Please join us on April 1, 2025 for a talk by AJ Alvero, a computational sociologist at Cornell University, presenting findings from an analysis of parole hearing transcripts in California. 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). This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

Abstract

In California, candidates for parole are able to present their case with the support of an attorney to commissioners appointed by the state. These hearings are professionally transcribed, making them highly amenable to a variety of social scientific questions and computational text analysis. In this talk, I will discuss a large project analyzing every parole hearing transcript in California that occurred from November 2007 until November 2019, along with a wealth of administrative data, some of which was obtained after successfully suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In some of our early work, we find that patterns in the text based on the words being used and who is using them (e.g., words used by the parole commissioner) have stronger explanatory power than variables used in past studies. To conclude, I will discuss forthcoming work which takes advantage of the unique structure of the transcripts.

About the Speaker

AJ Alvero is a computational sociologist at Cornell University with departmental affiliations in Sociology, Information Science, and Computer Science. Most of his research examines moments of high stakes evaluation, specifically college admissions and parole hearings. In doing so, he addresses questions and topics related to the sociological inquiry of artificial intelligence, culture, language, education, race and ethnicity, and organizational decision making. This work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Science Advances, Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, Sociological Methods & Research, Journal of Big Data, and other venues. AJ earned his PhD at Stanford University along with an MS in statistics.

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The New Contours of Mass Incarceration

March 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

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

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Please join us on March 18 for a talk by Alexander F. Roehrkasse, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. Roehrkasse’s research focuses on inequality, victimization, punishment, families and children, and quantitative and historical methods. His work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Social Forces, and other leading journals. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

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 Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS). This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

Abstract

The dynamics of inequality in mass incarceration are rapidly changing and poorly understood. In this talk, I present new evidence of declining Black–White inequality and skyrocketing educational inequality in U.S. prison admissions. I qualify these findings by documenting vast racial disparities in indirect contact with the carceral system through families and neighborhoods. I conclude by discussing possible causes of recent inequality trends and potential research strategies for identifying them.

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Matrix on Point: Technology and China in the New Political Economy

April 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

High-tech industry in China. PCB and chinese flag background. Microprocessor manufacturing in People Republic of China. The printed circuit board is made in China. Export of Chinese radio electronics.

The innovation, use and experience, and exchange of new and emerging technologies today are influenced by the role that China plays in global politics and economy. This panel brings together experts of the Chinese political economy and law and society in a conversation to discuss the political, economic, security, and social dimensions and complexities of technology in China’s internationalization during times of global tensions. Topics covered will include the institutional foundations of China’s technological development, technology governance and industrial policy, global technology competition, and legal technology and societal impacts in today’s China.

This panel will feature Mark Dallas, Professor of Political Science and Science, Technology, and Society at Union College; Roselyn Hsueh, Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at U.C. Berkeley. AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the School of Information, will chair and 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.

The panel is co-presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies (IIS), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science. This public panel is a part of the two-day Bringing the Sector Back In conference, also co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

This panel will be presented in-person and will also be livestreamed via Zoom. A link to the webinar will be sent to registrants in advance.

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Panelists

Roselyn Hsueh is a Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She is the author of Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge, 2022) and China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell, 2011), and scholarship on states and markets and industrial policy. Her current research examines the technological intensity of trade and Chinese outward foreign direct investment, and the economic and security nexus in technology governance. She held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and the University of Southern California. She conducted international fieldwork as a Fulbright Global Scholar, served as a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University, and was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics (China). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mark Dallas is temporarily on leave as Professor in the departments of Political Science, Asian Studies and Science, Technology & Society at Union College in New York to serve in the U.S. government. His research focuses on industrial organization, global value chains, China, industrial and technology policy and their economic and security implications. His publications cross multiple disciplines, including in leading journals in business management and technology innovation, geography and development studies. He has also worked with the World Bank in the Trade and International Integration Development Research Group, as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the Wilson Center. He also was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. All comments made are purely his own as a private citizen, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of the U.S. government.

Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science (by courtesy) in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law, where she also currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. She is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence, as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization, courts, political space and professionalization in contemporary China. Stern is currently working on a comparative project on the politics of access to legal information and the emergent market for court data in China, France and the United States, which explores how different political systems responded to the rise of big data, machine learning and natural language processing in the 2010s. She was previously a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows.

AnnaLee Saxenian is professor of information and economic development at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as dean of the School of Information from 2004-19. Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. She is author of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994) and The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard, 2006) and has published widely on the geography and dynamics of industrial change. She chaired the Advisory Committee for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation from 2010-15. She holds degrees from MIT, UC Berkeley, and Williams College.

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Los Angeles Wildfires: Risk, Resilience, and Collective Action

February 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

As wildfires grow more frequent and devastating, they expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, governance, and community preparedness. Tackling this escalating threat demands interdisciplinary solutions that address not just the immediate risks but also the broader systemic changes driving extreme weather events.

This Matrix on Point discussion will feature Christopher Ansell, Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM); Kenichi Soga, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure; and Marta Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning. Louise Comfort, Professor Emerita and Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will moderate.

This panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

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

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Panelists

Christopher Ansell received his B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia in 1979 and worked at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment from 1979 through 1984. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1993. His fields of interest include public policy, public administration, governance, and organization theory, with a geographical focus on Europe. His current research focuses on collaborative modes of governance with a focus on collective problem-solving, democracy and sustainability. He also studies the politics and management of risk and has an ongoing interest in public health, environmental policy and crisis management. His work is inspired by the philosophy of Pragmatism.

