Matrix on Point: Surveillance and Privacy in a Biometric World

February 15th, 2024
4:00pm-5:30pm

Facial recognition system identifying people on city street.

As governments and businesses begin to use more forms of biometric identification – including fingerprints, facial recognition, and voice recognition, among others – it’s easier than ever to recognize a person. What implications do these technologies have on the future of privacy and surveillance? In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will evaluate how biometric identification might change our understanding of the relationship between people, private industry, and their government.

The panel will feature John Chuang, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information; Lawrence Cohen, Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program; and Jennifer Urban, Clinical Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where she is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. The panel will be moderated by Rebecca Wexler, Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the UC Berkeley School of Information. This will be held in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley).

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Panelists

John Chuang is Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. His research and teaching span the areas of climate informatics, biosensory computing, and incentive-centered design. He leads the BioSENSE Lab in studying brainwave authentication using passthoughts, affective biosensing, embodied decision-making, and privacy of ubiquitous sensing. His earlier work investigated strategic cybersecurity investments, incentives for peer production, and scalability of multicast trees. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and graduated summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Lawrence Cohen is a scholar of religion and a medical anthropologist. Much of his work has focused on the norms and forms of political life in India, attending to questions of old age and the place of the family in the decolonization of knowledge; to the sexual and gendered logics of “backwardness”; and to the mediation and regulation of markets in human organs as sites to think about ethics as public culture. For the past decade he has studied contending models of biometrics and big data in the control and governance of economy and society, with a focus on India’s massive “Aadhaar” identification project.

Jennifer M. Urban is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. In March 2021, Urban was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to be the inaugural Chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency Board. Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Urban founded and directed the USC Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law. Before that, she was the Samuelson Clinic’s first fellow and an attorney with the Venture Law Group in Silicon Valley. She holds a B.A. in biological science (concentration in neurobiology and behavior) from Cornell University, and a J.D. (with law and technology certificate) from Berkeley Law.

Rebecca Wexler is Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Wexler’s teaching and research focus on data, technology, and secrecy in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on evidence law, trade secret law, and data privacy. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, NYU Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Berkeley Technology Law Journal, as well as in peer-reviewed computer science publications. Wexler will serve as senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Spring 2023, and as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School in Fall 2023.

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Authors Meet Critics: “Terracene,” by Salar Mameni

March 4th, 2024
4pm-5:30pm

Please join us in-person on Monday, March 4, 2024 from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Terracene, by Professor Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Professor Mameni will be joined by Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz; Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley; and Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

This panel is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory, the Art Research Center, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Department of Art History, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative.

About the Book

In Terracene, Professor Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

Panelists

Salar Mameni

Salar Mameni is an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies and an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. He has published articles in Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal. Salar’s first book, Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” I propose the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Terracene engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change.

Mayanthi Fernando is a Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014), which alternates between an analysis of Muslim French politics, ethics, and social life and the contradictions of French secularity (laïcité) that this new Muslim subjectivity reflects and refracts. Her second book discusses the secularity of the post-humanist turn that asks whether “natureculture” – a reversal of the distinction between nature and the human – might be extended to “supernatureculture.”

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the South Asia Art Initiative and the Climate Change Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; awarded the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited; 2020). He is currently writing a book on the question of the animal and animality in the early modern period and co-editing Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (2024).

Stefania Pandolfo is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn”, and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.

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Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice

February 8th, 2024
2:00pm

Please register to join us on Wednesday, February 8 at 2:00pm Pacific for a hybrid (in-person and online) talk, “Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice,” by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner.

REGISTER HERE

This event will be presented both online and in-person. A Zoom link will be sent to all registrants prior to the event.

Abstract

The places we live are inseparably connected to who we are. Our relationship with these spaces we come into being through is somewhat foundational to our knowing and being in the world. They shape who we are, and we, in so many ways, shape them, inscribing them with personal meanings and finding social coordinates in them. In this talk, Barnwell uses vignettes to describe how this takes place, emphasizing that these bonds are most evidently seen when threatened. Basing his insights on several years of clinical experience and critical psychology theory, he draws attention to how people’s psychological relationship to place is threatened through grievous acts of epistemic injustices — violence directed at knowledge and speech. These forms of epistemic injustice include the silencing, misrecognition, threats, and killings of land defenders, as well as systematized land dispossession in the name of capitalist expansion and mining. Decolonial and critical psychologies teach us that the language we come into being, which privileges certain politics, ways of knowing and being in the world in relation to such places, has a bearing on subjectivity — what can be said and what is unsayable, and, thus, unactionable. He will describe how such forms of epistemic violence threaten these psychological bonds and produce psychological trauma. Around the world in these extractive zones, Indigenous and land-based resurgent movements play a critical role in defending against epistemic injustices for the flourishing of life. In conclusion, Barnwell draws attention to how such resurgent groups use different forms of land dialogues and speech as integral parts of community resistance and psychological healing.

