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Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial

Published March 10, 2020

In Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press), Laura E. Pérez — Professor of Ethnic Studies and and Chair of the Latinx Research Center at UC Berkeley — explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity.

In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez’s screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros ideologies: understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.

Recorded on February 27, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” featured Professor Pérez in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture, UC Berkeley; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, UC Berkeley.

About the Speakers

Laura E. Pérez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Laitnx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while achiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with Delilah Montoya, the multimedia exhibition “Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas” at 516 ARTS gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from January-March of 2009, and curated “Labor + a(r)t + orio: Bay Area Latin@ Arts Now” at the Richmond Art Center, CA (April-June 2011). She has published in numerous publications on feminism, Chicana/o, and hemispheric decolonial cultures. She is also co-editing a book on the multimedia artist, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, with Dr. Ann Marie Leimer.

Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Imperio. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the relationship between current literary practices and photographic languages, techniques and materialities. She is also the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2015) on photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, and of a book of essays on experimental writer Osvaldo Lamborghini (2008). She is guest editing a Special Issue of Film Quarterly on Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (forthcoming Spring 2016). She is currently at work on two book length projects. The first looks at instances of contemporary photographic production which have moved beyond the medium and material historical conditions of photography. The second one is a study of time as critique in contemporary aesthetics.

Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art since 1960 in the US, Europe, and Latin America; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009, named a best book of the year by Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the 2018 Robert Motherwell Book Award). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of two special journal issues (“Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016). With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and is travelling to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and the ICA in Philadelphia. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson (under advanced contract with Yale University Press).

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Other Events

The California Primary and Super Tuesday

Published March 3, 2020

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the "Super Tuesday" primary, this panel focused on California's role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included: John Pérez: Chair, UC Board of Regents and Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly; Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey; and David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times. The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

Recorded on February 28, 2020, a few days before the “Super Tuesday” primary, this panel focused on California’s role in the 2020 presidential election. Speakers included:

John Pérez, Chair, UC Board of Regents, Speaker Emeritus, California State Assembly
Mark DiCamillo, Director, IGS Survey
David Lauter, Washington Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times

The panel was moderated by David Carrillo (Chair), Executive Director, California Constitution Center, Berkeley Law.

This event was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Authors Meet Critics

They Were Her Property

Published February 12, 2020

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this "Authors Meets Critics" panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured a discussion of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. In discussing her book, Jones-Rogers engaged with two eminent colleagues: Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor in the Department of English, UC Berkeley; and Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley. (Learn more about the Authors Meet Critics series.)

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, They Were Her Property makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

They Were Her Property foregrounds the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and puts their reflections into conversation with other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records in order to show how white women’s pecuniary investments in the institution shaped their gender identities and to situate them at the center of 19th century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. As a whole, this book offers more expansive and differently gendered understandings of American slavery, the trans-regional domestic slave trade, and nineteenth-century slave markets.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is associate professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the winner of the 2013 Lerner-Scott Prize for best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history. She is working on two new projects: “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law, examines the ways that West African customs and laws influenced English thinking about matrilineal descent and may have influenced their decisions to implement matrilineal descent laws in their North American colonies; and “A Country so dreadfull for a White Woman” reconstructs the lives of nearly 300 British women and girls who travelled to the African littoral on Royal African Company slave ships and settled in the company’s forts and castles before 1750. Jones-Rogers earned her PhD in History from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history and vernacular culture. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017). A book on The Wild Tchoupitoulas—a landmark album of processional call-and-response music arranged as electric funk—is forthcoming in the 33 1/3 Series from Bloomsbury. A critical edition, The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love, is forthcoming from LSU Press. A co-edited collection of essays, Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Current research includes a collaborative work, Slavery and Conspiracy in the Atlantic World.

Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies, received her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Professor Salzinger is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and with the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix Lecture

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Race for Profit

Published January 28, 2020

In a Matrix Distinguished Lecture, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained how banks and the real estate industry have undermined black homeownership.

On January 24, 2020, Social Science Matrix was honored to host Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor discussed her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press and has been longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Global Metropolitan Studies.

