Article Type: News

We are pleased to announce that Marion Fourcade, Professor in the Department of Sociology, has been appointed Director of Social Science Matrix. She will assume the role previously held by Professor Bill Hanks, who stepped down following a successful six-year term as the center’s founding director.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, Fourcade will serve as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, and so will begin her term at Matrix on July 1, 2020. In the interim, Michael Watts, Professor Emeritus of Geography, will serve as the Director of Matrix for the forthcoming academic year, effective July 1, 2019.

Under Hanks’ leadership, Social Science Matrix has established itself as an important resource for the UC Berkeley social science community, hosting hundreds of conferences, workshops, symposia, book discussions, and distinguished lectures by prominent scholars, and convening more than 70 Matrix Research Teams, interdisciplinary groups of scholars who gathered to pursue early-stage research focused on emerging social science questions and tackling globally significant issues like climate change, immigration, and artificial intelligence.

Among its many activities, Matrix has also hosted three cohorts of Dissertations Fellows; established a network of 25 Affiliated Centers across campus; and forged important international partnerships, creating bilateral exchange programs with Sciences Po in Paris and Freie Universität, Berlin.

“Working with Carla Hesse, former Dean of the Social Sciences Division, Bill [Hanks] formed Matrix into a cutting-edge research institute that responded to the particular needs of Berkeley’s social science community,” said Kim Voss, Acting Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, in an announcement. “As an incubator and accelerator for early-stage research and a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration, Matrix has attained national distinction under Bill’s leadership and emerged as a singular entity on campus. A linguistic anthropologist with deep historical commitments, Bill’s ability to fruitfully complicate the intellectual contours that undergird disciplinary thought has indelibly shaped Matrix and its mission.”

Professor Fourcade is well poised to build on this foundation, as she brings an exceptionally strong understanding of Matrix’s role within the division and a clear vision of how to expand the impact of its programs and initiatives. Fourcade served as Interim Director of Matrix in 2018, when she launched initiatives such as the Solidarity Series, a series of talks and panels focused on exploring and critiquing the ethical foundations, concrete implementations, and prospective designs that have fostered (or may foster) connectedness, inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality. She founded the Center on Economy and Morality, a Matrix-affiliated center, and she has led and/or participated in diverse Matrix Research Teams, including Seeing Like a Valley: Locating the Moral Visions of Silicon Valley Culture; Political Economy and Society Curriculum; Examining the Global Reach of Algorithms; and Work and Politics in the Digital Era.

Fourcade is “an innovative scholar whose numerous publications have taken an expansive, historical, and comparative approach to the sociology of economic knowledge, political practices, and digital society,” Voss said. “Known as a willing and resourceful collaborator, she has contributed to the work of several research centers on campus and built coalitions with scholars nationally and internationally, most notably as co-director of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies. Marion is also an award-winning mentor with an established track record of championing the research of graduate students.” Fourcade’s book, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s, won several awards, including the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award.

“Matrix is a unique institution,” Fourcade says. “Its mission is to serve as a catalyst of innovation in the social sciences, to foster conversations across the disciplines, and to discover new territories for research. We are deeply indebted to Bill Hanks and Carla Hesse for turning this ambitious vision into a lively reality, complete with a gorgeous physical space, a well-functioning infrastructure, and a vital intellectual role on campus.”

Marion intends to build on Matrix’s track record in serving the broader social science community for the organization of special events, workshops, and lectures, as well as in supporting innovative interdisciplinary seminars and research projects. Her priorities include increasing outreach through the cultivation of relationships with departments in the division and with other research units on campus (a model pioneered by the D-Lab/Matrix series on “social science and data science”); working with graduate students to provide intellectual support and better exposure for their research; and fostering connections to non-academic publics. “Matrix is for everyone,” Fourcade says.

Matrix’s work will be closely articulated with several of the signature initiatives on campus. “We want to focus on present-day challenges facing human societies, be they political (rising illiberalism and authoritarianism), technological (artificial intelligence, genetic modification), or ecological (climate change). As social scientists, we want to understand how these challenges transform our physical environment, our social world, and our sense of who we are; how they recycle old forms of power and marginality, but also create new ones; and how they might foster new opportunities, ideals, and aspirations. These questions all demand interdisciplinary conversations. Matrix will be actively engaged in cultivating those cross-field synergies that are already well established, while helping initiate other, less familiar ones.”