About the Speaker

Dr. Garret Barnwell is a clinical psychologist working as a psychotherapist and community psychology practitioner. He is most interested in different forms of accompaniment and resistance to extractivism for the flourishing of all life. Barnwell was an expert on the landmark youth-led #cancelcoal climate case launched against the South African government’s plans for new coal-fired power. He is also a member of the American Psychological Association’s Climate Change Advisory Group. Barnwell’s writing includes several expert reports, special issues, and a book, Terrapsychology: Further Inquiry Into Self, Place and Planet (with Prof Craig Chalquist). He is a research associate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

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Hugo ka Canham: Riotous Deathscapes through the Watchful Ocean

December 5th, 2023
4:00pm-6:00pm

Presented by the Program in Critical Theory, the Series in Black / Africana Critical Theory stages a slow sequence of conversations across Africana Studies, Black Study, and Critical Theory. Rather than a form of triangulation that aims at resolution, the series stays with tension across these lines of thought, in provisional forms of critical contemplation that might help us meet our current condition. Seminars center on open discussion of a recently published or pre-circulated piece.

This seminar centers on Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes.

Hugo ka Canham is a Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa. He thinks along the fault lines of Black studies, African feminism, African queer theorisations, and a planetary perspective. He is invested in dismantling the binaries between the human and the natural, multispecies world, within an emerging transdisciplinary rubric of Black Planetary Studies. His latest book, Riotous Deathscapes is published by Duke University Press and copublished by Wits University Press. He is working on a book provisionally titled Treading Queer Waters.

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community’s resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. Canham shows that Mpondo theory is grounded in and develops in relation to the natural world, where the river and hill are key sites of being and resistance. Central too, is the interface between ancestors and the living, in which life and death become a continuity and a boundlessness that white supremacy and neoliberalism cannot interdict. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

For information about ADA accessibility, please visit bit.ly/3sCykIR .

For more information abou tthe content of these events, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu.

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Author Meets Critics: Andrew Garrett, “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall”

January 19th, 2024
3:30pm-5:00pm

Book cover - a person prying the K off the wall of a building

Please join us on January 19, 2024 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Professor Garrett will be joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California. Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, Department of Ethnic Studies, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, and Native American Studies.

About the Book

In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber’s name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university’s failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber’s most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories.

The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber’s documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.

Panelists

Andrew Garrett is Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics, where he directs the California Language Archive. His research and teaching are in historical linguistics (especially Indo-European historical linguistics) and in language documentation and revitalization (especially involving Indigenous California languages). From the Linguistic Society of America, he has received the Best Paper in Language Award (2015, for “Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis”, coauthored with three students) and the Kenneth L. Hale Award (2023, for “outstanding work on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken”). Since 2001, he has collaborated with the Yurok Tribe on the documentation and revitalization of the Yurok language, preparing a short pedagogical grammar Basic Yurok in 2014.

James Clifford is Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. He the author of books that explore the intersections of anthropology, literature and art: The Predicament of Culture (1988); Routes (1997); and Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (2013). In the latter work, he writes at some length about Kroeber, Ishi, and the colonial legacies of ethnography museums.

William F. Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology, studies the history and ethnography of Yucatan, Mexico, and Yucatec Maya language and culture, including early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain. He examines the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). He has studied ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. His most recent work concerns the colonial history of Yucatan and New Spain, with a special emphasis on missionization and the emergence of colonial discourse genres.

Leanne Hinton is professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her recent research has focused on language revitalization of Native American languages. She strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics, and linguistic research that relates to community needs and interests, as well as to theory. Though retired, she remains active in research and consulting. Awards include the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award (2006), the Linguistics Society of America’s Language, Linguistics and the Public award (2012), The Hubert Howe Bancroft Award, presented by the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley (2018), and the “Honored One” award, presented by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, & Museums.

Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot) is a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer. He is a first language speaker of Karuk and a tribal scholar. Julian is a member of the Board of Directors of the Ink People – Center for Arts and the author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California.

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Nivedita Menon, “Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South”

November 15th, 2023
5:00pm-6:30pm

Please join us on November 15 at 5:00pm for a talk by Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Professor Menon will be joined in conversation by Poulomi Saha, co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

This event is presented by the Program in Critical Theory in collaboration with the Office of the Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences and the Institute for South Asia Studies. Co-sponsors (in addition to Social Science Matrix) include the UC Berkeley Department of English, the Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Center on Contemporary India, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender.

Register here to attend in-person or online.

About the Speaker

Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of Seeing like a Feminist (2012). Her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South, is forthcoming in 2023 (Permanent Black) and 2024 (Duke University Press). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014). She also has two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007); and a co-edited book Critical Studies in Politics. Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2014).

Menon is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India. She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.

Related Event

Nivedita Menon | The Saffron and the Star: Scripting Hindutva in Bollywood
(The 6th Bhattacharya Lecture on the “Future of India”)

November 14, 2023, 5 – 7 p.m.
Room 370, Dwinelle Hall, South Dr, Berkeley, CA 94720

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Elizabeth Joh: “Police Technology Experiments”

December 7th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Join us on Thursday, December 7 at 12pm for a talk by Elizabeth Joh, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. Professor Joh’s talk, “Police Technology Experiments,” is presented by the Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS) and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS).

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Abstract

Police Technology Experiments

To be a modern local police force means embracing new surveillance technologies that promise to amass the ever-enlarging universe of data around us and to produce actionable inferences about it. Whether described as using algorithms, artificial intelligence, or automated decision-making, all of these surveillance technologies involve some degree of computational analysis of data that creates new forms of knowledge and permits new types of policing. The usual way we discuss the use of these technologies, however, is limiting. Not only is it limiting, but it also obscures the human costs that are an inevitable consequence.

We should reconsider how we approach these new policing tools. This article makes one straightforward claim: algorithmic surveillance tools piloted by the police function as technology experiments on communities. These police technologies are experiments in the sense that they pose potential harms on those subject to the technology in the service of a theoretical but typically unproven benefit: more effective policing. With this framework, two observations follow. First, the model of technological experimentalism provides a more nuanced and comprehensive framework for understanding the use of algorithmic surveillance tools in policing. Second, experimentalism foregrounds both ethical considerations and group harms that are ill-suited to traditional legal analysis.

About the Speaker

Professor Elizabeth Joh is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. She is a leading expert on policing, privacy, and technology. She served as a member of the U.C. Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence (2020-21), and is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Faculty Advisory Board member of the UC Berkeley CITRIS Policy Lab, and an appointed member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study committee on Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance. She has spoken on policing and technology issues to audiences including the Justices of the Washington Supreme Court, the Judicial Research Training Institute of the Supreme Court of Korea, and the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee (U.K.).

Professor Joh’s scholarship has appeared in leading law reviews including the Northwestern University Law Review, the California Law Review and the Stanford Law Review. Her writing for general audiences has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Politico, and the New York Review of Books. She is the co-host of What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law, a popular podcast about constitutional law and current events.

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The Du Boisian Challenge and the Future of the Social Sciences

October 19th, 2023
2:00pm

Organized by UC Berkeley Sociology Professors Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz and Ricarda Hammer, with support from Berkeley Sociology, the Division of Social Sciences, the Latinx Research Center, and Social Science Matrix.

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Agenda

Reflections on the Recent Uptake of Du Bois (2-2:50pm)

While the social sciences have begun to seriously engage W.E.B. Du Bois, he has long been a fixture in Black Studies. As mainstream disciplines take up Du Bois, what is gained and what is lost? How does this moment challenge us to rethink the structures of the academy and knowledge production?

Panelists: Tina Park (Head of Inclusive Research & Design at Partnership on AI) Jacob Grumbach (Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley) Tianna Paschel (Sociology and African American Studies, UC Berkeley)

Dialoguing among Critical Traditions: Solidarity and Liberation (3-3:50pm)

Opening a dialogue between Du Boisian thought and other critical traditions, this panel asks: What are their distinct imaginaries of liberation and how do different traditions rethink the social sciences? What is the transformative potential of greater pollination?