Taylor began her lecture by describing how, in the 1960s, rat infestations were common in Black poor and working-class communities. “In the aftermath of riots in Philadelphia in 1964, a city commissioned report found that one hundred percent of reported rat bites happened in segregated, Black majority neighborhoods,” she said. “Housing segregation—maintained through a vexing combination of white terroristic violence, public policy, and the exclusionary practices of the private sector—insured the dilapidated and substandard condition of Black housing. These were the evidence of exclusion and enclosure and they boiled over into the electricity of successive waves of uprisings across the country.”

Poor housing conditions, she explained, were a major driver of riots in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities throughout the 1960s, and led the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, to call for historic changes to American housing policies. This led to Lyndon Johnson’s Housing and Urban Development Act, which sought to promote single-family homeownership for the poor. “At the heart of the legislation,” Taylor said, “was a low-income homeownership plan that aimed to transform low-income renters into homeowners…. The terms of the new homeownership program were a low $200 down payment, 20 percent of a participant’s income as their mortgage regardless of the cost of the house, and an interest rates capped at one percent. The inclusion of federal mortgage insurance for the first time meant that in the worst-case scenario—foreclosure or abandonment—the federal government was obligated to pay back the mortgage to the lenders. These terms kept the price of the homes manageable for low-income and working-class people.”

Yet this program led to corrupt practices by the real estate industry and banks, Taylor explained, as “speculators and brokers bought up cheap, dilapidated properties hoping to then flip them for higher prices in sales to people who would qualify for the new programs. Not only could money be made by flipping cheap properties, but brokers found it easy to bribe poorly paid FHA appraisers to inflate the value of the houses in the new urban market. Bankers made money on the front end of the real estate deal by securing the loan, and then they made money on the back end with expensive closing costs associated with selling the property. Everyone made money—except the poor Black families that were disproportionately saddled with these broken homes in cities across the country…. In narrowing their focus to ‘access’ alone, racial liberals overlooked the racist practices embedded within those institutions. This was shockingly clear in the real estate industry. Banks and the real estate industry had played a central role in creating the urban housing crisis—exemplified by the persistent presence of rats in Black housing—so the sudden involvement of these same private sector forces was a recipe for disaster.”

The program failed to remedy racial segregation and income inequality, Taylor said, as many families purchased homes that were in disrepair and had little chance of gaining value over time. “Miserable and dangerous housing conditions in the existing urban market led people to walk away from the homes they had recently purchased, and the numbers of defaults, foreclosures, and FHA insurance payments began to rise,” she said. “Where white housing was seen as an asset developed through inclusion and the accruable possibilities of its surrounding property, Black housing was marked by its exclusion and isolation, where value was extracted, not imbued. These racialized narratives of families, communities, and their built environments reinforced and naturalized the segregative practices among real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and the white public. Indeed, these perceptions of insurmountable difference steeped in the permanence of blood, race, and culture constituted the underwriting criteria that determined who was to be excluded and who should be included.”

Taylor noted that the trend continued in the 1990s and 2000s, as the rise of subprime lending — and the subsequent market collapse — led to unprecedented home losses for African Americans. “For more than fifty years now, the private sector has been viewed as most capable of ending the persisting urban housing crises,” Taylor explained. “And yet those crises have become even starker over time, creating even greater degrees of housing precariousness. This is especially true in the realm of homeownership…. The recurring perception of ‘risky’ Black buyers has opened pathways for the reemergence of naked, predatory practices in the real estate market. From rent-to-own schemes to the reappearance of LICs in lieu of conventional mortgages, real estate continues to pilfer African Americans in search of their American dream in the housing market. It is not history repeating itself. It is the predictable outcome when the home is a commodity and it continues to be promoted as the fulfillment and meaning of citizenship.”

Watch the full video of the lecture above or on YouTube.

Other Events

Who’s on First? The Democratic Race at the End of the Invisible Primary

Published December 18, 2019

Recorded on December 12, 2019, this video features a panel on the state of the presidential race heading into the 2020 primary season.