In his role as Interim Director, Professor Michael Watts will similarly bring a wealth of leadership experience to Matrix, as he formerly served as Director of the Institute of International Studies and Chair of the Trustees of the Social Science Research Council. Watts’ pioneering scholarship on the political economy of development has integrated thinking in the fields of anthropology, ecology, and sociology. He has been recognized internationally for his leadership, exemplary scholarship, and mentorship of graduate students; most recently, he was honored by election as Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (1983; 2013), which was a runner-up for the Herskovitz Prize, and The Curse of the Black Gold (2008). “Michael is uniquely capable of ensuring Matrix’s successful transition this year,” Voss said.

As Interim Director of Matrix, Watts says that he intends to continue to promote and fund research teams and lectures, while providing “new support for reading groups, book manuscript development for junior faculty, inter-disciplinary doctoral dissertation proposal workshops, and a venue for book launches and the chance for authors  to ‘meet their critics’ in wide ranging discussions.” He also plans to launch new event series that “speak to the current moment,” focusing on such topics as “the challenges of climate change and forms of life in the Anthropocene; the challenges associated with large-scale displacement and mobility of human populations, particularly in relation to civil conflict, war, and endemic violence (and of climate change); and, in view of the looming US elections in 2020, the broad theme of race, class, and authoritarian politics.” He also plans to “host discussions next spring, explicitly comparative in nature, drawing in our historical strength in area studies on the Berkeley campus, addressing the relations between neoliberalism, globalization, and authoritarian populisms of various stripe.”

“While the foundations for Matrix are now in place, I hope to continue and extend the yeoman work of Bill Hanks, who has developed connections, linkages, and networks among faculty and students across the social science division, while building new relations with the area studies programs, the many research centers on campus, and the professional schools, all of which have social scientists in their ranks,” Watts said. “I am delighted to be able to assist in this transitional period prior to Marion [Fourcade] taking up her appointment, and am looking forward to working with faculty and students across the campus. Matrix has served an exceptionally generative role in both promoting and advocating the exciting inter-disciplinary social scientific research being conducted on campus, while at the same time seeding and incubating early-stage research.”

A group of UC Berkeley’s administrators and university researchers will study issues related to sexual harassment and sexual violence. A team of experts in environmental management and law will explore the impacts of cannabis production on communities and ecosystems. A team of scholars in sociology, health, technology, and related areas will address important emerging questions related to genetic ancestry testing. These are just a few examples of projects that will be funded as 2018-2019 Social Science Matrix Research Teams, groups of scholars who are provided with funding to gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question of significance in the social sciences.

“We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to support and work with these teams,” said Marion Fourcade, Interim Director of Social Science Matrix. “They cover a wide range of topics, and bring together people across departments and levels of experience. Their research tackles original, timely issues and applies the sort of innovative, cross-disciplinary methods we aim to foster.”

Matrix Research Teams typically integrate participants from multiple social-science disciplines; are focused on a compelling research question with real-world significance; and deploy or develop appropriate methodologies in creative ways. Matrix supports two types of teams: Prospecting Teams receive funding in the amount of $1500 and run for a single semester, typically meeting 5-6 times to explore a new area or question of inquiry and assess whether it has potential for further investigation. Project Teams receive funding in the amount of $5000 and run for two semesters, meeting at least once a month around a defined research problem. Project Teams work toward producing an output, such as a proposal for external funding, a workshop or conference, or a joint publication.

In addition to funding, the teams receive administrative support in meetings in the Matrix offices on the top floor of Barrows Hall. All teams also receive assistance with administering their funding, as well as with research development and communications. This year’s teams were selected following a competitive process, as proposals were evaluated by faculty members from diverse social science disciplines.

Below are summaries of the 2017-2018 Matrix Research Teams, based on the teams’ winning proposals.

