Article

Article

Interview

Published September 20, 2023

Untimely Sacrifices: An Interview with Daena Funahashi

In this interview, Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, a Matrix Communications Scholar, spoke with Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, about her new book, “Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland,” based on her ethnographic work in Finnish rehabilitation programs for occupational burnout.

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Article

Interview

Published August 21, 2023

Language Revitalization in Oakland: A Visual Interview with Tessa Scott

Mam, a Mayan language spoken both in the highlands of Guatemala as well as in diaspora communities in Mexico and the US, is rapidly becoming one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the San Francisco East Bay region. Mam-speaking migrants are part of a broader trend of Central American migrants in the United […]

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Alumni Interview

Interview

Published August 14, 2023

How Medical Expertise Shapes Gender-Affirming Health Care: An Interview with Tara Gonsalves

Read an interview with Tara Gonsalves, a recent PhD graduate of UC Berkeley and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, about the challenges of the categories of sex, gender, and transgender, and how these categories are used in gender-affirming health care in the United States today.

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Article

Interview

Published August 1, 2023

Advancing Computational Psychology: A Visual Interview with Bill Thompson

Read an interview with UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Bill Thompson, who uses computational methods and large-scale experiments to understand problems like knowledge transmission, the universality of language categories, and the social aspects of human problem-solving.

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Economy

Interview

Published June 26, 2023

Balancing Property Taxes for Schools: An Interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey

Read an interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics, about his research on how reforming property taxes can reduce inequality among school districts in the United States.

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Matrix News

Faculty Fellows

Published April 15, 2023

2023-2024 Social Science Matrix Faculty Fellows Chosen

Four UC Berkeley professors have been selected to be Matrix Faculty Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year: Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History; Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology; Christopher Muller, Associate Professor of Sociology; and Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. 

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Article

Podcast

Published September 30, 2022

The Rise of Mass Incarceration: An Interview with Chris Muller and Alex Roehrkasse

On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars whose work focuses on explaining how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years. Alex Roehrkasse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. He studies the production of racial, class, and gender inequality in the […]

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Article

Interview

Published September 22, 2022

The Materiality of the Telegraph Revolution: A Visual Interview with Sophie FitzMaurice

How did the telegraph change the environment? Read our latest "visual interview" with Sophie FitzMaurice, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of History, whose research interests include how telegraph poles were produced, and how woodpeckers responded to the concomitant disappearance of forests and the rise of telegraph lines.

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Article

Interview

Published August 31, 2022

The Effects of Reparations: A Visual Interview with Arlen Guarin

What are the impacts of reparations on the lives of victims of violence? Read our visual interview with Arlen Guarin, a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley, who studies the effects of policies that aim to reduce poverty and inequality, including reparations given to victims of human rights violations in Colombia.

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Article

Interview

Published August 30, 2022

How Climate Change Became a Security Emergency: An Interview with Brittany Meché

How has climate change become an international security problem? In this interview, Brittany Meché, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College, discusses her research on how expert explanations of climate migration rework the afterlives of empire in the West African Sahel.

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Article

Podcast

Published August 3, 2022

Race, Gender, and Political Speech: An Interview with Gabriella Licata

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was insulted on the Capitol steps in July 2020, it was a brief media sensation. But what does being called an “effing bitch” mean for how we think about political speech? This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Gabriella Licata, a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, focused on how the standard language ideologies of political speech come to shape perceptions of language and people in Congress.

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Article

Interview

Published June 17, 2022

How CRISPR Became Routine

Read a Matrix visual interview with Santiago Molina, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, who researches how CRISPR, the genetic engineering technology, has become an everyday part of scientific practice.

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