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.

New Directions

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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.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published September 11, 2014

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Migrant farmworkers are subject to social and economic inequalities that put them at greater risk of hardship and injury, according to a book by UC Berkeley’s Seth Holmes.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published September 5, 2014

Struggles of a Class Worrier

Governments have to do more to reduce income inequality, says UC Berkeley's Robert Reich.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published September 3, 2014

Snapping Back from Disaster

UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management seeks new approaches for mitigating the impacts of disasters on large-scale infrastructure systems.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Invited Interventions

Research by UC Berkeley Political Scientist Aila Matanock sheds light on why state-building interventions succeed in some nations and not others.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Take No Prisoners

Through overcrowding, lockdowns, and medical neglect, the conditions in U.S. prisons have become unconstitutional, according to UC Berkeley legal scholar Jonathan Simon.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Decline of the City-State

UC Berkeley historian Mark Peterson writes about the prominence—and ultimate decline—of city-states, using 18th- and 19th-century Boston as an example.

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