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Solving the Mysteries of Brain Waves

Published December 7, 2014

In laboratories across the UC Berkeley campus, researchers are unlocking some of the mysteries surrounding "neural rhythms," the pulses, bursts, and waves of electricity that continually surge through our brains.

In 1875, a Liverpool doctor named Richard Caton found that when electrodes are placed on the surface of the skull, “the current is in constant fluctuation.” Such neural oscillations have continued to baffle researchers ever since. They appear at nearly every level of observation: single neurons firing in short bursts, local synchronized neural networks, and, of course, the large-scale “brain waves” that appear in electroencephalography (EEG) and define the stages of sleep.

No one fully understands where these neural rhythms come from and what they do. Recently, however, neural rhythms have shown up—almost synchronously—in published research from labs across UC Berkeley. Researchers are quietly beginning to uncover the role of neural rhythms in functions as diverse as navigation, executive control, motor learning, and working memory. Their discoveries have deep implications for neuroscience, and they may usher in a new wave of neurotechnologies.

Spatial navigation

Neuroscientists have long observed that the hippocampus, an inner brain region responsible for memory and spatial navigation, undergoes mysterious electrical pulses about 6-10 times per second (6-10 Hz), a time signature known as “theta oscillation.” In May, a publication by UC Berkeley researchers in the journal Science may have shed some light on the information hidden in these hippocampal oscillations. A team led by Gautam Agarwal, a doctoral student in neuroscience, used implanted electrodes to measure the activity of groups of neurons dotting the hippocampus of rats navigating a maze. They showed that the electrical pulses traversing the hippocampus (visualized here) have a unique signature for each part of the maze the rodent passes through. They were even able to use the electrodes’ pattern of rhythmic activity to accurately predict rodents’ spatial position in the maze.

“By analogy to radio communication, we defined the theta oscillation to be a carrier wave whose modulation contains information,” the authors explain. In other words, they derived information from the hippocampal rhythm in much the same way that a radio receiver scans radio waves and converts them into music or speech.

More work needs to be done to understand why the hippocampal rhythm contains spatial information. However, many researchers have theorized that, like radios, brain regions communicate by oscillating in discrete frequency bands. In particular, some researchers have suggested that the hippocampus uses theta oscillation to coordinate spatial working memory with the prefrontal cortex, an area known for its role in in executive function, the ability to allocate attention, problem-solve, plan and execute actions.

Of course, this remains largely a conjecture, and what happens in the rodent brain may not be fully applicable to humans. The oscillations of the human hippocampus are not as strongly dominated by a theta rhythm. On the other hand, theta oscillations occur frequently in the human cortex (the outer brain structure that is more pronounced in humans than other animals). In addition, a recent Berkeley review concludes, based on several recent papers, that forming long-term memories requires the rhythms of the hippocampus to synchronize with those of certain parts of the cortex. If this synchrony occurs while subjects are memorizing words, they are more likely to remember them later on.

Neural communication

Recent studies in humans and primates have tested the basic notion that neural rhythms enable long-range communication between distant brain areas. For instance, a 2012 study led by postdoctoral neuroscience researcher Sepideh Sadaghiani at UC Berkeley, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, looked for rhythmic coordination across the entire human brain.

Sepideh’s team measured the brain activity of human subjects at rest with concurrent fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG (electroencephalography). In fMRI, powerful magnetic fields are used to track oxygen in the brain, which is delivered to areas where the brain is active. fMRI yields a fairly slow signal, sampling every 2-6 seconds, but generates a fine-scaled image with a resolution of about 3 mm, measuring tens of thousands of sample points. EEG, by contrast, uses electrodes placed on the scalp to generate an extremely fast measure of brain activity, yielding multiple samples every millisecond. However, this measure has a limited spatial resolution. In this case, 62 recording channels were used.

Using both methods concurrently, the team found that a certain group of brain regions, known as the “fronto-parietal network,” has a unique rhythmic fingerprint. Regions in the fronto-parietal network, located using fMRI, are widely known to activate together when a subject is beginning a task or rapidly responding to something unexpected. Sepideh’s team found that when the fronto-parietal network is active, its constituent regions tend to oscillate together at frequencies around 8-12 Hz. In technical terms, they share the same “phase”—i.e. the peaks and troughs of their oscillations occur at the same time. This suggests that synchrony in the 8-12 Hz band might be the mechanism that allows regions in the fronto-parietal network to communicate when they need to rapidly integrate information.

A more recent study, published by UC Berkeley neuroscientists Antonio Lara and Jon Wallis in Nature Neuroscience , suggests that these neural oscillations have an important behavioral function. The two researchers used implanted electrodes to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—a little-understood brain region with a putative role in executive function—as subjects engaged in a working memory task.

The pre-frontal cortex might use neural rhythms to act like a quarterback.

Specifically, subjects had to remember whether the precise colors of squares that were flashed on the screen for half a second were the same as the colors of squares that reappeared a second later. They found that subjects were better at identifying the colors when the activity in certain prefrontal neurons oscillated strongly in the 1-12 Hz range. They concluded that these neural oscillations could allow the PFC to coordinate brain areas involved in memory and sensory processes, allowing perceptual information to be maintained in working memory. In other words, the PFC might use neural rhythms to act like a quarterback, directing players (allocating visual brain regions’ attention), monitoring their movements (keeping track of the color information held in memory), and attempting to deliver the pass (choose the correct button).

Scientists have also looked at how neural rhythms are synchronized during non-memory tasks, such as listening to music. A collaborative study by researchers at UC Berkeley and the Wadsworth Center in New York—published in the August 2014 issue of NeuroImage—measured neural rhythms with implanted electrodes while people listened to a song by Pink Floyd. They found that the music activated rhythmic connections throughout the auditory, frontal, and premotor cortices.

Another Berkeley collaboration—this one with the Leibniz Institute in Germany, published in February in the journal PLoS One—used implanted electrodes to peer at neural rhythms as people learned to perform various motor tasks. Each task required subjects to respond as quickly and accurately as possible to various cues using a keyboard. They found that as subjects got better at each task, the brain regions involved in the task oscillated in a sort of harmony: the phase of low frequency oscillations (4-8 Hz) was highly correlated with the amplitude of high frequency oscillations (80-180 Hz). They interpret this as indicating that, for improvement at the task to occur, long-distance communication between brain regions (reflected in low frequency oscillations) had to coordinate local activity within each region (reflected in high frequency oscillations). In other words, each region started acting like a worker on an assembly line, timing its own activities to be in lockstep with the other regions involved in the task.

