Article Type: REGISTER

Mapping the Brain: Functional Brain Mapping for Understanding Health, Aging, and Disease

January 20th, 2022
5:00pm Pacific

A Conversation with Jack Gallant, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

Hand holding an image of a brain

All of human experience — our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, plans and actions — reflect the coordinated activity of a complex network of hundreds of distinct areas and modules within the brain. Disorders of these brain networks that occur during development, aging, or due to neurological disease, can have profound effects on quality of life. Therefore, understanding how information is represented and processed in this network during daily life is a major challenge for medicine. Addressing this fundamental problem will require advances in the software algorithms used to process and model brain data, and in the development of new neuroimaging hardware.

UC Berkeley is at the forefront of research development in both these areas. Professor Jack Gallant’s computational neuroimaging laboratory focuses on functional mapping of these representations under naturalistic conditions that occur in daily life. His team has developed novel algorithms and software for creating high-dimensional, high-resolution functional brain maps in individual people. These functional maps reveal how the brain represents information during daily life. In this talk, Professor Gallant will summarize this technology and its potential applications in the areas of development, learning, aging and for diagnosis and monitoring of mental disorders.

In his capacity as head of the Henry J. Wheeler Brain Imaging Center at Berkeley, Prof. Gallant will also give an overview of the NexGen MRI Scanner. This is an ongoing project at UCB that will create the highest-resolution functional brain scanner available for routine human use.

About the Speaker

Jack Gallant is Chancellor’s Professor and Class of 1940 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He is affiliated with the departments of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with the programs in Bioengineering, Biophysics, Neuroscience, and Vision Science. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and Washington University Medical School. His research program focuses on computational modeling of human brain activity.

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Mapping the Brain

Sarah Vaughn: “Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation”

April 22nd, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM

Sarah Vaughn Book Cover

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability

Please join us on Friday, April 22, 2022 from 12pm-1:30pm Pacific for an “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation, by Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Professor Vaughn will be joined in conversation by Stephen Collier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. 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.

About the Book

In Engineering Vulnerability, Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources, but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and more broadly, future life on a warming earth.

About the Panelists

Sarah VaughnSarah E. Vaughn is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies.  She received her B.A. in 2006 from Cornell University, majoring as a College Scholar with a focus in Anthropology, Sociology, and Inequality Studies. She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. Her research advances understandings of climate change in the Circum-Caribbean while tracking the affective, ethical, and political components of dignity and belonging. At stake in her research are questions about the role climate change has in shaping the materiality of expertise, an ethics of (re)distribution, and narrative form. She is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology and Medicine, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Program in Development Engineering.

Stephen CollierStephen Collier studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. Collier examines both contemporary and historical topics, and is engaged with a number of sub-disciplinary fields, including science and technology studies, actor-network theory, governmentality studies, and cultural geography. Collier’s current research examines urban resilience as a significant new paradigm and practice in city and regional planning. He has conducted fieldwork on urban resilience in New Orleans and New York, with ongoing comparative projects in other U.S. cities that examine how urban governments are developing and financing resilience interventions. Collier’s ongoing work on resilience builds on longer-term research on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States, which resulted in a co-authored book, The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (forthcoming, Princeton University Press). Collier is co-editor of Limn, a scholarly magazine on contemporary problems that arise at the intersection of science, technology, and expert knowledge. He has edited issues of Limn on systemic risk, disease ecologies, design and development, and public infrastructure.

Sugata RaySugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the visual arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and co-editor of Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2020). He is currently writing a book on Indian Ocean art histories in the age of Anthropocene extinction.

Daniel Aldana CohenDaniel Aldana Cohen (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serves as a faculty affiliate in the graduate program on Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project. He is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-23). In 2018-19, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019). He is currently completing a book project called Street Fight: Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century City, under contract with Princeton University Press.

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Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa

March 7th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Precolonial legacies book cover

Please join us on Monday, March 7th from 12pm-1:30pm PST for an “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa, by Martha Wilfahrt, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science. Professor Wilfahrt will be joined in conversation by Scott Straus, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Leonardo Arriola, Associate Dean of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for African Studies, will moderate.

About the Book

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer to this question: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. Drawing on a multi-method research design, the book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization.