Recorded on December 12, 2019, this video features a panel entitled “Who’s on First? The Democratic Race at the End of the Invisible Primary,” in which experts weighed in on the state of the presidential race heading into the 2020 primary season.

The panel featured: Mark Barabak, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times; Terri Bimes, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley; John Zaller, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and author of The Party Decides; and Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution and Distinguished Resident Scholar at UC Berkeley.

This event was co-sponsored by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Authors Meet Critics

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

Published December 12, 2019

Watch our "Authors Meet Critics" panel on Professor Wendy Brown's In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West.

On December 5, 2019, the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” Series featured Professor Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West, in dialogue with Gillian Hart, Professor Emerita, Department of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Tianna Paschel, Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology at UC Berkeley.

In her opening remarks, Brown explained that her book’s focus is “the deliberate, multi-pronged neoliberal assault on the institutions, venues, practices, and values of democracy.” She said that her book was animated by a variety of questions related to the connection between neoliberalism and anti-democratic forces.

“Neoliberalism generates extreme inequality of wealth and access through its stripped-down welfare state, privatization of public goods, regressive taxation, deregulation, union busting, and rapid deindustrialization,” she said. “But why does rebellion against this extreme inequality take such an anti-democratic form?… Why do we get a hard right instead of left response to extreme capitalist depredations and crises?”

Other questions motivating her book, she said, relate to the role of neoliberal reason in “generating the ethnonationalism and conservative family values within this anti-democratic retort,” as well as the question of how “the combination of neoliberal socioeconomic dethronement of the white working- and middle-classes conjoin with traditional values mobilization — and an ever intensifying nihilism — to turn or convert so-called conservative values into a more explicit project of attempting to re-secure white male supremacy, both at the state and civic levels, and restore it at the familial or cultural levels.”

Brown also said she sought to answer the question, “what is the relevance of the fact that, instead of a neoliberal utopia, what many of us in the trade have come to call ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ generated a political formation that the founding neo-liberals themselves would have abhorred.”

Her argument, she said, is that “neo-liberalism tilled the ground for an anti-democratic right wing revolt. And that argument is built both from an examination of the critiques of democracy by the original neo-liberals and through trying to think through how, in ‘actually existing neo-liberalism,’ their vision was significantly distorted by forces that they ignored or neglected, from political power to diseducation to the acceleration of nihilism in our time.”

Following Brown’s remarks was Professor Gillian Hart, who praised the book’s core premise, noting that “there actually are absolutely huge political stakes in how we think about neo-liberalism in relation to the attenuation of democracy.” In her comments—which included a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Brown’s book—Hart noted that “what has happened is the hopes for widespread social and economic justice are very systematically being inverted. And what we are left with is a sort of an outer shell of liberal democracy, a horrendously unequal, divided populace and massive growing popular anger that often takes the form of xenophobia and femicide.”

Professor Tianna Paschel also provided a critique of Brown’s book, describing it as a “timely piece of work…that will be discussed and debated for decades to come.” Paschel noted that the book focuses on the “archetype of the right-wing, white nationalist populace, which is the white, working-class and/or poor, rural midlander man who has in some way experienced the devastating impact of de-industrialization, the ‘race of the bottom,’ and other neoliberal economic reforms at the same time that they felt this kind of devaluation.”

“I understand the attention to this demographic, and I also appreciate the nuanced discussion of nihilism, futurity, and white men,” Paschel said. “However, I want to know if focusing too much attention on this specific demographic, or even on white evangelicals, if by doing so we miss whiteness’s more broad function under this current moment…. Marx famously talked about workers under capitalism having nothing left to bring to market but their labor power, right? Perhaps rather than white male privilege being dethroned or even wounded, I want to suggest that the stripping away of economic stability for some white workers and poor whites has actually left white men in this category to have nothing but their white maleness to bring to market or to politics, which under neoliberalism are such similar things.”

Watch the video of the panel above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

On IPCC, Climate Crisis

Published November 27, 2019

A "Matrix On Point" panel examined the climate crisis from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

On November 18, a “Matrix On Point” panel examined a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. The Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate paints a dire picture about the state of our planet’s ecological health, and calls for “ambitious and effective adaptation for sustainable development.”