New technologies

A common thread throughout these studies is that neural rhythms seem to allow brain regions to communicate, whether the goal is to navigate the environment, remember visual cues, interpret auditory signals, or plan motor movements. But what happens if these oscillations are manipulated directly? This is already being done by neuroengineers, who are finding that neural rhythms can be harnessed to operate brain-machine interfaces (BMI), and can be stimulated to treat disorders and enhance cognition.

A study published by UC Berkeley researchers in the April 2014 issue of The Journal of Neural Engineering showed that neural rhythms can be used to operate a 2D cursor. As the researchers used electrodes to record activity from the motor cortex, subjects had to use their brains alone to move a digital cursor toward targets presented on a monitor. The direction and speed of the cursor’s movement were controlled by how the rhythms recorded from each electrode were oscillating in a chosen frequency band. Using each of three different frequency bands (0-40 Hz, 40-80 Hz, or 80-150 Hz), subjects were consistently able to learn to control the cursor. Previous BMI devices had only used the amplitude, rather than the rhythm, of brain activity. This new approach could open up exciting new channels for brain-machine control.

Other groups have manipulated neural rhythms directly using a noninvasive technique called transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). In tACS, a weak, alternating electric current is induced between two electrodes placed on the surface of the scalp. A German study published in the February 2014 issue of Current Biology showed that tACS could be used to strengthen or bolster brain waves at selected frequencies, simply by alternating an electric current at the corresponding rate.

Recent studies have already used this technique to generate some stunning effects on behavior and cognition. A 2013 Oxford study in Current Biology used tACS to “phase-cancel” resting activity in motor cortex—i.e., align the peaks in electrical stimulation with troughs in resting activity, and vice versa. As an example, this is the same technique that is used by noise-canceling headphones to eliminate ambient sound (as explained in this video). They used this to reduce motor cortex rhythms associated with tremors in Parkinson’s disease, resulting in an almost 50% reduction in tremors. (A study with rodents suggests that a similar technique could reduce epileptic seizures by up to 60%.)

Another remarkable 2013 study in Current Biology used tACS for high-level cognitive enhancement. By applying tACS over people’s frontal lobes, researchers enhanced their fluid intelligence: they made people 15% faster at solving difficult logic problems.

An Emerging Field

Although these advances are clearly impressive, the science of neural rhythms is still in its adolescence. So far, engineers trying to leverage this science have had to play a bit of a guessing game: along with the site and amplitude of recording or stimulation, they’ve had to speculate on what phase and frequency to use. With all of these parameters at play, it’s nearly impossible to find the perfect combination.

However, as the science of neural rhythms progresses —driven by research at UC Berkeley and elsewhere — we’re likely to see this technology improve. Expect to hear more about brain rhythms in the coming years.

Research Highlights

Flying Forward

Published November 30, 2014

Investing in airports and other transportation infrastructure is a major driver of economic growth, according to new research by a UC Berkeley economics graduate student.

“Rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure” has become a political rallying cry in recent years. Barack Obama punctuated his 2014 State of the Union with much-lauded references to public works projects. Congressional Representatives from Rhode Island to Illinois to California have built political platforms around infrastructure programs. A recent report from the American Society of Civil Engineers decried the state of the nation’s roads, rails, and waterway, assigned them a shameful “D+”, and called for immediate investment of $3.6 trillion dollars to remedy the situation. Sponsors of appropriation bills, meanwhile, offer assurances that infrastructure investment will generate hefty returns.

But is it all just hype?

Not according to “Perhaps the Sky’s the Limit? Airports and Employment in Local Economies”, a paper by UC Berkeley Economics PhD Candidate Marquise McGraw, whose research affirms that investing in at least one type of transportation infrastructure—airports—is indeed well worth the cost, particularly at a local scale. McGraw has dedicated years to understanding the relationship between infrastructure and local economic growth. His study, which analyzed the impacts of airports built between 1950-2010, suggests that metropolitan areas across the U.S. have reaped significant rewards from investing early, significantly, and consistently in airports.

As detailed in the report’s abstract: “Relative to non-airport cities, the presence of an airport in a [census-based statistical area] has caused population growth ranging between 14.6 percent and 29 percent, total employment growth of between 17.4 percent and 36.6 percent, tradable industry employment growth of between 26.6 percent and 42.6 percent, and non-tradable industry employment growth of between a non-statistically significant 2.7 percent and 16.1 percent…. On average, an airport generates $83.8 million in added payroll and 3,300 jobs for a local economy, of which roughly 950 are in tradable industries….”

To reach his conclusions, McGraw examined the economies of select American metropolitan areas over the course of sixty years, well before airports were relevant to private business. He identified a group of all cities that constructed airports during the first years of commercial use, excluding cities like San Francisco and New York, which tended to grow regardless of any single innovation. He then compared the economic development of his sample of urban areas to another group of otherwise similar cities that could have received airports, but did not. McGraw designed an algorithm that controlled for disparities between the two groups beyond the presence of airports, such as differences in population, industry, educational institutions, and other transportation networks. His conclusion: differences abounded between the economies of metropolitan areas with airports and those without.

How much growth did airports stimulate? His results suggest that airport-equipped urban areas might have grown as much as a fifth more than those without airports over the period of study. “I can say that there is a rather large effect,” McGraw says.

He also found that cities with airports were less likely to suffer during times of broad economic downturns or industry-wide closures. “A lot of firms made their location decisions very quickly,” he explains. “They saw that there is going to be an airport, and decided, ‘We’re going to move there.’ With manufacturing, it turns out that … airports helped to retain a lot of manufacturing jobs.”

In other words, cities with aviation infrastructure prove far more resilient to economic turbulence than others, especially in terms of employment. McGraw also found that growth in retail, manufacturing, transportation, and wholesale trade sectors were all consistently higher among the metropolitan areas that received airports.