About the Panelists

Martha WilfahrtMartha WIlfahrt studies African Politics and Political Economy of Development with a focus on historical legacies, redistributive politics and state-society relations. Her current research interests revolve around two themes. The first focuses on historical legacies in contemporary African politics, with a particular interest in the persistence of social norms and the role of concept formation in the ‘historical renaissance.’ Work from this first area of focus has been published in Comparative Politics, The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, World Development and World Politics, as well as Cambridge University Press, which just released her first book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics. A second, ongoing stream of research studies the politics of field research in the Global South.

Scott StraussScott Straus works on violence, human rights, and African politics. His most recent books are Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (US Holocuast Memorial Museum, 2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.  His 2006 book on the Rwandan genocide, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press), also won several awards, including the best 2006 book in political science from the Association of American Publishers. He also has co-edited, with Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda: State-Building and Human Rights in Rwanda (UW Press, 2011) and, with Steve Stern, The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents (UW Press, 2014). Straus has published articles in American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Politics and Society, Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, African Affairs, Terrorism and Political Violence, Genocide Studies and Prevention, The Journal of Genocide Research, and other journals; he translated The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (Zone 2003); and he has received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. In 2009, Straus was awarded the campus-wide William Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2011 he was named a Winnick Fellow at the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to his academic career, Straus was a freelance journalist in Africa.

alberto diaz cayerosAlberto Díaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.

Leonardo Arriola (moderator) studies the challenges associated with representation and governance in multiethnic societies. His research examines inter-ethnic political cooperation, party competition under ethnic polarization, and political violence in divided societies. His award-winning research has been published in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of Politics along with books published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. His work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Carnegie Corporation of New York, U.S. Department of Defense, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He is co-editor of Africa Spectrum, an interdisciplinary journal published by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), an associated senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway, and a board member of the African Studies Association (ASA).

 

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Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education

February 3rd, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Bankers in the Ivory Tower book cover

Co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education

Please join us on February 3rd, 2022 from 12-1:30pm PST for an “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, by Charlie Eaton, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Professor Eaton will be joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel will be moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.

This event will be broadcast via Zoom. We will send a link to registrants prior to the event.

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About the Book

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.

About the Panelists

Charlie EatonCharlie Eaton investigates the role of organizations in the interplay between economic elites and disadvantaged social groups. His primary current project asks how the rising power and wealth of finance has contributed to rising inequality in America since the 1980s. The project particularly examines how private equity, hedge funds, investment banks, commercial banks and their leaders entered the field of higher education administration and finance. Private financiers expanded their role in higher education as the post-industrial economy made a college degree an increasingly necessary prerequisite for Americans to attain economic success and security. In entering the higher education field, financial organizations became increasingly powerful intermediaries between financial markets, government, universities, and students — offering insights into broader processes of financialization by which financial elites ascended to the pinnacle of power and wealth in America. Eaton’s research on the financialization of higher education has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes The Nation,  The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Eaton graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a B.A. in politics in 2002. He then worked as a union organizer for 7 years, mostly in California’s Central Valley. Eaton received his Ph.D in sociology from University of California, Berkeley in 2016. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University from 2016 to 2017 before joining the faculty in sociology at UC Merced.

Emmanuel SaezEmmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999. His research focuses on inequality and tax policy. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he created the top income share series that show a dramatic increase in US inequality since 1980. The data have been widely discussed in the public debate. His 2019 book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, joint with his colleague Gabriel Zucman, narrates the demise of US progressive taxation and how to reinvent it in the 21st century. He received numerous academic awards, including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2010, and a Honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.

Jonathan GlaterJonathan D. Glater is a Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He was previously a Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and prior to that at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He is a coauthor with Michael A. Olivas and Amy Gajda on the forthcoming, fifth edition of The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court. He has written extensively for law reviews on higher education opportunity, frequently exploring the implications of rising student indebtedness. With Dalié Jiménez, he helped establish the Student Loan Law Initiative, a partnership with the Student Borrower Protection Center dedicated to research on student debt. Professor Glater began law teaching at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016. He visited at Stanford Law School in 2016. Before entering the legal academy, Professor Glater spent nearly a decade as a reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of articles on the legal profession, legal education, criminal and civil cases in the news, as well as on higher education finance and student debt. Prior to joining the Times, he worked as an associate at the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and at the Buenos Aires, Argentina firm of Marval, O’Farrell, & Mairal. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.A. in international relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College.

