Recorded on February 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.
Recorded on February 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the “Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic” initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.
Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC), which explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns. Dr. Donovan’s research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements.
“I am a sociologist and an ethnographer by trade,” she said. “One of the things we really try to help people understand is that you don’t need an advanced degree in data science (though sometimes it’s nice) to do this kind of work. What you really need is a mind for sniffing out the BS. You really need to try to figure out what kind of power is at play, who is being manipulated, and what kind of content is being used? And then of course, as the sociologist, the question for me is always, who is being harmed? What kind of social institution is in the crosshairs of misinformation at scale?”
In her talk, Donovan draws important distinctions between disinformation and misinformation, and she uses case studies to illuminate how misinformation spreads. “When I’m thinking about this pandemic moment, I’m really thinking about, what is people’s access to timely local, relevant, and accurate information?” she explained. “And how is the presence of disinformation disrupting or displacing our human right to truth? But I also know that we’re living in a bit of pandemonium…. We’re looking at an evil spirit, a divine power, a kind of an intentional moment in which chaos reigns. And so with the pandemic, of course, I feel like we’re living through pandemonium.”
Joined by a panel of scholars, CLTC Faculty Director Steve Weber discussed his book, which outlines a framework for how firms should position themselves for the new economic geography.
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At a time when globalization is taking a step backward, what’s the best way to organize a global enterprise? This question is at the heart of CLTC Faculty Director Steven Weber’s book Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order, which argues that firms should prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions defined by their own rules and standards — including data and technology standards.
Weber’s book (and its thesis) was also the focus of an “Authors Meet Critics” book talk, presented on February 11, 2021 by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix. Professor Weber discussed the book with Vinod K. Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science, and Homa Bahrami, Senior Lecturer in the Haas School of Business. The panel was introduced by Matrix director Marion Fourcade and moderated by AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.
Bloc by Bloc, Weber explained in his introductory remarks, is “a book about economic geography that tries to ask the question, how should a global enterprise organize to reach the world in the coming decade? The assertion for me is that, if a leader today asks a a deceptively simple question — about where to store her firm’s data, where to seek legal foundation for its intellectual property, where its employees should live and work, where its robots should live and work — there’s really no coherent conceptual framework to guide those decisions right now.”
Drawing upon centuries of history, the book is an attempt to “set out that conceptual framework and try to explain where it comes from,” Weber explained, and to provide “concrete advice about how to make those decisions to maximize the upsides of what we can expect in this new economic geography.”
The book evolved in part from Weber’s past research and consulting with IBM’s then-CEO, Sam Palmisano, who coined the term “globally integrated enterprise” (as described in a 2006 article in Foreign Affairs) to describe how a company should prepare for a world of globalization.
“IBM actually took its own advice,” Weber said. “The problem was, by the time we figured it out, it was too late. It was one of those moments where you feel like got the argument exactly right, just at the moment when the story we were telling was coming to an end. That was the single most important moment and really the inspiration for the book, that the technical and political landscape that had enabled the globally integrated enterprise was gone.”
“The ability to see the landscape of economic geography in any particular era, assess how close it is to a stable equilibrium, and then figure out the right model for organization is the central problem of organizational strategy,” he said. “But to get it right is a lot harder than it sounds.”
Weber said that the era of globalization that was supposed to be made possible by the world wide web and “outsourcing” talent failed in part because “many corporate leaders… thought about cost reduction through the gap model, rather than growth and value creation.” The financial crisis of 2008 gave way to economic nationalism and the “introduction of new, non-Western rule sets and standards which were aimed at tilting the playing field toward China and Europe.”
“Of course, now we see this everywhere,” Weber said. “The Chinese talk about it as a national security priority to control standards. The Europeans talk about it as a human rights battle for privacy to control standards. The consequences for global organization are exactly the same.”
These shifts have resulted in the rise of “logical regions,” defined by divergent rules and standards, and to succeed in this world, “a global organization needs to develop three or four full copies of itself that operates substantially on their own in an individual region.”