The panel featured Daniel Kammen, Chair of the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley; James Bishop, Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science; Kathryn De Master, Assistant Professor of Agriculture, Society, and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM); and Alexander Arroyo, PhD Student in the Department of Geography. Matrix On Point panels are designed to “draw upon the extraordinary range of expertise on these issues that we have on the Berkeley campus,” said Michael Watts, Interim Director of Matrix, in his opening remarks.

The discussion began with an overview by Daniel Kammen, who has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various IPCC reports since 1999. (Kammen was among the scientists who, as part of the IPCC, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.) He provided an overview of how the IPCC’s reports have evolved over the past two decades as scientific consensus about the potential threats and impacts of climate change has grown. (Slides from Kammen’s presentation can be found here.)

In the first IPCC report, Kammen said, “the strongest statement that we could collectively say…was that unequivocal detection of climate change is not likely for a decade.” The second report concluded there was “discernible human influence” on climate change. And a subsequent report concluded that “warming is 90% likely due to humans” and that “warming will most strongly impact the global poor.” For this third report, Kammen noted that he helped produce a special report on renewable energy that showed how an 80% clean energy economy could be possible. “Philosophically, this was a transition point, in terms of actually baking in a list of what we could do,” he said.

Kammen explained that there has been little progress since the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, which sought to keep the rise of global temperatures below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. “The brilliance of the 1.5 degree report is that it highlights very clearly, sector by sector, how much of a difference to the planet it will make to meet the one and a half degree target as opposed to the two,” Kammen said.

But he noted that achieving the 1.5-degree limit “basically means doubling down on everything we know how to do well—energy efficiency, renewables—and also to do things we don’t do well—or we don’t do it all—like finding ways to price pollution and be much more aggressive, not just to invest in clean energy, but also to protect forests and wetlands and fragile ocean systems.”

“The progress has been exceedingly slow,” Kammen said. “Only one country is on pace to make its target…. Many very solid scientists and economists and engineers think even two degrees… is impossible because we’re not on path for it,” Kammen said. “We’ve already warmed by between one degree and 1.1 degrees, so there’s not a lot of head room left…. We need buy-in among decision makers. Meaningful industry participation has been absent. And of course, without that, government participation has been largely absent.”

Next to speak was James Bishop, who provided an overview of some of the impacts of climate change on the ocean, including the potential impacts on fisheries and marine and land productivity. Bishop explained that he studies the role of “fish poop” in capturing carbon. (Slides from Bishop’s presentation can be found here.)

“Ocean pH is going down everywhere and sea level is rising everywhere,” he explained. “And then there are the ecosystem impacts. The prospect from this report is quite bleak. Why is this a crisis? We are actually running out of time to do something in a meaningful way. When I started this in the 1970s, everyone was saying, well, global warming. But this is global crisis. The social science impacts are huge because a lot of communities live at sea level. And even if you go up to 1.5 degrees and stabilize the recovery of the ocean to preindustrial CO2 levels, it will take thousands of years to recover, because that’s the time scale of the overturning circulation of the ocean.”

“That’s the wake up call,” Bishop said. “We’ve changed the circulation of the ocean, the return of nutrients to the surface, and that’s going to feed back into ocean productivity and fisheries.”

Drawing on her expertise in the sociology of agriculture and food production, Kathryn De Master focused on possible levers of change that could help reduce the impacts of climate change. She noted that “it’s a very complicated problem that requires some really nuanced solutions,” particularly as a change in one area—e.g. people deciding to reduce their milk and meat consumption—can have other impacts, such as dairy farmers choosing to use their land for fracking or other industrial production.

“One thing I think the IPCC gets right is that they notice that equity is a critical part of actually solving the climate change puzzle,” she said. “And if we’re attending to some of the social problems like equity, like people’s livelihoods, then some of the scientific questions may in fact get a little easier.

The final presentation came from Alexander Arroyo, who described himself as a “critical geographer with a background in environmental planning and landscape architecture,” with a specific interest in the “digital ocean,” which he explained is “a slew of technologies that are being developed to sense, map, and model what’s happening in the ocean.”