Jennifer Johnson-HanksJennifer Johnson-Hanks is the Executive Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science (L&S). She previously served as Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Senate and Professor of Demography and Sociology. Johnson-Hanks is a cultural demographer whose empirical work focuses mostly on family variation and change, with a focus on whether and how intentions matter, especially in contexts of uncertainty. Her first book, Uncertain Honor, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. It explores the relationship between population rates and cultural practices through a study of the transition to motherhood among educated women in Southern Cameroon. Co-authoring with Phil Morgan, Chris Bachrach, and Hans-Peter Kohler, Johnson-Hanks published Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a theory of Conjunctural Action in 2011. Her third book, How We Count, is forthcoming. Drawing examples from demography, sociology, economics, and political science, this book argues that quantitative methods are essential tools for understanding society, but only if we change how we use them: focusing more on the dynamics of social groups than on differences between individuals, and thinking more deeply about the social processes that produce the data we observe. Johnson-Hanks earned her BA from Berkeley, and her MA and PhD from Northwestern, all in Anthropology.

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Adapting Flood Risk Management to Climate Change: Examples from the EU and the US

November 29th, 2021
9:00am-11:00am PST

Fall 2021 3rd EU-US Knowledge Exchange Webinar

It has been an intense summer in terms of flooding all over the world, especially with recent flooding disasters in Germany, China, Turkey, Afghanistan, and more recently in the United States with Hurricane Ida. A recent study has shown that the risk of flooding in northwestern Germany was increased by a factor of 1.2 to 9 due to climate change.

The increasing number of extreme events makes it necessary to shift our current management approaches, which are largely historically based statistical values such as 100-year flooding frequencies that may no longer hold true. But how do different countries include climate change in flood risk assessment, mapping, and management?

In this webinar we will discuss this topic with experts from the EU and the US by looking at examples from two EU member states, Sweden and Spain, and the State of California and the City of Miami in the United States.

The Fall 2021 3rd EU-US Knowledge Exchange Webinar is hosted by Social Science Matrix and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), with the collaboration of the EU Working Group on Floods (WGF). This event is part of the project “Residual Risk of Extreme Floods: A Challenge for the Sustainable Development Goals” (RREFlood), funded by the Belmont Forum and the National Science Foundation.

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Agenda

All times are listed in Pacific Time

9:00 am: Welcome

  • Marion Fourcade, Director UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix

09:05 am: Introduction

  • David Powers, CDM Smith – ASFPM International Committee co-chair
  • Anna Serra-Llobet, University of California Berkeley – ASFPM International Committee co-chair

9:10 am: The EU Floods Directive: Consideration of Likely Impacts of Climate Change

  • Ioannis Kavvadas and Clemens Neuhold, EU Working Group on Floods

9:20 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the EU: the Case of Sweden

  • Barbro Näslund-Landenmark, Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency

9:30 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the EU: the Case of Spain

  • Juan Francisco Arrazola-Herreros, Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge

9:40 am Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the US: the Case of California

  • Romain Maendly, California Department of Water Resources

10:00 am: Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change in the US: the Case of Miami

  • Michael Schmidt, CDM Smith

10:30 am Q&A and Discussion

11:00 am: Adjourn

 

Speakers

flood event speakers

Ioannis Kavaadas joined the European Commission in 2007. He served six years in European Union Delegations, initially in Addis Ababa as an infrastructure advisor and later in Beijing as a head of the Section responsible for development and cooperation in areas as small and medium enterprises, energy and environment/climate change. In 2013 he joined the Commission’s Directorate General for Environment as a policy officer. He is currently a team leader in the Water Policy Unit, where he implements the Floods Directive. He also co-chairs the EU Working Group on Floods.

Clemens Neuhold is the Deputy Director of the Flood Risk Management Directorate in the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Regions and Tourism. He is responsible for the implementation of the EU Floods Directive in Austria at the national level as well as for international coordination. In the frame of the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) for the EU Water Framework Directive and Floods Directive at EU level, he is co-chairing the EU Working Group on Floods. He is also strongly involved in international coordination of the Rhine, Elbe, and Danube river basins, and he chairs the Flood Protection Expert Group of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR).