“What’s my rule of thumb advice for global enterprise strategy in this world?” Weber concluded. “I’ll sum it up in five commandments. Keep your robots close to home. Keep your data close to your chest. Keep your capital expenditure under tight control, no matter how loose monetary policy gets. Keep your job creation firmly in the spotlight. And finally, keep your fingers crossed for minimum viable global security cooperation between governments — and don’t expect to get a whole lot more than that.”
Keep your robots close to home. Keep your data close to your chest. Keep your capital expenditure under tight control, no matter how loose monetary policy gets. Keep your job creation firmly in the spotlight. And finally, keep your fingers crossed for minimum viable global security cooperation between governments — and don’t expect to get a whole lot more than that.
In her response, Professor Homa Bahrami drew upon her own past research on studying how businesses organize themselves. “My interest in organizational forms is, what are the new forms that are going to evolve through the impact of technology?” she said. “If you look at the first modern industrial corporation, it was nurtured and enabled by the development of railways and telegraph. Before that, the enterprises, we knew were more local in nature, just because you have the barriers of transfer, transportation and information sharing.”
Bahrami said she agreed with Weber’s point “about regions defined by technology standards, not by physical boundaries,” which is “the bedrock assumption that we have to keep in the back of our mind as we think about new organizational forms. Having said that, however, I think they’re going to be variations across industries. So if you think about financial services, its government control is much tighter than if you think about technology industries, for example. We really have to apply somewhat of an industry lens, and if you look at some of the things that are going on in biotech and life sciences, those are going to be governed by different set of government rules and standards.”
In his comments, Professor Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal praised the book for “making a grand synthesis of about 50 different topics,” but noted that the book seems to shift in its argument about whether the world will be defined by physical boundaries and rules and standards. “Steve does say, in a nuanced way, in the last chapter, that we’re not saying this is completely divorced from physical space,” Aggarwal said. “This, to me is the original contribution of the book… I had hoped for a kind of economic geography that goes beyond the physical space view.”
To find out how Weber responded — and to hear the rest of this engaging discussion — watch through the link above, or watch it on YouTube.
Recorded on February 3, 2021, this video features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Recorded on February 3, 2021, this video features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. The lecture was introduced and moderated by Henry Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Allen’s lecture focuses on the findings of Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century, a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Allen served as co-chair of the Commission, which convened weekly for two years in support of this project. As detailed in the report, the Commission was established to “consider what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens…. Through its recommendations, the Commission has looked to increase citizens’ capacity to engage in their communities, counter rising threats to democratic self-government, and rebuild trust in political institutions.”
Allen noted that the messages in the report are particularly urgent in the wake of the the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I think all over the country and world, people are asking really deep, important questions about American democracy and its viability at this point in time,” Allen said. “Those same kinds of questions are what motivated us in our work on the commission.”
She noted that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is itself the child of revolution, as it was founded in 1780, in the middle of the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, and others “who thought of themselves as scholar patriots.”
The project emerged from a growing awareness of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of our democracy. “In 2017, there were a number of us affiliated with the Academy… who found ourselves expressing these worries to one another,” Allen said. “And we were fortunate that the Academy thought it made sense to pull together a commission to dig into the question of what was happening with the practice of democratic citizenship. What could the future be in the 21st century? Why did we see this rise of disaffection and alienation? And what can we do about it?”
The Commission included stakeholders from across the political spectrum, Allen said. “We gathered a group of about 35 people from different professional sectors, different disciplinary sectors within the Academy, and also across the ideological spectrum,” Allen said. “We were indeed a cross-ideological group, and that was really important to our work. We really wanted to see whether we could find a way of bridging some of the cleavages that separated us as we think about the future of democracy in this country.”
A lecture on why people believe fake news — and what can be done about it, by Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics at New York University
Recorded on January 29, 2021, this video features Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. In his lecture, Tucker discussed his recent research, which focused on understanding how well can ordinary people do in identifying the veracity of news in real time.