2018-2019 Matrix Project Teams

Community Conversations on Sexual Violence and Harassment: Narratives of Activism, Inclusion, Confidentiality, Accountability, and Healing

Incidents of sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH) have been a focus of national headlines this year as a social and political movement swept the country. SVSH is also a longstanding topic of interest among social science researchers nationally, and UC Berkeley administrators and practitioners are making efforts to improve SVSH support, procedure, and policy on campus. Yet there is often too little connection between the administrators and practitioners working to reduce SVSH on campus and the researchers who carry out the university’s academic mission. This Matrix Project Team will work to bridge this gap by convening a series of panel discussions among on-campus practitioners and researchers across different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, law, and community dynamics, all of which are necessary to prevent further trauma and recidivism as well as to promote healing. “Sexual violence requires an interdisciplinary solution, because it is an interdisciplinary problem,” the team wrote in their successful proposal. “With support from Matrix, we can give those working on our campus a platform to collaborate, potentially transforming our campus culture and the field of violence prevention and response at large.”

Formation of interdisciplinary research group to study the socio-ecological impacts of cannabis production

The recent legalization and regulation of cannabis production and consumption in California represent an unprecedented change in public policy that may have profound impacts on the environment and communities across the state. At this moment of change, there is a critical need for scholarship on cannabis-producing communities and their relation to the natural environment. This Matrix Research Team will address that need by bringing together faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from the College of Letters and Science, College of Natural Resources, and School of Law to study the socio-ecological impacts of cannabis production in California, focusing on three core areas: (1) policy and regulation, (2) environmental impacts, and (3) the social relations and agricultural practices of cannabis-producing communities. They will focus on developing intellectual exchange among team members, organizing a cannabis research and policy workshop, and developing opportunities for future funding. “We understand that regulation affects farmers’ decisions and ultimately the environment,” they wrote in their proposal. “We also believe that scientific information on the ecological impacts of cannabis in turn influences farmer practices and regulation. By investigating the system as a whole, we aim to understand cannabis agriculture in all its complexities.”

Seeing Like a Valley: Locating the Moral Visions of Silicon Valley Culture

Like modern states, the industrial region known as Silicon Valley has developed through attempts to regularize, rationalize, and codify the world. These ways of knowing have favored emerging technologies and new modes of organization. But what are the effects of this developing view to the world? The “Seeing Like a Valley” Matrix Research Team will bring UC Berkeley affiliates in contact with others who are studying or intervening in Silicon Valley to understand the place of this unique region in shaping not just new technological practices, but new moral visions. The team will experiment with practices for theoretically-informed events and interventions, and will convene an international group of scholars, policy makers, technologists, journalists, artists, and activists to explore the moral visions emerging out of the world’s tech hub. The team’s work will include a series of “public encounters,” monthly field trips and bi-monthly salons that promote an active public intellectual culture across and beyond UC Berkeley, as well as monthly planning meetings on campus. They ultimately hope to produce an edited volume designed for a general audience.

Comparing the Politics of Computer Vision in the United States, China, and Europe

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to visualize the social world, and computer vision technologies are being developed according to divergent standards in different countries. This Matrix Research Team will study, discuss, and provide perspective on the emerging comparative political economy of computer vision. The group’s work will focus on three case studies—United States, China, and Europe— that each reflect different potential models for integrating computer vision technology into civil society: respectively, either stratifying it through new fault lines of racial and gender inequality; erasing it through bureaucratic centralization; or resisting its application in industry and private life, as with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Based on the ongoing work of cross-disciplinary Ph.D. candidates, the researchers will share findings, organize a group-authored working paper, and coordinate a panel on the topic of cross-comparative social science research on computer vision.

2018-2019 Matrix Prospecting Teams

Causal Conversations

The proliferation of data sources and the advent of computationally intensive analytic algorithms have multiplied the possibilities for non-experimental (i.e., observational) research. Much of that research highlights prediction, yet remains agnostic about cause, a successful strategy as long as the causal structures undergirding the phenomena remain stable. This raises concerns, as practical action or public policy without an understanding of cause is blind, and methodological discussions rarely reach empirical researchers, in part because those discussions are often too formal and thus too insular. Led by Samuel Lucas, Professor of Sociology, this Matrix team’s work will explore the emerging issues and questions about causality in the digital age; the group’s work will focus on interviewing key scholars of causality from statistics, philosophy, and a variety of social sciences The project will allow each to convey to empirical researchers key insights on causality in an accessible, conversational way. The interviews will be integrated into thematic sets, and will ultimately be compiled to form an accessible volume.