Barbro Näslund-Landemark is an expert in natural disasters at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB). Barbro is responsible for the implementation of the European Floods Directive in Sweden. She is the contact point at national and international levels and is in this role representing Sweden at the EU implementing process of the Floods Directive. Barbro was part of the Swedish negotiation team for the Floods Directive before it came into force in 2007. Barbro is also a former co-chair of the EU Working Group on Floods. She has participated in international projects and has worked abroad on missions regarding natural disasters’ prevention and disaster risk reduction. She is an internal project leader for a bilateral flood research project between FEMA and Sweden.

Juan Francisco Arrazola-Herreros is a member of the team in charge of the implementation of the Floods Directive in the Directorate-General for Water of the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. Specifically, he coordinates the flood hazard and risk mapping for the national flood information system (SNCZI) and he is in charge of reporting to the European Commission. He also runs a pilot program for urban adaptation to floods at National level.

Romain Maendly is a senior water resources engineer with the Climate Change Program under the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). Over the last twelve years at DWR, he has led, assisted, and collaborated on multiple plans and studies related to integrated water management. These include the Central Valley Flood Protection 2017 and 2022 Update. Under the Climate Change Program, Romain is leading the DWR’s Climate Action Plan Phase II, aiming to improve the consistency and scientific rigor of DWR’s approaches for analyzing climate change’s potential impacts while preserving both project management flexibility and efficiency.

Michael Schmidt is a Senior Vice President with 37 years of experience in sustainable and resilient stormwater and ecosystem programs for more than 400 projects in 33 States and eight countries. He has guided the implementation of over $1 billion of retrofit capital improvements, saving clients more than $365 million through innovation and synergies.

Marion Fourcade is Director of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Organizers

David Powers is a water resources engineer and hydrologist with 25 years of experience specializing in surface water issues at CDM Smith. Based in Richmond, Virginia, he works extensively on flood risk management projects around the country that include flood risk modelling and mapping, disaster recovery, and risk communication. In addition, David’s experience includes urban stormwater management and permitting, water quality assessments, and stream restoration projects. He has worked in the EU and has been involved in research on flood risk management and green infrastructure in the EU, China and the US. He serves as a co-chair for the Association of State Floodplain Managers’ (ASFPM) International Committee.

Anna Serra-Llobet is an environmental scientist whose research concerns to flood risk management policies. After finishing her PhD she interned at the Directorate General for the Environment at the European Commission (EU) in Brussels, working on the analysis of EU funded research related to hydro-meteorological risks (floods and droughts) and vulnerability assessment in Europe. Currently she is a researcher at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) of the University of California Berkeley, conducting comparative research on sustainable flood management strategies comparing the US and the EU. She serves as a co-chair for the Association of State Floodplain Managers’ (ASFPM) International Committee.

 

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The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi

January 26th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Part of the Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" Series

Cover of "The King and the People"

Please join us on January 26, 2022 from 12-1:30pm for an online “Authors Meet Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press), by Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. Professor Kaicker will be joined in conversation by Asad Ahmed, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley; and Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. The panel will be moderated by Pradeep Chhibber, Professor and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at UC Berkeley.

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. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of South Asia Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

About the Book

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime that saw them only as the ruled.

Panelists

Abhishek KaickerAbhishek Kaicker is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi is his first book.

Asad Q. Ahmed is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on Islamic intellectual history and is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz (Oxford), Avicenna’s Deliverance (Oxford), and Palimpsests of Themselves (UC Press).

Aarti SethiAarti Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She writes on agrarian life, debt and capitalism. She is also more broadly interested in comparative religion, cinema, media and visual cultures, the study of caste, structural violence and social-economic inequality in South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown Universities.

Pradeep ChhibberPradeep Chhibber (moderator) studies the politics of India, political parties and party systems. His recent research is on the influence of ideology on party system change, religion and politics, elections and parties, and the politics of development in India. Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party System of India, co-authored with Rahul Verma, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The book lays out an ideological framework for understanding party system change in India since 1952. The book also explains the reasons behind the rise of the religious right-dominated party system in contemporary India. Religious Practice and Democracy (with Sandeep Shastri, Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the relationship between everyday religious practice and political representation in contemporary India.

