UC Berkeley’s flagship institute for social science research

Our purpose is captured in our name: we provide an organizational framework—a “matrix”—that supports cross-disciplinary research pursued by social scientists across the University of California, Berkeley campus and beyond.

Special Event

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Event Date: May 8th, 2024
2:00pm-3:00pm

Global Economic Developments: A View from the IMF

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are invited to join us on May 8, 2024 from 2:00pm-3:00pm for a town hall meeting with Gita Gopinath, the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. The event will feature an interview of Dr Gopinath conducted by current UC Berkeley students on topics ranging from debt sustainability to economic fragmentation and the role of the dollar in the global economy, followed by an open question period.

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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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Podcast

Interview

Published August 7, 2023

Listening to Rwandan Popular Music with Victoria Netanus Grubbs

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Victoria Netanus Grubbs, a Black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator who is a Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her current book project examines how popular Rwandan music worked in the aftermath of genocide to produce a collective social body.

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Symposium

Recap

Published August 1, 2023

DEEPFAKE: A Rhetorical and Economic Alternative to Address the So-Called “Post-Truth Era”

Recorded on May 10, 2023 at Social Science Matrix, this symposium aimed to develop a critique of the current debates about Post-Truth and fakeness, and specifically of Big Tech’s effort to frame the political expression of the demos as it solidifies its control over the digital economy.

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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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Symposium

Recap

Published July 27, 2023

Jews and Other Groups Who Resisted the Nazis: Means, Motivations, and Limitations

Recorded on April 28, 2023, this video features talks and panels from an interdisciplinary, comparative symposium exploring what remains an under-examined topic in the history of World War II and the Holocaust: the multivarious paths through which ordinary men and women resisted the Nazis.

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Podcast

Interview

Published July 27, 2023

The Binational Politics of Return Migrant Activism: Interview with Caroline Tracey

Listen to (or read) an interview with Caroline Tracey, a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, whose research uses ethnographic, archival, and literary methods to study the American Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border. Tracey argues that women and trans deportees and returnees play an important role in community-building and activism in Mexico that has improved emplacement for all return migrants.

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