McGraw’s research offers important contributions to social scientists studying the effects of globalizing economies, as it reinforces a growing body of work showing that globalization does not obviate the significance of location. As evidence, he points to the multiplier effect in employment, as detailed in The New Geography of Jobs, written by UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti (McGraw’s advisor), who found that the creation of one tech job may generate as many as five other local jobs. Airport jobs appear to generate even more local jobs, significantly boosting local economies. Conversely, few urban areas without airports fared well in terms of economic growth or employment in the 20th-century economy. Even in an interconnected world, McGraw says, “place does matter.”

The first two to three decades of commercial air travel brought enormous gains for economies with airports, but from the 1980s until fairly recently, growth leveled off. Since then, a notable shift has occurred. “Aviation is increasing in its importance to local economies today,” McGraw says. “Transportation is such a huge part of G.D.P. It’s something on the order of 10% of what we do in America.”

Why would location be so important to business in an age of high-speed, digital communication and virtual consumption? Economists like McGraw believe that the process of agglomeration is at work. Simply put, people innovate best when they work in close proximity and can share ideas. These “knowledge spillovers” possess enormous potential to generate new products and sustain long-term growth for local communities. Think Silicon Valley or Hollywood. The airport, McGraw reasons, “is bringing people together.”

Historically, those cities that invested early and heavily in airports benefitted most from their investments. San Diego and Oakland were among those early investors, and they had a “first-mover advantage” in attracting airlines, investors, and firms. To McGraw, those cities are examples of municipalities “taking control of their own destinies…. It really is the responsibility of local leaders to decide what it takes to develop their own growth.”

While McGraw is not arguing that all cities should begin building new airports, he stresses that communities with airports already in place should support them, and local leaders should take the reins in infrastructure development. “We’re in an age where the federal government isn’t going to be able to solve all our problems any more,” he says. “Cities are the new labs of democracy; cities are where the innovation is happening.”

Research Highlights

Economic Impacts of Climate Change

Published November 16, 2014

The United States faces massive economic threats due to climate change, but not all the causes are obvious.

As sea levels rise and temperatures continue to creep up, vital elements of the U.S. economy are at risk. Energy resources, labor productivity, and entire infrastructures are threatened by the consequences of a changing climate. Moreover, mortality rates could increase if we don’t act to alter the path.

These projections come from American Climate Prospectus: Economic Risks in the United States, a report co-authored by Solomon Hsiang, Assistant Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy. This first-of-its-kind report evaluates the grave threats that climate change represents for the U.S. economy; it highlights which regions are most at risk, as well as which sectors of the economy are most vulnerable. Among the impacts detailed in the report’s executive summary (based on assumptions that “we stay on our current path”):

By 2050, between $66 billion and $106 billion worth of existing coastal property nationwide will likely be below sea level.
Property losses from sea level rise will be concentrated in specific regions of the U.S., especially on the Southeast and Atlantic coasts, where the rise is higher and the losses far greater than the national average.
As a result of increases in temperature, the labor productivity of outdoor workers, such as those working in construction, utility maintenance, landscaping, and agriculture, could be reduced by as much as 3%, particularly in the Southeast.
Some states in the Southeast, lower Great Plains, and Midwest risk up to a 50% to 70% loss in average annual crop yields (corn, soy, cotton, and wheat).

The American Climate Prospectus was published by Risky Business, an organization founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen. The report is intended to provide reference material for policymakers and economic leaders; by examining regions and resources in detail, the report offers new opportunities to understand and intervene.

While the report does not include policy recommendations, the overall message is clear: climate change represents a significant risk to economic well-being. The research highlights how, as it worsens, climate change will exacerbate economic inequalities, as the economically disadvantaged will bear a disproportionate burden.

To learn more about Hsiang’s report, see riskybusiness.org.

Photo by Master Sgt. Mark Olsen

Research Highlights

Taming the Dust Devils

Published November 10, 2014

The Chinese government has begun using surprising methods to control air pollution while aligning local and national interests.

The problem of air quality in Beijing often makes front-page news across the world, with images of people in masks making their way through a reddish haze. While much of this air pollution comes from burning coal, some of it is also sand, carried into the city from Inner Mongolia on the backs of massive dust storms. Once fairly rare, occurring only every seven years or so, these clouds of airborne sand have hit Beijing annually since the early 2000s and regularly contribute to some of the worst smog events.

For Jerry Zee, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley, studying how the Chinese government and citizens have responded to this “wind-sand,” as it is called in Mandarin, has led to new insights into how politics and the environment interact. “I tracked the physical event,” Zee says of the dust storms, “and the government apparatus that has emerged in its path.”

Through his research, Zee has uncovered a far different narrative about the Chinese response to pollution than is usually presented in the western media, which tends to focus on how environmental degradation threatens governmental control. On the contrary, Zee found that, at least in the Alxa region of Inner Mongolia where the dust storms originate, preventing these natural events has created a seemingly unlikely convergence between local economic needs and national environmental goals.

Zee’s research entailed two years of fieldwork in sites across Asia, from pastoralist communities in Western Inner Mongolia, to the urban centers of Beijing and Seoul, South Korea, where the dust often terminates. As an ethnographer, Zee gathers his data through direct participation in the daily life of the communities and institutions he studies, and through interviews with a range of subjects, including field ecologists, semi-nomadic sheep herders, and government officials.

“My strategy was to see how the efforts to manage the sand are bringing people together,” he says. “[State forestry officials in Alxa] would call me up at 7:30 in the morning and say, ‘Come down here, we’re doing something.’ Then they would just throw me in the back of a truck and we would go where they were digging a well, or planting.”

From this hands-on experience, Zee began to see that the apparently straightforward activities associated with preventing dust storms is creating new relationships between local citizens, the environment, and the government.

The Chinese government’s goal is to stop the transformation of grassland into desert, which causes the sand to become mobile on the wind. This process of “desertification” has been exacerbated by the production of goats to produce cashmere, as goats are master foragers and have quickly depleted the amount of grass. To try and curb the dust storms, the government has imposed a variety of measures, and even launched an initiative with a goal to plant 100 million trees to create a forest to block the blowing sand.