 

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Agriculture, Labor, and Markets

November 17th, 2021
12:00pm

Part of the Berkeley Cannabis Research Center's Webinar Series

cannabis farmers

The Berkeley Cannabis Research Center hosts monthly webinars focused on the intersection of cannabis policy, cannabis producing communities and the environment.

On November 17, the webinar will focus on the topic, “Agriculture, Labor, and Markets.” Panelists include: Amber Senter, Supernova Women, Workforce Development Initiative; Stella Beckham, UC Davis, Center for Health & the Environment; Keith Taylor, UC Davis, Department of Human Ecology; and Eduardo Blanco, Agriculture Labor Relations Board, Special Counsel. Moderated by: Hekia Bodwitch, Dalhousie University & Berkeley CRC.

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The Problem of Trust in the Digital Public Sphere

February 24th, 2022
4:00pm

William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London

Will Davies

We have been repeatedly told in recent years that we live in an age of ‘post-truth’, in which experts no longer get heard and liars hold sway. But what if we focus instead on the adjacent problem of trust?

In this Matrix Distinguished Lecture, William Davies will explore how the digitisation of our public sphere has made trust harder to establish, as the ideal of “facts” has been challenged by that of “real-time data,” and consequently altered the forms of allegiance, organization, and political coalitions that are possible. Drawing on his recent books, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason and This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain, Davies identifies pivotal ways in which liberal visions of the public sphere have been damaged, and what kinds of alternatives take their place.

About the Speaker

William Davies is Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of The Limits of Neoliberalism (Sage, 2014), The Happiness Industry (Verso, 2015), Nervous States (Norton, 2019) and This Is Not Normal (Verso, 2020). He writes regularly for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

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The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism

November 8th, 2021
12:00pm

Part of the "Social Science for a World in Crisis" series, presented by Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Social Science for a World in Crisis

We still do not have a sufficient understanding of the moral political economy of machine learning and other algorithmic forms of decision making. In a new working paper, Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, Director of Social Science Matrix, present one way of addressing this challenge. They argue that both machine learning and traditional bureaucracies are engines of classification, so that our current moral political economy can be compared to the 19th and 20th century “High Modernism” described by James C. Scott (a former CASBS fellow) in his classic book, Seeing Like a State. What can we learn by thinking of these new techniques as a kind of “High-tech Modernism” and what do we miss? What are alternative ways of understanding this emerging moral political economy, and what are their respective strengths and blind spots?

Join Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade in a roundtable discussion with danah boyd, William Janeway, Charlton McIlwain, and Zeynep Tufekci – renowned scholars and thinkers directly engaged with issues surrounding the moral political economy of technology – to consider these questions.

This event is produced by Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in partnership with Data & Society; the Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub at Stanford University; the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Social Science Matrix. CASBS presents this episode in association with its program on Creating a New Moral Political Economy

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Questions for the panelists? Send them to CASBS-events@stanford.edu.

Panelists

danah boyd is a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder and president of Data & Society, and a Visiting Professor at New York University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye to how structural inequities shape and are shaped by technologies. She is currently conducting a multi-year ethnographic study of the US census to understand how data are made legitimate. Her previous studies have focused on media manipulation, algorithmic bias, privacy practices, social media, and teen culture. Her monograph It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens has received widespread praise. She is a Director of both Crisis Text Line and Social Science Research Council, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University, a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD in Information from the University of California, Berkeley. Learn more here. @zephoria

Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, and Editor in Chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. He works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He has written articles and book chapters as well as two books, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, published by Cambridge University Press, and (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, published by Princeton University Press. Learn more here. @henryfarrell

Marion Fourcade is Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2000 and is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton University Press, 2009). Her current work focuses on the politics of wine classification and taste in France and the United States and on new forms of stratification, morality, and profit in the digital economy. A book on this topic, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract with Harvard University Press. Fourcade is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award and the Society for the Social Studies of Science’s Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book in the area of science and technology studies, as well as of the Lewis Coser award for theoretical agenda setting. Learn more here.