“I’m really interested in [the IPCC report] as a kind of geographical story,” Arroyo said. “What is really being shown here? How do we analyze these changes? Clearly they’re temporal, they’re spatial, but they’re also relational.”

Arroyo provided an overview of potential impacts of shifting coastlines and ice caps, including how fishermen and other groups may realign themselves. “What kind of new solidarities does this enable?” Arroyo asked. “Thinking from the ocean actually allows you to enter into new spaces of solidarity and then figure out how that hits the land, how that hits very specific conditions, contexts, and communities. So rather than this being a kind of think globally act locally issue, this is actually thinking in a really deeply interconnected but specific way.”

The presentations were followed by a lively audience Q&A. For information about other upcoming Matrix On Point events, please see https://matrix.berkeley.edu/events.

Slides from Daniel Kammen’s Presentation

Slides from James Bishop’s Presentation

Matrix On Point

The Trump Impeachment

Published November 10, 2019

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Robert B. Reich discussed "The Trump Impeachment" at a recent Matrix On Point event.

Will Congress vote to impeach President Trump? What would his legal defense look like? If not impeachment, how else might this process play out?

These questions were at the heart of a recent “Matrix On Point” panel discussion featuring two prominent scholars: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the School of Law and an expert in constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction, and Robert B. Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, who has served in three national administrations, including as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Over the course of 80 minutes, the two men engaged with audience members in discussion about an array of factors that could shape the prospects for President Trump’s impeachment. The event was co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Following an introduction by Michael Watts, Interim Director of Social Science Matrix and Emeritus “Class of 1963” Professor of Geography and Development Studies, Dean Chemerinsky kicked off the discussion with an overview of what the constitution says (and does not say) in regard to impeachment. He cited the historic examples of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, and noted that in addition to being removed through impeachment, a president can choose to resign, as Nixon did, or both houses of Congress can choose to censure a president, as happened to Andrew Johnson.

“There may be more talk about censure of Trump if there is a desire in both houses to do something,” Chemerinsky said. “There are no legal consequences to a censure; it’s an expression of displeasure toward the president.”

He noted that the Constitution says the President can be removed “for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdimeanaors,” and that last phrase could become prominent in the coming weeks and months. “The real focus is, what does it mean to say, ‘other high crimes and misdemeanors?’” Chemerinsky said. “A criminal violation is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to be a high crime and misdeameanor.”

Chemerinsky noted that, in the case of Trump’s statements, “there’s not a disupute over what was said: Trump said, ‘I need a favor,’ and none other than Mick Mulvaney said, ‘it was a quid pro quo, get over it’…. The fact-finding won’t be a important as it was with Nixon. It’s, is this a high crime and misdemeanor? And it will come to those who say, this is a serious abuse of power…and others will say, this is what presidents do, and it doesn’t rise to a high crime and misdemeanor.”

Chemerinsky also wondered whether the president’s violations of the emoluments clause will come into play. “Until January 2017, most people thought emoluments were just a skin cream,” he quipped. He commented that, because the Constitution “doesn’t say much” about impeachment, lawmakers could find ways to avoid the process. “What if the house writes Articles of Impeachment but Mitch McConnell says, that’s nice, we’re not going to hold a trial? There’s nothing we can do.”

In his remarks, Robert Reich said he has had close encounters with the impeachment process throughout his career, first by working for Robert Bork, who oversaw the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon impeachment era, and later as a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He agreed with Chemerinsky that the Constitution says very little about impeachment. “This is all about politics and power,” Reich said. “As much as we would like to find answers in the constitution, they really are not there. We have to find answers in politics and power. It’s almost impossible that the Senate would come up with the 20 GOP votes to convict Trump of impeachment, even assuming every democratic senator votes for it—almost impossible, because we have a very different system of politics and allocation of power than we did with Nixon and Clinton.”