The urgent need to battle the dust has created unlikely partnerships between nations. South Korea has become a world leader in anti-desertification efforts, and has funded huge plantations of trees in Inner Mongolia. “South Korea is extremely nationalist,” Zee observes, but because of the sand coming from China, their scientists “think about Asia as a space that is united environmentally.”

As one of its more recent measures, the Chinese government has banned grazing by pastoralist Inner Mongolians, who graze sheep, plow land for agriculture, and harvest trees in an increasingly intensive manner. The government-led efforts are “dismantling the pastoralist economy,” according to Zee, yet the pastoralists “participate in the bans as volunteers.”

The reason, Zee contends, is that the phenomenon of “wind-sand” is creating “new kinds of institutions” in China. “Ten years ago,” Zee observes, “no one would have called what is happening in Inner Mongolia ‘over-grazing,’ because it was unthinkable.” After all, according to classical socialist ideology, all production is good, and more production is better, so there is no room to criticize raising more sheep. Yet the sheer force of the wind-sand, and its damaging influence in Beijing, has exposed that pure economic growth is not always an ideal end.

To address the wind-sand challenge, the forestry experts and planners who hauled Zee around in their trucks are trying to create a new economy, one that is meant to be ecologically focused. With the help of massive state funding, forestry experts are urging pastoralists to grow medicinal roots, which only grow in the shade of shrubs that help fix sand in place and reverse the creep of the desert.

The sheer force of the wind-sand, and its damaging influence in Beijing, has exposed that pure economic growth is not always an ideal end.

“Imagine you’re a herder,” Zee explains. “You only have 10% of your flock left because of the grazing bans, but you have cash from selling them. You’re paid for planting sand-binding shrubs, and the government has set up a plant to process these medicinal roots. In three years, you can turn your sand dune into cash.”

In other words, the Chinese state, by using basic market incentives rather than demanding ideological fealty or using force, is producing a living wall against the dust storms. China is responding to ecological problems by using the market as a political tool, and Chinese citizens on the margins are responding to the new opportunities provided by the state’s root production programs.

As he develops his dissertation at Berkeley (overseen by a committee drawn equally from the geography and anthropology departments), Zee reflects that his fieldwork has given him a new appreciation for how the natural and social sciences overlap, and for the need for collaboration. “Social science isn’t used to looking at things that aren’t people,” he says. “Working with natural scientists and engineers made me take science more seriously, not just as something to critique.”

Research Highlights

The Dragon of Debt

Published October 16, 2014

An oral history focused on the U.S. national debt showcases interviews with top U.S. policy-makers from the past five decades.

How much debt can the nation bear? Why is our national debt so large? How worried should we be?

“Slaying the Dragon of Debt”, a project compiled by the research staff of the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, sheds light on these and other questions related to the U.S. national debt. Featuring clips, infographics, and compelling full-length discussions, the website for this initiative features interviews with many of the nation’s top economic advisors, and provides insight into federal budgetary processes, macroeconomics, and the history of debt in the nation and around the globe.

“This project was born of the financial crisis of 2008 and the response by national governments to the crisis,” explains Martin Meeker, the project director and associate director of ROHO. “[At that time] the practice of fiscal stimulus was on the lips of every politico, along with concerns about mounting budget deficits—and national debt—that such spending would surely create. Given the timeliness of the project, the interviews proved to be lively and vital, full of impassioned opinions expressed by the leading figures who have guided U.S. fiscal and monetary policy since the administration of John F. Kennedy.”

Meeker and ROHO staff interviewed a wide range of economic policy-makers, including Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury; UC Berkeley’s own Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor; as well as past directors of the Congressional Budget Office and the Senate Budget Committee. The full-length transcripts are available online.

The interviews showcase diverging views about debt and the moral politics related to budgeting, business cycles, boom-times, recessions, and financial crises. Among the key events detailed are the Savings and Loans crisis of the 1980s and the DotCom boom of the 1990s. Other topics include relationships between public debt, corporate debt, and household debt, and “the role of these deficits in the process of public disillusionment with government, especially when debt is used a political wedge issue,” Meeker explains.

Through the interviews and other resources, ROHO provides an introduction to such macroeconomic concepts as Keynesianism, monetarism, and supply-side economics. While largely focused on the U.S., the project looks beyond the nation’s borders to examine the complex world of global finance, including the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the management of sovereign debt in developing countries.

As the project’s website explains, oral history is uniquely suited to examine the question of national debt as this format enables “participants to speak for themselves” and offer “perspectives on the events and processes that occurred behind-the-scenes and which, for a variety of reasons, are not recorded in the documentary record.” The ultimate purpose, the site explains, is to “preserve the memories of past decision-makers in order to inform research and policy-making in the future.”

An interactive timeline is featured as part of the “Slaying the Dragon of Debt” website.

Research Highlights

Credit and Class

Published October 6, 2014

Economic classification tools such as credit scores directly contribute to stratification and class division, according to Berkeley sociologist Marion Fourcade.

In the United States, median household debt is roughly double median annual income. But as Berkeley Sociologist Marion Fourcade reminds us, not all debt is created equal, especially in the U.S.

In a recently published article in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Fourcade and co-author Kieran Healy highlight that, while debt can send Americans deeper into poverty or make them even richer, the concept of living on borrowed money has become a powerful form of governance in American life. This is significant for our understanding of debt and credit and, more broadly, how class emerges in contemporary American life.

As economic sociologists, Fourcade (who directs Berkeley’s center on Economy and Morality, a Matrix Affiliate, or EMMA) and Healy are concerned with the construction of markets in their myriad forms—through economic policy, pricing, the morality we attach to transactions, and other methods. But here, they focus on a more recent and less well-understood side of the economy: the categorization of consumers through new classificatory instruments and institutions, which they call “classification situations”. These are “positions in the credit market that are consequential for one’s life-chances, and that are associated with distinctive experiences of debt.”

One such measure is quite familiar to most Americans: FICO’s credit score, which helps determine our access to credit cards, car loans, mortgages, and other opportuniites. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Fueled by the increasing availability of individual data and the rise of the market economy (associated with cuts in social services and the individualization of risk), these classification situations and the data they produce permeate myriad dimensions of contemporary American life. Social scientists have recognized the rise and consequences of such data, particularly at the lower end of the economic scale, where services like “payday loan” centers use low credit scores to prey on the economically vulnerable.