Using a unique research design, Tucker compared the performance of both ordinary citizens and professional fact checkers in identifying fake news, and gained insights into the individual-level characteristics of those likely to incorrectly identify false news stories as true. He also researched what interventions can reduce the prevalence of this behavior, and the prospects for crowdsourcing to serve as a viable means for identifying false news stories in real time. He also reported preliminary findings from a replication of this study focusing exclusively on news about COVID-19.
“I’m going to try to give you answers to the following five questions,” Tucker said. “The first is, how often do ordinary people believe fake news when they encounter it online, and crucially, when do they do so in real time? The second question is, what individual-level characteristics are associated with susceptibility to believing fake news? The third is, do these findings…change when we move from traditional fake news around more political and hard news issues, to when we move to fake news around COVID-19? We might think that this might change a bit when someone’s health is at risk. The fourth is whether or not there are certain task flows we can enact that will reduce the likelihood of people believing fake news. And fifth is whether or not we can crowdsource fact checking fake news.”
Tucker said that his research revealed that people in general fare poorly at spotting fake news when they see it. “Unfortunately, untrained people are not particularly good at identifying fake news,” Tucker said. “And when we look at what types of covariates determine who is better at doing this…the biggest thing that we find that matters has to do with politics, not what we would think of as more conventional demographics.”
An additional challenge, Tucker said, is that people tend to use the internet to corrobate the false information a fake news story contains. “If we send people out into the internet to search for corroboration, to see if they can find additional evidence to see whether a story is false or not, that actually makes people worse,” Tucker said. “Sending them on the internet will actually make people more likely to believe that a false news story is true…. This turns out to take place when there is other corroborating evidence out there on the internet.”
Recorded on Dec. 11, 2020, this "Matrix on Point" panel addressed the consequences of climate migration.
Within the next 30 years, slow-onset climate change may impel as many as 143 million people living in the Global South to relocate within their countries of origin. Longer-range forecasts predict that by 2070 rising temperatures may render one-fifth of the earth’s landmasses uninhabitable, forcing international migration on a massive scale. Among the displaced, low-income populations will be particularly vulnerable, and cities in the Global North may have to absorb and provide services for these immigrants. Given the politicization of migration in recent years, and the lack of international policies to protect climate refugees, climate change is anticipated to reinforce global inequalities.
Recorded on December 11, 2020, a Matrix On Point panel discussion brought together a group of esteemed scholars to discuss the humanitarian, ecological, and geopolitical impacts of climate migration, along with forward-looking policies that can help mitigate displacement, address global inequalities, and support refugees forced to leave their homelands due to extreme weather, devastated ecosystems, and other climate-related issues. This event was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix (as part of the “Matrix on Point” series), and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Center for Effective Global Action, and Human Rights Center.
Panelists included Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Lead Environmental Specialist at the World Bank; Daniel Kammen, Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair; the Goldman School of Public Policy, where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy; and the Department of Nuclear Engineering; Elizabeth Fussell, Associate Professor of Population Studies and Environmental Studies at Brown University; and Teevrat Garg, Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley, and Founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.
A panel of scholars weighed in on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented shutdown of the global economy. Governments (mostly in advanced economies) responded with an array of programs, from increased unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, small business assistance loans, and broad monetary support. In spite of these unprecedented interventions, all financed by a rapid expansion of public debt, the economic outlook continues to be very uncertain nearly nine months into the pandemic. What are the likely near- and long-term consequences of the pandemic for the global economy? Which populations have been most affected? Which industries are likely to recover, and which will not? How should we evaluate the success of economic measures taken by governments in the U.S. and around the world?
Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy, and presented as part of the Berkeley Haas “New Thinking in a Pandemic” series, this “Matrix on Point” panel discussion — recorded on December 3, 2020 — brought together a panel of scholars to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panelists were Mitu Gulati, Professor of Law at Duke University; Hilary Hoynes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at UC Berkeley; Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan, the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Maryland; and Maurice Obstfeld, the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at Berkeley and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The panel was moderated by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Professor of Economics in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics; and S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Haas School of Business.
A "Matrix on Point" panel discussion focused on the rise of right-wing autocrats around the world.