I Regret to Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised

Led by Naniette Coleman, a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, this Matrix Prospecting Team will focus on important questions around privacy, which the organizers explained in their proposal is “one of the central issues of importance of our time…. Despite our appreciation of privacy, police officers wear body cameras, customer loyalty programs track purchases, and the Transportation Safety Administration performs full body scans. This paradox illuminates the deep ambivalence in modern American society about privacy, and a largely untapped area of research in the social sciences.” The team will bring together students and scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus—as well as outside speakers—to form a privacy-focused social science community at Berkeley. In addition to engaging experts in diverse dimensions of privacy, they will create annotated bibliographies and Wikipedia pages to serve as resources for other scholars.”There are many of us working on these topics alone or together by happenstance; it is time we formed a more permanent community and worked together,” the researchers wrote. “Matrix can be a catalyst for that happening.”

Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides

Refugees, immigrants, and natives—whether indigenous persons or not—are typically constructed as separate legal and social categories, and thus studied in isolation from one another. Who is a refugee, who is an immigrant, and who is a native? These are critical questions at a time when nation-states are tightening and manipulating their borders and increasingly criminalizing mobility. This interdisciplinary research project will examine how these communities, and the fields of studies developed to examine them, in fact converge, displace, and shape each other. The researchers will examine how legal regimes and public discourse produce categories that determine the corresponding legal entitlements and cultural claims based on membership in these categories; they will look at how gender is construed in discourse and policy, and the particular burdens placed upon women and families. The group will invite cross-disciplinary conversations with Berkeley faculty whose research interests align with the project, and they will apply for a major external grant and build toward a future conference and publication.

The DNA of Media Accounts on Genetic Ancestry Testing

A growing number of people are taking genetic ancestry tests (GAT), and companies like FamilyTreeDNA, AncestryDNA, and 23andMe now make up a multibillion-dollar industry dominating both popular and academic discourse. Literature on GAT largely attributes consumer participation to a desire for individuals to identify biological relatives, validate genealogical records, fill gaps in family histories, and learn about one’s health dispositions. Existing research, however, inadequately explains how these desires came to be. While word-of-mouth marketing and network effects come to mind, one major mechanism neglected by scholars is the effect of mainstream media. Anecdotal evidence suggests that talk shows, documentaries, news articles, advertisements and trade books featuring GAT present a homogenous picture of the process—that it brings about life-changing, transformative, and largely positive experiences. In doing so, what narratives are being sidelined? What are the strategies deployed by content producers? How can we classify existing narratives and their symbolic, psychological and health effects? By systematically examining a diverse pool of media content and forum reactions towards these media elements, this Matrix Prospecting Team hopes to bridge the gap between knowledge transmission and consumer participation. They will conclude by considering the implications for consumers, the GAT market, and policy governing this sector.

Berkeley Black Geographies

The Berkeley Black Geographies (BBG) project will foster intellectual creative space and proposes an intervention into the colonial canon of academic disciplines. BBG looks at the ways that many disciplines utilize Black radical thought and geographic methods in order to mobilize rigorous and meaningful theory and praxis for interdisciplinary projects while countering the anti-Black and colonial histories that traditionally structure academic disciplines. This project will serve as a follow up to the campus-funded Berkeley Black Geographies Conference in October 2017. The primary function of this project is to facilitate reading groups, writing workshops, the development of an independent publication and a Black Geographies curriculum that transcends disciplinary boxes. It will bring together students and faculty from Public Health, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, ESPM, City & Regional Planning, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. “The BBG project has already received positive feedback from interdisciplinary scholars from around the country,” the organizing scholars wrote in their proposal, “and will have important implications for academics looking to advance intellectual development in questions that meaningfully attend to Black lives and equitable spatial, social, and economic development.”