What makes Fourcade’s and Healy’s analysis particularly innovative is their broader argument that classificatory technologies are also key drivers of class. At all levels of the economic scale, that is, classifications like credit scores are both determined by and determinants of stratification.

In making this argument, Fourcade and Healy are taking a decidingly different tack from traditional social scientific research on the economy. Most economic scholars have long been compelled by a “production bias”—a guiding assumption that class and other dimensions of the economy are determined by firms, factories, laborers, unions, and other economic agents involved in the production of goods and services. Fourcade and Healy, however, are concerned here with Americans as consumers and the way our consumption is tracked, measured, analyzed, and classified.

At all levels of the economic scale, classifications like credit scores are both determined by and determinants of stratification.

Today, such technologies are so refined and specific that they no longer establish the once-used binaries of economic insiders and outsiders (as, for instance, “redlining” did in the housing market). Rather, the new methods have led to newer stratification based upon internal or “within-market classifications”. Where the latter categories were more often based on social groups, most notably race, today’s categories are far more individualized. On the one hand, such a move from outright exclusion to individualized classification appears more inclusive and democratic. But as Fourcade and Healy write, “sorting people is a messy business in practice.”

“By enabling and facilitating the differential pricing of people, scoring has expanded the reach of the market while opening the door to new forms of classification with powerful stratifying effects,” they write. “The market expands at the boundary and then differentiates internally.”

More Americans are today incorporated into the market, but on increasingly unequal grounds. Such market expansion entails new forms of governance that affect consumers at all levels. At the bottom, they trap the poor in a cycle of poverty and normalize high-interest predatory loans; in the middle, they drive consumer aspirations and “reinforce the practice of self-surveillance” (i.e. knowing and managing your credit score); at the top, they extend privilege by attaching symbolic rewards (e.g. silver, gold, platinum level benefits) to material wealth, and push the well-off to strategically and continuously shop around for the best deals on credit.

The power of these new technologies is that they govern us externally and internally, differentiating us as consumers and motivating us to manage ourselves accordingly, while permeating virtually all aspect of economic life. In the United States, the evidence is abundant. On the one hand, the number of payday loan stores increased from 2000 to 23,600 between 1996 and 2007. On the other hand, American adults hold on average 5.2 credit cards today, totaling 1.2 billion cards. In France, about nine million personal credit cards circulate, or roughly 0.17 per adult.

In concluding, Fourcade and Healy quote Foucault: “it is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces…all the shading of individual differences.” Under the veneer of the formal equality that stems from democratizing access to the market, the real power of the credit score—and the myriad other ways in which our consumption is measured and classified—reveals itself.

Research Highlights

From Plantation to Corporation

Published October 2, 2014

A UC Berkeley historian explores how commonly used modern-day business practices evolved from methods used in the operation of brutal slave plantations.

Depreciation of assets. Individual productivity analysis. Incentives for performance. These commonplace practices are ingrained in modern business, and popular wisdom holds that they developed as part of the evolution of free-market, free-labor capitalism.

But according to Caitlin Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, these and other modern business practices were in many cases developed on slave plantations during the 18th and 19th centuries.

“Plantations were more sophisticated than people previously realized,” Rosenthal says. “When we look at the origins of business practices, historians have tended to look at the steam engine and textile factories in New England. These were very important, but we should also be looking at plantations. Some were doing things that were rare in contemporary factories—for example, depreciating slaves and using detailed day-to-day output records for individuals. During that period, it was unusual to see that kind of record.”

Rosenthal stresses that her point is not that slavery had positive benefits, but rather that historians should not turn a blind eye to the reality of how modern capitalism evolved. “There’s a pervasive mythology that says free labor and free markets and capitalism inevitably go together,” she says. “One of the messages of my work is that capitalism can be highly compatible with brutal forms of slave labor. Just using more sophisticated techniques doesn’t mean you have a moral business.”

Rosenthal, who came to UC Berkeley in 2013, first became interested in the history of quantitative management practices during her first job out of college. “I worked as a generalist management consultant, the 21-year-old sitting in the back of the room who makes a big projection that if a company does x, y, and z, it will make 250 million more dollars,” she says. “I loved my time there, but it also raised questions for me about how my calculations could have a huge effect on the lives of people I had never met.”

As a next step, Rosenthal joined the Department of American Studies at Harvard University, where her focus became the study of the history of how today’s corporations evolved. Her chosen window into the past: account books, which she found were numerous and had been vastly underutilized by economists and historians alike. While the minutiae of the day-to-day transactions were mostly irrelevant, she found she could read the account books at a higher level, as maps of the changing meaning of work, productivity, time, and ultimately, people.

Through her research, she discovered that the accounting practices used on large-scale slave plantations in the American South and Caribbean were in many cases novel for their time. Slave overseers working among slaves began to collect information and send it to distant owners, who in many cases lived thousands of miles away. This distance led owners to think of men and women as units of productivity, and variables such as a slave’s age, time, and punishment were added into calculations to maximize profit. At the same time, this process allowed the overseers to distance themselves from the violence of slavery. “Neat columns of lines and numbers defining productivity were covering up this very violent and inhumane system,” Rosenthal says.

Rosenthal is currently working on a book based in part upon her dissertation, “From Memory to Mastery,” which examines how numerical reasoning in America changed between between 1750 and 1880. “Accounting evolved from a system of recordkeeping into an instrument of control and analysis—from an aid to memory to an instrument of mastery,” she writes on her web site. Her book, currently titled From Masters to Managers, further investigates the complex relationship between slavery and capitalism in American history.

“I’m interested in how corporate reports separate people from their workers,” she says. “I look at the distance constructed by numbers, and how much easier it gets to justify all kinds of things when you don’t have to be on the shop floor, you don’t have to encounter people in person, and you only have to encounter them as these quantified units of productivity.”

She hopes that her findings strike a chord with the data-oriented decision-makers who lead companies today. “Numbers work both ways,” Rosenthal says. “On the one hand, they shrink distances and let you see things in huge quantities over a large amount of space. On other hand, when all people have in front of them is a list of numbers, you start to see labor as becoming more commoditized through a series of figures…. People that are crunching numbers [in business today] should step back and think about the bigger story.”

