New Directions
REGISTER
Event Date: March 10th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT
New Directions: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Perspectives
Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel — part of the Social Science Matrix New Directions series — will bring together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.
Learn More >Matrix On Point
Recap
Published April 30, 2023
Matrix on Point: Border Crossing
For this Matrix on Point panel, we asked UC Berkeley PhD candidates — Pauline White Meeusen, Gisselle Perez-Leon, and Adriana P. Ramirez — to share their ongoing research on borders and migration. Moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), which co-sponsored the event.
Learn More >Affiliated Centers
Recap
Published April 28, 2023
Reshaping City Politics? Asian Voters’ Demands for Change in San Francisco and Vancouver
In 2022, Asian voters shocked the political establishment in San Francisco and Vancouver. Presented by UC Berkeley's Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel featured insiders from both cities, including Ken Sim’s campaign manager, a leader from Vancouver’s Canadian-Chinese community, a leader in the San Francisco school board recall campaign who was appointed to the school board herself, and scholar Neil Malhotra.
Learn More >Affiliated Centers
Recap
Published April 25, 2023
John McWhorter: Pitfalls in the Policing of Language
Recorded on April 7, 2023, this video features a lecture by Professor John McWhorter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Slavic Department at Columbia University, and a regular columnist for the New York Times. Presented by the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.
Learn More >Alumni
Interview
Published April 19, 2023
Understanding the Opioid Overdose Crisis: An Interview with David Showalter
How does the opioid overdose crisis reshape rural communities? Through their research on opioid use and opioid-related services in backcountry California, David Showalter argues that an ethnographic sensibility can help us understand how drug use both becomes an ordinary part of people’s lives and what policymakers might do to help prevent overdoses. David Showalter completed […]
Learn More >Lecture
Recap
Published April 17, 2023
Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty
Recorded on February 22, 2023, this video features a lecture by Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. In this talk, “Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty,” Amin discusses a key architect of Modern Sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
Learn More >Lecture
Recap
Published April 17, 2023
The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out
Recorded on March 22, 2023, this talk — "The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out" — features Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet.
Learn More >