A new generation of authoritarians has risen to power in democracies around the world. Since coming to office, these rulers have manipulated laws and reconfigured state bureaucracies, undermining civil liberties, flouting representative institutions, attacking the free press, and subverting international law. Figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Mihály Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States have all attained office by embracing, and in some instances co-opting, conservative populist movements.
Recorded on November 30, 2020, this Matrix On Point panel considered not only the illiberal tactics these right-wing autocrats have used to consolidate power and further their objectives, but also what it will take to undo the damage they have inflicted upon democratic institutions.
Panelists includedKim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University; Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Lena Lavinas, Professor of Welfare Economics at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Senior Researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPQ); and Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. The panel was moderated by Paul Pierson (moderator) is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
Recorded on November 12, 2020, this panel was presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.
Recorded on November 12, 2020, this video features a “post-mortem” analysis of the 2020 election — and what the implications are for the future. The panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and Social Science Matrix.
Panelists included: Peter Hart, Founder of Hart Research; Lyn Vavreck, the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA; and Nathan Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. The panel was moderated by Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
A Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel asked, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future?
Recorded on Nov. 5, 2020, this online “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured Rosemary Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing her book, The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material. Professor Joyce was joined in conversation by Cathryn Carson, Professor of History, and Kate O’Neill, Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
At the heart of Joyce’s book is the question, how can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would satisfy demands from the Environmental Protection Agency for a marker system that would be effective long into the future. Expert consultants proposed two very different designs: one based on archaeological sites recognized as cultural heritage monuments; the other proposing that certain forms invoke universal feelings.
The Department of Energy opted for a design based on archaeological ruins, cited as proof human-made markers could last and communicate warnings for thousands of years. This book explores the common sense assumptions the experts made about their archaeological models, and shows how they are contradicted by what archaeologists understand about these places and things. The book alternates between discussions of archaeological marker designs and reflections on the alternative proposal based on archetypes intended to arouse universal responses. Recognizing these archetype designs as similar in scale and form to Land Art projects, it compares the way government experts proposed their designs would work with views of modern artists and critics. Drawing on views of indigenous people who disproportionately are asked to accommodate such projects, the book explores concessions within the project that only oral transmission is likely to ensure such sites remain identifiable long into the future.
“It may seem surprising to have an archaeologist writing a book about the handling of nuclear waste,” Joyce said. “The scope of work has led me to ask questions about long-term temporalities, about how ongoing understandings of futures by people in the past could be conceived by those of us who are in their future, and for whom, what happened, is now a past.”
Joyce explained that her interest in the project began in 1999, when she saw an article in Time magazine describing how the government was working with artists to propose plans to mark nuclear waste sites so that they would not be violated for 10,000 years. “That was precisely the kind of long-term thinking I was interested in,” Joyce said. “As Time characterized it, the artists were drawing on universal features that would repel people, such as the use of sharp pointed metal, of red and of jaggedness. And immediately, as an anthropologist, I was attracted to the idea…because that goes against one of our central understandings, which is that there’s very little that can be assumed to be universal.”
Joyce’s book explores how different materials and symbols were considered to be markers, and how other methods — such as oral history — could be used to convey where the poisonous materials were buried. “Ultimately I’ve come to understand that what’s at stake here is something larger,” she said. “All of my attempts to explain the book tended to have recourse to poetry, to art, to fiction. And this is part of what I think is a broader challenge for those of us in the social sciences, whose work sometimes does not have the impact it should have in the world…. We need to remind ourselves of the ability of a poetic language to convey the impact, the meaning, and the implications of things.”
Watch the full panel discussion — including the responses by Kate O’Neil and Cathryn Carson — above or on YouTube.
Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, on his book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
Recorded on October 20, 2020, this video features a lecture by Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University.
Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion, named after Jack Citrin, the Citrin Award annual event recognizes the career of an individual who has made significant contributions to the study and understanding of public opinion. The 2020 Award celebrates the achievements of Robert Putnam, one of the most distinguished political scientists in the country, whose work has been an indispensable guide to understanding the underpinnings of democracy and community in America and elsewhere.
Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for “deepening our understanding of community in America.”