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Research Highlights

Behind the Beef Machine

Published September 30, 2014

The origins of the modern U.S. beef industry go farther back than most people realize, says UC Berkeley historian Joshua Specht.

Joshua Specht is a vegetarian. Yet in the course of his research at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, he spends much of his days reading and writing about beef.

Specht, who is a historian by training and serves as the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy, explains that it was a lifetime of thinking about the politics and impacts of industrial agriculture that both led him to disavow meat, and to focus his academic work on why people in the United States eat so much of it. In the history of beef production, Specht found he could explore why “so many of us talk about how the food system is problematic and at the same time inevitable,” he explains. “I wanted to know how it got that way.”

The answer, Specht found, goes far back into American history, long before the post-World War II industrial transformation that has been the focus of work by journalists such as Michael Pollan. In his unpublished manuscript, Red Meat Republic: The Rise of the Cattle-Beef Complex, 1865-1905, Specht argues that, while the agricultural changes of the 1950s were important, our current desire and ability to eat cheap beef began far earlier, during the nineteenth century. In this period, an expanding population of Americans in cities wanted to eat beef—a meat associated with class prestige, masculinity, and healthfulness, as well as a source of necessary protein. Urban entrepreneurs were eager to feed this demand, and doing so required raising more cattle and moving more meat from pasture to plate.

Whether rooted in cultural discourses justifying Indian land expropriation or technological arguments rationalizing market concentration, particular narratives enabled the historical processes integral to the rise of big meatpacking.

This process, Specht says, produced major changes in the American West, especially after the Civil War. The Great Plains, once the home of bison-hunting nomads, were increasingly settled by ranchers, a process of violent ecological change and war. Railroads made it possible to move cattle to centralized packing plants in urban areas. Businessmen became adept at distributing beef through networks of slaughterhouses and refrigerated rail cars, controlling how beef came to market. The U.S. government became involved in regulating everything from the disposition of Native American land to the quality of meat coming to market.

In essence, Specht says, the history of beef production in the United States is a history of the nation itself: of radical environmental change, expansion, technological innovation, as well as the rise of large business interests and their relationship with politics. Through this process, we ended up living a paradox: loving a romantic image of small-scale farming and adventurous cowboys, while eating industrially produced hamburgers.

As Specht describes in an abstract of his manuscript, the persistence of the U.S. beef industry in its current form has depended upon “a set of widely accepted narratives that made centralized meatpacking appear natural and inevitable. Whether rooted in cultural discourses justifying Indian land expropriation or technological arguments rationalizing market concentration, particular narratives enabled the historical processes integral to the rise of big meatpacking.”

Specht pieced this history together by spending months in archives across the United States. He discovered documents tracing the rise of meatpacking in Chicago and nearby cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also discovered records left by Texas cattle ranchers, many of which are housed at West Texas A&M and Texas Tech.

Specht found that telling the ranchers’ story was much easier than examining what happened to cows once they were sold. “Meatpackers are still in business, and are worried about criticism,” he says. As a result, their records are company property, not open to the public. To get around this, Specht examined court cases, Congressional hearings, and letters from ranchers to major cattle buyers. When writing about cowboys, who did not leave many documents behind, Specht even used traditional campfire songs.

Through his investigation, Specht discovered that, for more than a century, people have been concerned about how their food is produced, from how the cattle are treated to the horrors of industrial labor, yet in many ways little about the system has changed. “We embed food in our personal worlds,” Specht says, “so we all like beef for our cultural reasons.” As a result, demand stays high, and American consumers have grown used to buying subsidized, inexpensive food. History has produced a set of expectations for eating meat, and a deeply flawed system for producing it.

Discerning the relationship between the environment, consumer demand, business interests, and government regulation was, for Specht, an interdisciplinary process from the start. His manuscript is infused with insights from law, economics, and anthropology; while in residence at Berkeley, Specht is frequently in dialogue with environmental scientists, and says that scholars focused on today’s policies have been interested to hear his perspectives. “The real key is learning to talk across disciplines,” he says. “People in different fields ask really unexpected questions.”

Specht notes that a major conclusion of his research is that our current methods of producing beef—which are environmentally costly in terms of land and water use, and produce inhumane feedlots and ill-paid, dangerous slaughterhouse jobs—were not actually inevitable. Indeed, they were the unexpected result of multiple historical choices and malleable cultural values. Looking at food production in this context “opens space for the story to recognize the limits of industrial agriculture—and of small-scale [food production] too,” he says. “It’s not just about evil meatpackers.”

Research Highlights

Population and Climate Change

Published September 23, 2014

In general, experts have been optimistic that health standards in developing countries will improve. Some have suggested that in 20 years, the infant mortality rate—which is still close to 10% in countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Angola—will drop below 2% almost everywhere.

However, in a commentary entitled “Population and climate change: who will the grand convergence leave behind?” published in The Lancet Global Health, a team of UC Berkeley researchers—collaborating with the University of California, San Francisco, Princeton, and the African Institute for Development Policy—warn that unless action is taken, certain countries will likely face dire rates of starvation and disease.

Specifically, they focus on the impacts of a warmer climate in the Sahel—a region with over 100 million that lies between the Sahara desert and Sudanian savanna, stretching from Senegal to Somalia—where temperatures are expected to soar by 9-15 ºF by 2100. This will cause extreme weather events, reduced crop yield, and increased spread of disease by insects. During the same period, the population of the region is predicted to rise to over 600 million.

Of course, this rise in population and temperature will be gradual, and we’re likely to see crises occur well before the year 2100. The temperature is projected to increase by 5-6 degrees by 2050, when the population is already likely to exceed 300 million.

The researchers recommend three measures to prevent impending starvation and disease. One is primarily technological: develop methods to grow drought-resistant crops, prevent pest infestations, improve crop storage, and distribute water more efficiently. “A multidisciplinary approach and a long-term vision are much needed,” the report notes. “Currently many interventions are not adopted until visible water shortages occur.”

Second, international aid must focus more on access to family planning, including reproductive education, contraceptives, and abortion care. This could reduce population growth and thus ameliorate food shortages and the spread of disease.