William H. Janeway is a Special Limited Partner of Warburg Pincus and an Affiliated Member of the Faculty of Economics of Cambridge University. He joined Warburg Pincus in 1988 and was responsible for building the information technology investment practice: leading investments included BEA Systems and VERITAS Software. Previously, he was executive vice president and director at Eberstadt Fleming. Dr. Janeway is a director of Magnet Systems and O’Reilly Media. He is a co-founder and member of the board of governors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council, and of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance. He is a member of the management committee of the Cambridge-INET Institute, University of Cambridge, and a Member of the Board of Managers of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF). He is the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators, and the State; the substantially revised and extended second edition of the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Dr. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. Learn more here. @billjaneway

In his role as Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development, Charlton McIlwain advances NYU’s academic excellence by supporting faculty recruitment, retention, and career advancement. McIlwain leads NYU’s Center for Faculty Advancement, which provides programming, resources, and special recognitions and awards that promote faculty research, teaching, mentorship, community engagement, and academic leadership development for NYU faculty, as well as those faculty with whom we collaborate through our Faculty Resource Network. McIlwain oversees the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, which brings together NYU’s faculty experts to collaborate with each other and with partners in the public and private sectors on the ethical creation, use, and governance of technology in society, and is NYU’s Designee to the New America/Ford Foundation sponsored Public Interest Technology-University Network. Dr. McIlwain has been at NYU since 2001. As Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, his scholarly work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He is the founder of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the author of the new book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, by Oxford University Press. He also co-authored the award-winning book, Race Appeal: How Political Candidates Invoke Race In U.S. Political Campaigns. He received his PhD in Communication and a Master’s of Human Relations, both from the University of Oklahoma. Learn more here. @cmcilwain

Zeynep Tufekci is Dr. Zeynep Tufekci is an Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), a principal researcher at Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was previously an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Dr. Tufekci is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and regularly writes columns for the New York Times, WIRED, and Scientific American. She also publishes a newsletter at zeynep.substack.com. Her book, Twitter and Teargas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century (Yale 2018), examines the dynamics, strengths, and weaknesses of 21st century social movements. Dr. Tufekci’s research interests revolve around the intersection of technology and society. Her academic work focuses on social movements and civics, privacy and surveillance, and social interaction. She has become a go-to source for national and international media outlets looking for insights on the impact of social media and the growing influence of machine algorithms. She has given three TED Talks and frequently delivers keynote addresses at conferences. Originally from Turkey, and formerly a computer programmer, Dr. Tufekci became interested in the social impacts of technology and began to focus on how digital and computational technology interact with social, political and cultural dynamics. Learn more here. @zeynep.

Suggested Reading

A selection of working papers, articles, and essays by our panelists.

 

UC Berkeley Psychology Celebrates 100 Years

December 8th, 2021
5:00pm-6:30pm PST

berkeley psychology 100th

The UC Berkeley Department Department cordially invites you to attend the launch event in celebration of its 100th anniversary. This event will feature “lightning talks” – short form-presentations – from four distinguished members of our faculty, showcasing the exciting research being conducted in our top-ranked department. In addition to illustrating the cutting-edge science of Berkeley Psychology, the program will also make clear the relevance of the department’s work to addressing some of the most pressing issues confronting us today.

In addition to these lightning talks from current faculty, we will celebrate the foundation built by retired faculty and those who embody our exciting future.

Speakers:

  • Rhona Weinstein, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology
  • Silvia Bunge, Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute | Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Lab
  • Allison Harvey, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic
  • Rich Ivry, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Cognition and Action Lab
  • Rodolfo Mendoza Denton, Professor, Department of Psychology | Co-Director, Relationships and Social Cognition Lab
  • Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Ph.D. student
  • Hari Srinivisan, Undergraduate Class of 2022

Republican Religion in Republican Rome?

November 3rd, 2021
5:00pm

Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Humanities and Professor of Classics, History, and Law, University of Chicago

Clifford Ando

Professor Clifford Ando will address the specific dynamics of religion and politics in Roman republics, both in the city of Rome itself and in communities founded along Roman lines. The dispersed nature of the evidence raises important questions about the relationship between Rome’s religion and its imperial project, but also about the extent to which we may rely on colonial evidence to reconstruct practice in Rome itself.  How far did the Romans carry their belief that cults were human institutions? If one voted about which gods to worship, might one also vote to cease that worship?

Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Humanities and Professor of Classics, History, and Law at the University of Chicago, focuses his research on the histories of religion, law and government in the ancient world. His first work centered on the history of political culture in the provinces of the Roman empire, and he continues to write and advise on topics related to provincial administration, the relationship between imperial power and local cultural change, and the form and structure of ancient empires. He has also written extensively on ancient religion. Significant themes were the connection of religion to empire and imperial government, especially in relation to pluralism and tolerance, and problems of representation in the use of objects in ritual. His current projects include a study of Latin as a language of the law from the mid-Republic to the end of Rome; a collaborative edition of the surviving Roman statutes; and, long term, a study of legal theory in contexts of weak state power.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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Matrix on Point: Democracy, Misogyny and Digital Media

December 13th, 2021
12pm-1:30pm

A series of conversations on today's most pressing issues

protest sign: boys will be held accountable

This panel will convene a diverse group of speakers to discuss today’s remarkable political moment, marked both by a new kind of women’s activism (centered on #MeToo and related movements) and by the rise of a misogynistic far-right. Panelists will explore the role that digital mediations, from social media to video games, play in this cultural complex.

This event is presented as part of the Matrix On Point series, a 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

Sarah Sobieraj
Sarah Sobieraj is an award-winning teacher and researcher with expertise in US political culture, extreme incivility, digital abuse and harassment, and the mediated information environment. Her most recent book, Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the impact of identity-based digital abuse on women’s participation in social and political discourse. She is also the author of The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford University Press, 2014) with Jeff Berry, and Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU Press, 2011). Professor Sobieraj’s most recent journal articles can be found in Information, Communication & Society, Social Problems, PS: Political Science & Politics, Poetics, Political Communication, and Sociological Theory. Her work has also been featured in venues such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Atlantic. Sobieraj serves on the advisory board of the Social Science Research Council’s Disinformation Research Mapping Initiative, and is a member of the National Institute for Civil Discourse Research Network.

C.J. Pascoe
CJ PascoeCJ Pascoe is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and co-editor of Socius Journal Her award winning book, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School documents the the relationship between homophobic bullying and masculinity in adolescence. She has worked extensively with a variety of organizations dedicated to reducing gender and sexuality inequality in schools and adolescence. Her current book project, American High School: Inequality and Change in an American Suburb continues to explore inequality in schools with a focus on young people’s social activism.

Julia Ebner
Julia EbnerJulia Ebner is a radicalisation researcher and bestselling writer based in London. She works as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and is completing her DPhil at Oxford University. Based on her research, she has acted as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank and several security and intelligence agencies. Her first book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, (I.B. Tauris, 2017) won the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018. For her second book, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, (Bloomsbury, 2020), Julia went undercover with extremist organisations across the ideological spectrum, including jihadist, white supremacist, and misogynist groups. Going Dark was an international bestseller and has been translated into seven languages so far. It won the award ‘Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020’ (Science Book of the Year 2020) and was long-listed for the Gold Dagger Award. To bring her research findings to a wider audience, she regularly writes for newspapers such as The Guardian, Süddeutsche, and Washington Post.

Kishonna L. Gray
Kishonna L. GrayDr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an Associate Professor in the Writing, Rhetoric, Digital Studies program at the University of Kentucky. She is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism. Dr. Gray is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020). She is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), and the co-editor of two volumes on culture and gaming. Dr. Gray has published in a variety of outlets across disciplines and has also featured in public outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The New York Times.

Raka Ray (moderator)

Raka RayRaka Ray is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley. She is an award-winning mentor and teacher, and has previously held several leadership positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Institute of South Asia Studies (2003-2012), Chair of the Department of Sociology (2012-2015), and Chair of the Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations. Ray’s research interests include topics such as gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, contemporary politics in the US and India; her current project is on the transformations in gender wrought by the decline of traditional fields of work for men. Ray’s publications include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; and in India, Kali for Women, 2000), Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld, 2005), Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India with Seemin Qayum (Stanford 2009), The Handbook of Gender (OUP, India 2011), Both Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, co-edited with Amita Baviskar (Routledge, 2011), The Social Life of Gender (Sage 2017) co-edited with Jennifer Carlson and Abigail Andrews, and many articles and op-eds.

 

Photo by Michelle Ding on Unsplash