Putnam has written fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, including Making Democracy Work: Civic Transitions in Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, both among the most cited social science works in the last half-century.
An "Authors Meet Critics" panel on "Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality," by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker
Recorded on October 13, 2020, this online panel focused on the book, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, co-authored by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Jacob Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. This book explores how the modern Republican Party has come to be defined by “plutocratic pluralism,” which combines an elite-benefiting economic agenda with populist appeals.
Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and Christopher Parker, Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, responded as “critics” of the book. Both Skocpol and Parker have authored books on topics directly relevant to today’s GOP — including the Tea Party. “I think these are the authors of the two best books on the Tea Party, which I think is critical for understanding how we got to where we are,” Pierson said.
Moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, the lively dialogue began with an introductory overview by the two authors. Pierson explained that the book was a response to the fact that the “dramatic shift in the distribution of economic resources in the United States was not being sufficiently considered in in the discussion of where Donald Trump comes from and how he came to occupy the position in American politics that he did.” Pierson pointed out that wealth inequality is far greater in the United States than in Europe. “There is a tendency to lump what’s happening in the United States together with the explosion of right-wing populism that you see in various countries in Western Europe — and of course, there are important similarities — but this suggests that there are also very dramatic differences.”
Let Them Eat Tweets illustrates how the rise in inequality in the U.S. poses challenges for democratic politics. “As inequality grows, there’s likely to be more of a divergence of preferences and interest between the wealthy and everyone else — so the things that are going to benefit ordinary citizens in the economic sphere are not going to be beneficial to those economic elites,” Pierson explained. “Economic elites are likely to become more suspicious of democracy, and they’re going to work harder to make sure that voters are not going to use their numbers to overcome and possibly redistribute the economic resources that are increasingly concentrated at the top.”
In his comments, Hacker stressed the vital role that organizations have played in shaping the modern Republican Party, as groups like the NRA and various Christian Right organizations have become entwined with the party’s platform. “This is another respect in which the American landscape is distinctive,” Hacker said. “We have this ecosystem of right wing media that is willing and capable of deploying highly racialized, anti-government themes in a way that turns out to be mobilizing for a core group of voters.”
In her response, Skocpol largely praised the authors for showing how the GOP has evolved since the 1980s by “using all the levers available in the U.S. constitutional and federal system to further narrow majoritarian governing agendas.” However, she noted that the book would have benefited from a more clearly articulated causal argument. “I’d like to have seen a lot more precision about the various organizational networks that are in play in and around the Republican Party,” she said, adding that she would have also liked to see an analysis of the Democratic Party’s own role in allowing the rise of the modern GOP.
In his comments, Christopher Parker posed a series of questions to the authors, including what they think is different about the role of race today compared to earlier eras. “In the early part of the 20th century, during the Gilded Era, we saw massive amounts of inequality,” Parker said. “But we didn’t see any sort of racial conflict at the behest of other plutocrats…. If your theory is correct, we should have seen plutocrats try to stoke racial division, but we didn’t.”
The ninety-minute panel covered a wide range of topics, including similarities and differences between the U.S. and Europe, as well as the dynamic relationships between political economy and demographics. In his closing remarks, Hacker encouraged the audience to read the book and assess it for themselves. “I want to encourage people to read the book and decide whether I’m right that this book helps us understand 2016 to 2020,” Hacker said. “I think the argument is correct that, unless we address the extreme inequality that we have, some of the same particular strains that we’re talking about are going to keep recurring and threaten our democracy.”
Watch the full video of the event above or on YouTube.
Recorded on October 7, 2020, this video features Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley, discussing her book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, with Nikki Jones, Professor of African American Studies.
On October 7, 2020, Social Science Matrix hosted an online discussion focused on Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, a book authored by Brandi Thompson Summers, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley. In her book, Summers documents Washington, D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting the economic and racial developments of H Street, one of the city’s main commercial corridors. Thompson’s book offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital.
Dr. Summers discussed Black in Place with Nikki Jones, Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series, which features critically engaged discussions about recently published books by social scientists at UC Berkeley.