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Soga is also the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves as a Special Advisor to the Dean of the College of Engineering for Resilient and Sustainable Systems. Soga’s research focuses on infrastructure sensing and modeling, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan. He is the PI of the NSF-funded Smart and Connected Communities project “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities: Modeling Risk Across Scales of Time and Space”.

Marta Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gonzalez’s research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies. She is the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016.

Louise K. Comfort is Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and co-principal investigator for the National Science Foundation grant titled “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities,” 2022-2025, at UC Berkeley. She is professor Emerita, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and was the Director of the Center for Disaster Management at the University of Pittsburgh from 2009-2017. A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration since 2006, she received the 2020 Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement, Section on International Comparative Administration, for the American Society of Public Administration. Her recent books include The Dynamics of Risk Changing Technologies and Collective Action in Seismic Events, Princeton University Press, 2019; Global Risk Management: The Role of Collective Cognition in Response to COVID-19, Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Mary Lee Rhodes’ and Hazardous Seas: A Sociotechnical Framework for Early Tsunami Detection and Warning, Island Press, 2023, co-edited with H.P. Rahayu. She studies the dynamics of decision making in response to urgent events: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfire, and COVID-19.

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The New Gender Gap

April 7th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

Businessman and business woman standing. concept of gender gap or business inequality concept. Business career challenge symbol. Eps10 vector illustration.

Are we witnessing a backlash to the progress of gender equality around the world? New research reveals a growing gender gap in attitudes across a range of topics, particularly striking among younger generations. From polarized views on social issues to contrasting expectations regarding marriage and family, this divergence in outlook between genders points to deeper societal fissures. This panel brings together experts to discuss the contours and complexities of this “new gender gap” and explore its ramifications for politics, demography, and societal cohesion.

This panel will feature Joshua R. Goldstein, Professor of Demography and Director of the Berkeley Population Center at UC Berkeley; Xiaoling Shu, Professor of Sociology at UC Davis; and Rachel Bernhard, Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Kiera Hudson, Assistant Professor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), the UC Berkeley Department of Demography, the Berkeley Population Center, the Haas School of Business, and the Center for Research on Social Change.

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Panelists

Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson is an Assistant Professor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Their research examines the ubiquitous nature of unequal social hierarchies in society and their role as a primary source of intergroup conflict. By understanding the contextual and psychological processes that underpin how hierarchies are formed, maintained, and influenced by one another, Professor Hudson believes we can develop tools to change hierarchical systems to be more egalitarian.

Joshua R. Goldstein is Chancellor’s Professor of Demography in the Department of Demography at UC Berkeley. He is currently director of the Berkeley Population Center and the Berkeley Formal Demography Workshops and Graduate Advisor in the Department. He is co-editor of the “Formal Relationships” series at Demographic Research and founder of the Human Fertility Database, the Mosaic Census Project for historical censuses, and, most recently, the CenSoc project, making available administrative micro- data to study mortality disparities.

Xiaoling Shu is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the impacts of two of the most profound processes of our times, marketization and globalization, on gender inequalities, well-being, and gender, family, marriage, and sexual behaviors and attitudes. She uses data science models on national and international data to carry out country-specific (China, the United States, and the United Kingdom) and cross-national analyses. She is the author of Knowledge Discovery in the Social Science: A Data Mining Approach (University of California Press) and Chinese Marriages in Transition: From Patriarchy to New Familism (Rutgers University Press). She has published in Social Forces, Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science Quarterly, Journal of Happiness Studies, Chinese Journal of Sociology, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, etc. She has served as Chair of the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association, President of the International Chinese Sociological Association, and Director of East Asia Studies at UC Davis.

Rachel Bernhard is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Before joining Nuffield, she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. Professor Bernhard is currently working on a book project on appearance-based discrimination in politics. Her research interests include gender and intersectional identity in politics (with a focus on American elections), political psychology and behavior (with a focus on voter information-gathering and decision-making), and survey and experimental design.

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Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims

April 4th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Image from the Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims book cover.

Please join us on April 4 from 12:00pm – 1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims by Shari Huhndorf, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Shari Huhndorf will be joined in conversation with Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, and Luanne Redeye, Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History 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 Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and the Department of Ethnic Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.

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About the Book

Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.

Panelists

Shari Huhndorf is Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of three books, Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims (UC Press, 2024), Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Cornell University Press, 2009), and a co-editor of three volumes, including Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2010), winner of the Canadian Women’s Studies Association Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. She is currently completing a community history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), the largest Indigenous land claims settlement in U.S. history.

Lauren Kroiz is an Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on art and modernism in the United States during the twentieth century. She has taught a range of topics in the history of American art, photography, material culture, and modernism, including courses on avant-gardism, race and representation, thing theory, technologies of imaging, meanings of medium, and globalization. Kroiz is the author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (University of California Press, 2018) and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (University of California Press, 2012).

Luanne Redeye is an Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. As a portrait and figurative artist, she works at the intersection of autobiography and community. Luanne grew up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York. It is from here where she draws connections to land, kinship, and culture in her artwork, which gives her pieces a strong personal and emotional component. Whether her art touches on the native experience, identity, or resiliency, Luanne’s work is always created through a native lens sharing her experiences, knowledge, and perspective of navigating a modern world as a native woman.

Bernadette Perez is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She focuses particularly on the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her work is situated at the intersection of multiple subfields of history, from race and environment to labor, migration, and colonialism. In other words, she studies empire and capitalism in action. Migrant sugar beet workers are at the heart of her current work. In her manuscript, she follows corporate sugar into southeastern Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century and trace its efforts to hold diverse working communities within a highly unequal and hierarchical land and labor regime for the better part of a century. In doing so, she unearths the long and entangled histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and white peoples in a space structured by U.S. expansion, Indian removal, and anti-Blackness.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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