Third, concerted efforts must be taken to empower and educate women. In the Sahel, child marriage is common. This deprives women of the opportunity to lead autonomous lives—and potentially contribute to economic growth—and leads to pregnancy in immature teens, increasing the odds of mortality and morbidity for both mother and child. The researchers note that programs to educate women have been successful in helping women become leaders of their communities, and parents are often willing to delay their daughters’ marriage in exchange for school fees and books.

“These three key interventions are regarded as mutually supportive,” the researchers explain. “Although they involve long-term considerations, some, such as improved agricultural practices, have immediate payoffs. Programmes need to be integrated so as to exploit intrinsic multiplier effects. For example, educating girls facilitates the adoption of family planning and enhances income generation in the family. Rigorous research and assessment will be essential to build the evidence base for such urgently needed investments. Substantial gaps in demographic, agricultural, and health data need to be filled.”

Pursuing any of these measures will require help from governments and international donors, and the researchers advise that these priorities be considered as a framework for aid. “Policies need to be designed to result in measurable, meaningful benefit to the most vulnerable populations,” they write. “Interventions must be developed in a human rights framework, ensuring that the benefits do not drift only toward those with the most social and political capital.”

Research Highlights

The Cuban Health Question

Published September 23, 2014

A book edited by UC Berkeley's Nancy Burke provides a comprehensive and critical look at the history, construction, and circulation of the Cuban healthcare system in a global context.

Global health is one of the fastest growing disciplines in academia. Responsible for mobilizing billions of dollars in research, interventions, and evaluation, graduating thousands of experts in the United States each year, and mediated by world renowned non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Bill and Melinda Gates and Clinton Foundations, global health has emerged as an academic field centered on innovation and a commitment to improving the health of communities across the globe.

Yet as evidenced by the number of articles and now two recent edited volumes presented as global health textbooks—including Farmer et al.’s Reimagining Global Health (2013), and Biehl and Petryna’s When People Come First (2013)—exactly what falls under the rubric of global health, as a discipline and as praxis, is still being defined.

The fraught definition of global health has predominantly fallen within the field of medical anthropology. Indeed, many global health physicians and practitioners are also trained medical anthropologists (Paul Farmer is perhaps the most popularly known MD-PhD). Medical anthropology has a long tradition of studying health, illness, and healthcare through a social science framework, allowing for a very nuanced approach of drawing on ethnographic data, and the field tends to problematize even its object of study, situating it in its sociopolitical, cultural, geographic, historical, and temporal context.

Another common mode within global health lies in examining modes of governance in and through global health programs, the technologies by which governance is established, and how these may be simultaneously adopted and contested. In the words of one of anthropology’s most revolutionary practitioners, UC Berkeley Professor of Anthropology Laura Nader, anthropologists “study up” the chain of global health institutions as much as they study down.

A major contribution to this field—and to the question of global health and to the anthropology of Cuba—is the recent publication of Health Travels: Cuban Health(care) On and Off the Island, a comprehensive and critical look at the history, construction, and circulation of the Cuban healthcare system in a global context. Nancy Burke, professor of medical anthropology in UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley’s joint program, edited this volume, which itself was the result of a conference she organized at UC Berkeley in 2010, entitled “In Sickness and in Health: Encountering Wellness in Cuba and the United States”.

The contributing authors of this volume study the ways in which “various assemblages of global, national, and sub-national factors converge on health issues, problems or outcomes in the particular local context of Cuban health(care),” Burke writes.

The theoretical and practical force of this volume lie in the incisive critiques extracted from rich ethnographic evidence presented in each chapter, which cover a wide range of health concerns, from men’s health to food insecurity, among others. Divided into three thematic sections, the authors of Health Travels provide readers with a deep sense of the daily entanglements of “elemental aspects of Cuban health(care),” such as seeking prenatal care or contracting dengue fever, and describe how these are affected by (and reflective of) broader global discussions and stakes in health.

For instance, Elise Andaya’s chapter on prenatal care in Cuba is a critical look at the production and circulation of Cuban reproductive health statistics. By following the lives of Cuban women seeking prenatal care, and the lives of their health care providers, she “questions the numbers,” and shows how Cuban health statistics on infant and maternal mortality are tied to both international stakes and the Cuban state’s desires to (re)produce a healthy socialist population. Providers rely on Cuban reproductive health statistics, which themselves can be understood as “technologies of scientific knowledge, government administration and symbolic representation,” to govern the behavior of Cuban mothers. Interestingly, many of these women push back against their doctors’ orders. Anadaya shows how a simple office visit can be a terrain of competing desires and forms of governance.

In another chapter, Charles Briggs, Professor of Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, writes about the negative media representation of the Cuban population during the rise of dengue fever. He demonstrates how Cuba’s anxiety around dengue and the potential for this epidemic to undermine Cuba’s status as a site for global medical diplomacy was displaced onto its citizens. Briggs deftly ties narratives of dengue failure and success to narratives of the Cuban revolution as dengue came to become a symbol of the Cuban public health infrastructure. By bringing media coverage of this recent epidemic into conversation with the reports and actions of Cuban state and public health officials, both before and after the epidemic subsided, Briggs demonstrates how unstable the labels and characterizations of a population, patients, and even the Cuban state truly are. Moreover, his chapter shows how anxiety over this instability may dictate how a population is governed.

As Burke notes, the anthropology of global health often focuses on “tensions between national sovereignty and transnational authority of institutions such as the World Health Organization.” Through careful investigations and ethnographic accounts, this volume illuminates the necessity for situating analyses in locally specific contexts. We are given examples of how Cuba can help reorient global health analyses—noting in the case of Andaya how state desires and priorities, and not just the goals of transnational institutions, can affect health governance. In this case, then, global health interventions are in fact instantiations of national sovereignty rather than transgressions of them. Health Travels provides much needed analyses for the emergent ways that medical governance takes shape and reorients people and states and their relations to each other in a global health landscape.

Research Highlights

Invisible Users

Published September 17, 2014

Invisible Users, a book by UC Berkeley's Jenna Burrell, explores the youth culture of Internet cafés in Ghana, which upends expectations about the power and purpose of technology.

According to the Broadband Commission’s 2013 report, only 7% of households in Africa have Internet access, compared to Europe’s 77% and the Americas’ 61%. Yet what interests UC Berkeley Associate Professor Jenna Burrell in her book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana (MIT Press 2012) is what these statistics about Internet access overlook: the messy spaces between access and non-access, between users and non-users.