Child Marriage and Youth empowerment: Directions for Future Research, practice, and training

Child marriage refers to a union—formal or informal—in which one or both members of a couple marry before the age of 18. Annually, an estimated 15 million girls marry before their 18th birthdays. Evidence shows that marriage below the age of 18 increases risks related to health, education, opportunity and, well-being. It increases girls’ exposure to partner violence throughout their lives and promotes poverty. Child marriage takes place in every region across the globe, including within the US, and the causes, consequences, and prevalence vary among and within countries. Through monthly conversations and presentations from researchers across Berkeley in multiple disciplines, this Matrix Prospecting Team aims to gain a broader and deeper understanding of child marriage and the complex set of social factors that shape adolescence. In doing so, the scholars’ vision is to promote well-being during this pivotal life phase and pave the way to successful transitions to adulthood. They plan to do this through discussing innovative, rigorous, and interdisciplinary research and evaluation design, and considering how this evidence can contribute to cross-sectoral programs and policies. This team is led by scholars who have experience leading research in a number of critical areas relevant to child marriage from multiple disciplines across the university. They have scholars engaged in the fields of education; public health, global health, and mental health; youth and adolescent studies; demography; gender studies; international development; and public policy.

Queer Ecologies: Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Animal Behavior Science

The Queer Ecologies Prospecting Team will examine how historically exclusionary and hierarchical ideas of race, sex, and gender are both replicated and disrupted by contemporary laboratory and fieldwork practices, as well as theoretical innovations, in animal behavior sciences. The group conceives of animal behavior sciences—such as studies of mate choice and sexual display—as cultural, social, and political practices. As scientists work to understand animal behavior along the lines of agency, choice, sex, pairing, and bonding, “we are also often co-producing understandings about ourselves and our social worlds that have significant consequences for who counts as human, who has the right to ‘pair,’ and what kinds of behaviors count as ‘normal’,” they wrote in their proposal. While much Queer Ecology scholarship emerges from humanities disciplines, this team uniquely cross-pollinates theories, research questions, and political debates among social and natural scientists . They will generate a research agenda (for academics and social-change agents alike) that takes seriously the practices, instruments, field experiences, communications, media representations, and political alliances that constitute the very laboratories and scientific communities in and through which knowledge of “queer animals” and “queer ecosystems” is being produced.

Masculinity and Capitalism

Recent decades have brought about a striking increase in inequality among men across many scales. Within the regime of globalized financialized capitalism. manufacturing has been relocated to low-wage regions, and many of the jobs have simply disappeared because of automation. At the same time, in the upper echelons of financial capitalism, elite men continue to predominate, simultaneously fueling profitable market “bubbles” through rhetorics of masculine performance and excusing market crises through narratives that reference uncontrollable male hormones. The new regime has both recruited women into the paid workforce, and promoted state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare. Understanding the relationships among these varied discourses requires not just new empirical investigations, but new categories. Taking on this challenge will be the subject of this Matrix Prospecting Team, which is interested in understanding better the relationship between masculinity, conventionally defined in relationship to the sphere of production, and the changing contours of that sphere of production.

Gender and Technology

UC Berkeley is an ideal place from which to study the tech industry. The San Francisco Bay Area serves as the headquarters of most large tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, as well as countless startups. UC Berkeley also produces a large number of tech workers. Yet no groups on campus are currently working to bring researchers together to discuss gender inequality in the tech industry. In spite of recent efforts to recruit and retain women, gender inequality remains a defining feature of the tech industry. The goal of this Matrix Prospecting Team will be to facilitate collaboration between researchers from various disciplines, methodological approaches, and institutions who are interested in issues surrounding gender and technology. Over the course this semester-long project, the team will work to organize a day-long workshop for researchers interested in gender and technology. This workshop will provide an opportunity for scholars to present original research on topics related to gender and technology, while also providing a venue for researchers to strategize new methodological approaches for research in this area. In conjunction with this workshop, team leaders will also develop an online platform that will help attendees keep in touch, share ideas and resources, and ultimately facilitate collaboration.

UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and Sciences Po, a premier university based in Paris, France, are pleased to announce the recipients of an inaugural set of grants designed to encourage collaboration between scholars from the two institutions. Through the Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grants program, each institution has committed to provide a pool of funding to enable graduate students and faculty members to work together on a cross-institutional basis.

Sciences Po and UC Berkeley are two of the world’s leading centers of research in the social sciences; both are home to renowned experts in public health, urban development, security, environmental policy, and other pressing 21st-century issues. Four teams of scholars were selected to receive grants following evaluation by faculty review boards from the two partner institutions. Projects were selected in part for their potential to lead to ongoing partnerships; contribute to their home departments, schools, or programs; and create opportunities for graduate students to participate. In addition to funding, Matrix and Sciences Po will each provide meeting and work space for successful applicants, as well as administrative support and other services.

Below are summaries of the projects that will be funded through the inaugural Matrix/Sciences Po Collaboration Grants:

The Hissène Habré Trial: A New Model for Prosecuting International Crimes in National Courts?

In this cross-disciplinary collaboration, researchers from UC Berkeley and Sciences Po will examine the role of national courts in providing accountability for international crimes in Africa. Their research is focused on the trial of Chad’s former president, Hissène Habré, who was convicted of crimes against humanity, torture, and war crimes before the Extraordinary African Chambers, a novel judicial mechanism born out of an agreement between Chad, Senegal, and the African Union.

The team’s members will use their grant to work on a book that is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2019. The book will present the history and significance of the Habré case, highlight direct actors’ perspectives and practical experiences of the trial, and offer academic analysis of the trial in the broader context of international criminal law generally.

“As researchers, we were interested in how this trial actually happened and what aspects, if any, are replicable,” the scholars wrote in their proposal. “In early 2017, we interviewed the trial’s direct actors—mostly Senegalese and Chadian lawyers, judges, journalists, funders, and civil society actors who operationalized the trial. In doing so, we documented the practical and political realities affecting their day to day work. Now, with an invitation from Oxford University Press to produce an edited volume of direct actors’ perspectives and broader academic analysis, we will make a significant contribution to understanding of not only this trial but also potential models for the domestic prosecution of international crimes in Africa and beyond.”

Participating scholars from UC Berkeley include Eric Stover, Adjunct Professor in Law and Public Health and Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center; and Kim Thuy Seelinger, Lecturer in Law and Director of the Sexual Violence Program at the Human Rights Center. Collaborators from Sciences Po include Horatia Muir Watt, Professor and Co-Director of the Global Governance Studies Program; Jeremy Perelman, Assistant Professor at the Sciences Po Law School; and Dr. Sharon Weill, Senior Lecturer at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) and Associate Researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI).

The Social Life of the Sediment Balance: A Social and Geomorphic Approach to the Transformation of River Systems and Deltas

This collaborative project will explore the social and natural processes that lead to the modification of sediment balance in rivers. Interdisciplinary scholarship on river systems and society is usually concerned with water flows, but rarely with sediment balance. Sediments, however, are essential components of river systems. Hydroelectric dams, canals, navigation, sand and gravel mining, and other human uses alter sediment fluxes, often with detrimental consequences on the river morphology and ecology as well as on coastal land.

The project will bring together two scholars with different perspectives on this topic: Giacomo Parrinello, Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the Centre for History at Sciences Po (CHSP), brings a social science and history background, while G. Mathias Kondolf, Professor of Environmental Planning and Geography in UC Berkeley’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, is an expert in the geomorphology of river systems. The collaborators, who reached out to each other for the first time as a result of this grant program, will explore how the dynamics of the river systems are shaped by policy, institutional, and legal frameworks. They will focus their research on diverse river basins, such as the Rhône, the Po, the Mekong, the Mississippi-Missouri system, the Colorado, and the Sacramento.

“The collaborating faculty have both developed an interest in the intersection of sociotechnical and geomorphological processes in river systems, and aim to combine their expertise to shed new light on a key aspect of human-environment interaction in fluvial environments,” the scholars explained in their proposal. “By systematically compiling geomorphic data on these river systems, their historical transformations, and resulting channel responses, with a social-science-based analysis of the governance context, we hope to push forward interdisciplinary efforts to better understand these transformed river systems and how they can be best managed.”