Panelists: Cedric de Leon (Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) Keith Feldman (Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley); Zophia Edwards (Sociology, Johns Hopkins University)

KEYNOTE: Towards a Du Boisian Sociological Methodology (4-5:15pm)

Opening Remarks: prabhdeep singh kehal (Sociology, University of Wisconsin)

Presenter: José Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology, Brown University

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If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

October 17th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Please join us on October 17 for a talk by Vincent Bevins, an award-winning journalist and correspondent, focused on his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The panel will be moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Co-sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative and Social Science Matrix.

Time and Location: October 17, 12pm – 1:30 pm, 8th Floor, Social Science Building; lunch will be provided for those registered by Oct 13.

About the Book

Vincent Bevins’ brilliant new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, tells the story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world – and what comes next.

From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Over four years, the acclaimed journalist Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world. The result is a stirring work of history built around one question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, If We Burn renders street movements and their consequences in gripping detail. Bevins draws on his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change has been gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.

Praise for If We Burn

“This is a wondrous work of mystery writing, an effort to solve the riddle: Why has a decade of large-scale rolling revolts produced no revolution, no significant structural reform? I can’t think of any journalist other than Bevins who would dare to ask such a question, or be capable of weaving together seemingly discrete global events into a stunning history of now. Have we planted seeds for a better future, or have the gears of change frozen for good? Bevins lets the people he talked to, those on the street, answer.” —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth.

“In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent introduces us to the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and the millions of ordinary people whose spontaneous acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. Bevins’s clear-eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves his reader with a bold vision of the future—one in which his book’s lessons are used to transform an uprising into a true revolution.” —Merve Emre, critic, New Yorker

Praise for The Jakarta Method

“The Jakarta Method dismantles and re-positions the American mythos, similar to two recent Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth…. The Jakarta Method is a devastating critique of US hypocrisy during the Cold War, and a mournful hypothetical of what the world might have looked like if Third World movements had succeeded.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books<

Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London.

Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and more. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Brazil.
Moderator: Daniel Aldana Cohen

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019).

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Authors Meet Critics: Trevor Jackson, “Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830”

December 5th, 2023
3:30pm-5:00pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Please join us on December 5 at 3:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), by Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson will be joined by William H. Janeway, Affiliated Member of the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University; David Singh Grewal, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; and Anat Admati, the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and the UC Berkeley Department of History. 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.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Book

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe’s richest man in 1709, to the world’s first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

Panelists

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the seventeenth century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has ongoing research interests in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health.

William H. Janeway is an Affiliated Member of the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University and the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (2nd. ed., Cambridge University Press: 2018). He is a Special Limited Partner of Warburg Pincus, having joined the firm in 1988 and served as head of its information technology investment practice for 15 years. He is chair of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council. He is founder of the Cambridge Endowment for Research and the Janeway Institute for Economics at Cambridge University. He was co-founder of the Institute for New Economics Thinking. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

David Singh Grewal is Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. His teaching and research interests include legal and political theory; intellectual history, particularly the history of economic thought; global economic governance and international trade law; intellectual property law and biotechnology; and law and economics. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. His second book, The Invention of the Economy, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He has published on legal topics in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and several other law reviews, and on a variety of questions in political theory and intellectual history in several peer-reviewed journals. His public writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the BioBricks Foundation and a co-founder of the Law and Political Economy blog. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and holds B.A. (Economics) and Ph.D. (Political Science) degrees from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Faculty Director of the Corporations and Society Initiative and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research who is writing and teaching on the interactions of business, law and policy. Admati is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of The Bankers’ New Clothes: Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton Press 2013) whose new and expanded edition is forthcoming in January 2024. In 2014, she was named one of Time Magazine 100 most influential people and one of the Foreign Policy Magazine 100 global thinkers. Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University and an honorary doctorate from University of Zurich.

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Matrix on Point: New Directions in Gender and Sexuality

November 30th, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

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

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

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

REGISTER HERE

Co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender (CRG) and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. This event is part of the Matrix on Point series, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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

November 28th, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

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

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

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

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography and the Program in Critical Theory.

REGISTER TO ATTEND.

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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