Burrell’s interest stems from her experience as an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation, where she combined technical work and ethnographic research to help the company expand global PC and Internet access.

Upon returning to academics, Burrell sustained her focus on access to technology, but expanded her questions to include the more tangled issues of technology and political economy. Her work fills a void between scholarship on global inequalities in the digital age and localized cultural accounts about how technologies are adopted.

Much of the dialogue about the need to globalize Internet access focuses on the divide between the Global North and the Global South and the marginality that has resulted from colonial and post-colonial legacies. But in Invisible Users, Burrell focuses on the Internet café usage of non-elite, urban youth in Accra, Ghana, and shows that the marginality of these non-elite, urban users does not exclude them from global connectivity.

Instead, being marginal has led these youth to spend as much time in Internet cafés as they can afford on websites like plentyoffiish.com and in chat rooms, where they attempt to create bonds with foreigners on other continents, often through phishing and other online scams. As the book description explains, “Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region’s famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of ‘big gains’ that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region.”

Being “invisible users,” these Ghanaian youths are excluded from power but are empowered, in part because they are reachable through western regulatory systems. Sitting on second-hand computers “where the more erratic processes of globalization are operative,” these youth attempt to build relationships with foreign others in North America or Europe in the space of Internet cafés to try to gain access to international travel and to circumvent their own social immobility. It is through these practices, which often fail at attaining the hoped-for goal of securing financial support from elsewhere, that these youth attempt to gain access to avenues of bettering their lives that are not available to them through any other means.

The Ghanaian youth Burrell interviewed often spoke of being stuck in pre-adulthood and being unable to get to a position of security with “employment, marriage, and the ownership of property and modern goods” like cars and electronics. Many of these young Ghanaians see the Internet as a tool to “escape the poverty cycle.”

The African continent is often represented as a technological “blank slate,” most often by development agencies trying to attract projects to bring technology and Internet access to the population at large. Consider Google’s attempts to extend access to internet in Sub-Saharan Africa with initiatives like its Project Link in Uganda.

In this discourse, technology itself is seen as the key to solving all the problems facing the continent (and Africa is almost always represented as a continent, rather than as regions or individual countries. But accounts like Professor Burrell’s show us how technology does not come to the ground fully formed, but creates new worlds for those who use it, and that those new worlds are already being formed in spaces previously thought to be excluded from global connectivity.

These new worlds for Ghanaian youth come in many different forms. Internet café use in Accra not only creates certain forms of sociality online but also configures ways that young people can avoid constant surveillance by their elders and create social cohesion among their peer group. Together, these young men and women are able to articulate frustrations about the lack of opportunities in their own society and brainstorm together techniques for finding access to possibilities elsewhere.

In this space, these young people are forced to contend with the representations that exist of themselves, as well as their own perceptions. As one young man told her, “if you are not in Africa all the pictures you see in Africa are diseases.” Drawn into the forces of globalization on this individual level, these Internet users are forced to contend with the representations of Africans as needy, and certain users employ these stereotypes in strategic ways to get monetary support from foreign others. It is here that utopian dreams that the Internet will create the “opportunity for cross-cultural exchange and understanding and for true partnership” are thwarted.

Photo Credit: oneVillage Initiative

Research Highlights

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Published September 11, 2014

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.

Fresh fruit comes with a cost. For many residents of California, this cost is paid at the grocery store, where choice is abundant and prices seem fair. For those who work to supply the fruit we enjoy, the cost is different. The cost is felt. Choices are few, and prices aren’t fair. Migrant farmworkers rise before the sun, labor until dusk, and are paid in miniscule amounts for their heavy labor. The average worker makes $8,000 a year. This labor is hard on workers’ bodies, families, and lives.

In his book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (University of California Press, 2013), Seth Holmes, UC Berkeley Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, calls attention to the social and economic structures that produce this inequality, and shows how the suffering of migrant farm-workers is both structural and endemic.

Reflecting on his ethnographic research, which entailed hustling hour after hour across the sun-soaked desert of Northern Mexico in pursuit of the U.S. border, Holmes asks: Is it worth risking your life? Navigating a landscape of inequality, Holmes was held at gunpoint by U.S. Border Patrol agents, arrested, and imprisoned. After spending time in jail with his friends and fellow fieldworkers, he labored in the berry fields of California and Washington State.

As an anthropologist and physician, Holmes represents the promise of cross-disciplinary inquiry that takes seriously the problems of social inequality and risk. His work presents critical perspectives about political and economic structures that separate the United States and Mexico, including how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has recast and exacerbated economic inequality, leaving native farmers of Mexico little choice but to cross the border. Holmes details how these inequalities are felt in the everyday lives of migrants, and how they produce conditions of medical and social concern.

This inequality continues on the fields where berries are picked, where there is frequently discrimination by farm managers, who give assignments based on race, ethnicity, and skin color. The darker skinned laborers of Oaxaca frequently field racial slurs, and are identified as fit for bent-over picking because they are “closer to the ground,” while other groups rank higher in the labor chain, and are afforded work breaks because their bodies are different. For many, these prejudices result in great strain, repetitive motion, and injury.

By bringing attention to the details of everyday life among a group of people who are native to southern Mexico and have been forced to migrate to the United States and work for very little pay, Holmes shows us how risk is felt personally, inflicts injury, perpetuates hardship, and is structurally produced.

Holmes observes how, because of his tall, bald-headed, white, male body, he is treated differently than others. For those with whom he travels, the risks—of not making enough money to survive, becoming injured, or not making it to the United States—are all compounded by the prejudices of having darker skin, a smaller stature, and a different heritage; speaking another language; and being born in another country.

Try as he does to participate in and observe the life of migrant farmworkers, and experience it as they do, Holmes finds himself in the quandary of being white, tall and bald-headed; of having a different body, and so, navigating the world differently.

For Holmes, the question “Is it worth risking your life?” is a matter of choice, but for his fellow travelers, the decisions to cross the border, toil for low wages, and endure lifelong injury are seen as necessities. This life is full of risks—risks that are based on and compounded by social and economic disparity; risks that are distributed differently; risks that are felt and embodied.