Jones noted at the outset, however, that “Authors Meet Critics” was an inappropriate title for the conversation. “[Authors meet critics] is standard fare in the academy, we know that,” Jones said. “But it represents a particular way of producing and consuming knowledge, and it doesn’t always align with the Black feminist politics that I like to bring into the space or even Black feminist modes of critique…. I show up in this space not as a critic of what has been thoughtfully and carefully produced, but as a co-constructor of knowledge, as a person who has engaged with your work and your ideas, and is poised to engage with you around those ideas, and others who are able to join us today, to also learn from that conversation.”
Summers began the discussion by providing an overview of her book’s central focus. “I’m really describing this changing historical role of Blackness and its interaction with processes of gentrification,” she explained. “I’m using this small space — H Street, this commercial corridor — to tell a much wider story about cultural change, about racial conflict, and also about capital flows and governance…. I wanted to take this hyperlocal focus because I think you’re better able to see the the nuances and the patterns that hold narratives together. And you can better see the inner workings of power when you look at a small geography, and unpack various elements that contribute to the production and the management of space.”
“It perfectly illustrates this problem that emerges when Black areas are essentially primed for revitalization,” she added. “I’m using Blackness as this central analytic to really understand how racism shapes Black life and, and how these liberal proclamations of ‘race neutrality’ or these calls for diversity only serve to marginalize and ultimately displace Black people.”
Summers explained that she coined the term “Black aesthetic emplacement” (BAE) as a way to think about how Blackness is “deployed to fortify public order and organize landscapes literally, as well as foster capital. This happens through this hegemonic capitalist structuring and a signifying of ideas about Blackness to really increase the desirability of coming to a particular neighborhood, or coming to the city. I don’t mean Black aesthetics as in Black cultural production. I’m thinking about Black aesthetics separately, where Blackness operates as an aesthetic that’s essential to gentrification as an urbanizing process, and can really be seen clearly in institutions that provide daily life or daily service.”
“The urban landscape is being produced in ways that necessitate the visibility of Blackness, but also operate alongside the displacement of Black people and those enterprises that cater to poor and working-class Black residents,” Summers said. “In the book, I’m trying to document these these everyday expressions of the symbolic takeover of Blackness…. The transformation of H street really exemplifies this dismantling of the Black city. It’s this disappearing mode of social and cultural life that’s been revised and and remade by this aesthetic infrastructure.”
The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.
In her comments, Jones praised how Summers uses the transformation of the H Street corridor to expose the story of race and gentrification, and noted that, as a sociologist, she likely would have taken a different approach. “I appreciate the way that space is the main character, the key respondent in this book,” Jones said. “I focus on on interpersonal interaction, so I simply would not would not have done the thing you do here quite masterfully, which is to make spatial relationships — the relationship between space and capital, and in turn the relationship between space, Blackness, and capital — a main point of entry into the story of H Street.”
“Sociologists can take space for granted,” Jones said. “In not taking space for granted, you create a way of seeing relationships — structural, economic, and social — that exist but aren’t accessible solely through the tools or training of social science generally. And in doing so, you provide a model not for the one way to see Blackness in the city, but a multiplicity of ways to see Blackness, and to see Black people in spaces where they are necessary, yet unseen.”
“Blackness is made to be seen in the city in ways that are increasingly untethered from the visual presence of actual Black people, untethered from Black life as it is lived, as you argue, in a place where blackness operates on the level of aesthetics.
Jones pointed to one of the examples described in Summers’ book — Chocolate City Beer, a (now defunct) craft brewery owned by two White men that used the Black power fist in its logo — to highlight “how ‘Blackness shows up in the city — Blackness as taste, Blackness as struggle, Blackness as nostalgia. Blackness acts as an engine of profit. Blackness is ‘the illusion of inclusion within the culture of modern capital’…. The book is a history of how post-racial discourse in neoliberal urban development converts Blackness into a prized aesthetic. The book shows us how a city becomes cool through Blackness, even as the population of Black people in the city declines.”
Watch the video of the discussion above or on YouTube.