Diasporic Identities: Southeast Asian Incorporation Experiences in Europe and America—The Post-Refugee Generations

In the four decades since the initial mass resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the Southeast Asian communities in Europe and the U.S. have registered a significant demographic shift. Yet surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to these communities. A team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Sciences Po will use a Collaboration Grant to convene European and American researchers working on Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian diasporas to engage in critical, cross-disciplinary discourse on the post-refugee generations.

“Despite the resurgent attention to immigration issues in Europe in recent years, we know little of the integration experiences of these earlier but relatively recent refugee communities in Europe,” the researchers explained in their proposal. “In particular, we have virtually no knowledge of the post-refugee generations that are an integral part of the French cultural, political, economic, and social fabric. These knowledge gaps deprive us of critical insights that would be relevant and invaluable in view of the current refugee situations in Europe, and the intensifying debates engendered by demographic and cultural shifts both in the U.S. and in France….”

Leading the collaboration are Khatharya Um, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Hélène Le Bail, a political scientist on the permanent faculty at Sciences Po and a research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI). Um is currently working on a book project on Southeast Asian diaspora; she has completed her research on the communities in the U.S. and is deepening her research on the communities in France. Le Bail’s previous scholarly focus on Chinese migration has evolved into her current research interest in second-generation Sino-Vietnamese populations in France.

“We envision this initiative as paving the way for more extensive exchange and research collaboration not only between Berkeley and Sciences Po but also with other universities in France and Europe, and generation of new scholarship and publications, including a co-edited volume,” the scholars explained. “Ultimately, we hope to foster a robust transcontinental community of scholars, researchers, artists, and advocates working on critical Southeast Asian diaspora studies, a space that is emerging in the U.S. but currently does not exist in Europe. With its attention to transnational and diasporic concerns, this future transnational community would provide a much needed home for new innovative scholarship that is not focused singularly on Southeast Asia, and that brings critical approaches and inquiries to both area studies, and to diaspora, transnational, and community studies.”

Political Representation in India: The Berkeley-Sciences Po Indian Legislators Project

This project aims to understand the profiles of national and state legislators and the changing nature of political representation in India. The collaboration will bring together scholars from UC Berkeley and Sciences Po who have each developed unique research approaches to understanding Indian politics, and will integrate previous major data collection efforts related to politicians in India.

“We see this grant as an opportunity to bring together our shared interests to maximize the synergies and quality of our research output,” the researchers wrote in their proposal, “and to initiate what may be a broader and longer term research partnership focused on the political behavior of India’s state and national legislators.”

Based at Sciences Po, Christophe Jaffrelot, a Senior Research Fellow at Centre de Recherches Internationales, is building a major database on the sociological profile of Indian national and state legislators, including information on caste, class, gender, and family backgrounds. These data are critical for assessing trends in the democratization of political and descriptive representation in India and also allow assessment of legislators’ political trajectories, for instance, the extent to which they shift from one party to another or belong to dynastic political families.

From UC Berkeley, Jennifer Bussell, Gruber Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Goldman School of Public Policy, focuses her research on political representation, service delivery, and the political economy of corruption in India; she recently completed a book manuscript on the constituency service provided by state and national legislators in that country. Bussell has used data collected by Jaffrelot and collaborators to assess the relationship between caste background and political responsiveness.

Adding to the collaboration, Thad Dunning, Robson Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center on the Politics of Development, is a scholar of comparative politics with an emphasis on distributive politics, ethnic politics, and political economy. He research focuses on the distributional impact of political reservations (electoral quotas for marginalized castes) in village councils in India, and provides an important foundation for understanding the relationships between local brokers and the higher-level legislators studied by Bussell and Jaffrelot.

“We envision that our collaboration will integrate our previous research in novel ways,” the researchers explained. “Overall, our goal is to combine our previous separate efforts in a productive manner to produce a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which social background does, and does not, affect the manner by which Indian politicians engage with their constituents and serve as effective representatives. More generally, we expect that this may serve as a starting point for a broader research agenda on the political behavior of India’s legislators, writ large.”