Reich explained that the current media landscape has been a major driver in this shift over the past 20 years. “Forty percent of Americans are entranced in a counternarrative about what is happening,” Reich said. “They do not believe Trump even engaged with Ukraine in any kind of negotiation, quid pro quo or not…. The thing that gets me most worried about where we are as a democracy is that, to maintain and sustain counternarratives, you have to have a counter-system of informing people, of shaping people’s brains around what is reality…. We have a president who lies like most people breathe. His lies reach 68 million people on Twitter every day, unfiltered. We’ve never had a system in which president lies that much – and in which those lies get to individuals without any filter…. The problem is not really Fox news. It’s lack of intermediation combined with a president who will say anything.”

Reich said the core problem is that too many Americans feel left out by a “rigged” system, and they are looking to candidates like Donald Trump and Robert Reich because they will “shake things up.”

“Donald Trump is the culmination of years of something happening in this country, and it is and would be inappropriate for me just to have a discussion about what is happening without talking about what led to what is happening,” Reich said. “The dilemmas, the anxieties many of us feel in this room, are a product in part of what has come over the last 30-40 years: the failure of the political system to respond effectively to the frustrations, anxieties, and eventually hopelessness of a large number of people in this country.”

Watch the full of the presentation above or on the UCTV Public Policy Channel. You can also see how the Daily Cal reported on this event.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: Brexit

Published October 29, 2019

Cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues.

The end of October 2019 marks the deadline for Brexit (“British Exit”), when the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union. Following a revolt from within his own party, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has failed in his efforts to move ahead without a “backstop” and called a General Election for December 12. What’s next for Brexit? And how might Brexit transform political and economic life in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world?

On October 24, three distinguished scholars—Mark Bevir, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies, Akasemi Newsome, Associate Director of the Institute of European Studies, and Ian Duncan, Florence Green Bixby Chair in the English Department—took on this important topic as part of “Matrix On Point,” a new brown-bag series that promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues.

In her opening remarks Akasemi Newsome stressed the importance of maintaining a “longitudinal perspective” on Brexit,” and noted we should “step away from the minute-to-minute development of Brexit and consider the fact that Brexit has implications that will be unfolding for several years, and that will involve nation-states not only confined to the UK, but other other member states of the EU, other countries around Europe and around the world.”

“Brexit is a process,” Newsome said. “It is not any single event. It is not the referendum of June 23, 2016. It’s not the two-year time frame that comes into place with the invocation of Article 50 calling for the withdrawal of a member state from the European Union. And it’s not a single deal—it’s not Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, and it’s certainly not only confined to Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement. Rather, it’s a series of overlapping processes and debates that are taking place involving multiple actors in Britain, in the EU, the rest of Europe, and the world.”

In his comments, Mark Bevir noted that what will happen next is highly unpredictable, but that the long-term impacts may be less significant than many think. “What will happen next? My best guess is something like [Boris Johnson’s] deal will actually pass with or without a general election,” he said. “What will be the impact on the UK? In general, if you’re talking about society and the economy, as opposed to politics, I would like to suggest that the impact on the UK will be minimal. It really won’t make a huge deal of difference.”

Drawing on his expertise, English scholar Ian Duncan considered Brexit in terms of literary elements. “From the point of view of character, like many, I’ve been marveling at the fecklessness and mendacity and chicanery of the principal political actors in this ongoing story—the surge of what should be bit players in national life,” Duncan said.

Describing the “narrative form” of Brexit, he pointed out the “strange discrepancy between historical scales of what seems to be unfolding…macroscopically, on the stage of world history, and the durational scale of national history. We seem to have grand narratives unfolding, as opposed to the absolutely baffling intricacies and contingent developments of what’s happening on the day-to-day, hour-to-hour unfolding of procedure.”

Watch the video above (or on YouTube) to hear the full discussion, as well as the audience Q&A.

Authors Meet Critics

The Populist Temptation

Published October 15, 2019

Watch the inaugural "Authors Meet Critics" panel, which centered on Professor Barry Eichengreen's book, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era.

Recorded on October 3, 2019, this panel centered on The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics & Political Science at UC Berkeley. This event was presented as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” book talk series.

Eichengreen was joined on the panel by Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, a renowned specialist in populism, social theory, and political economy; and Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Clinton Administration and is currently a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“I’m a little surprised to find myself here,” Eichengreen said in his opening remarks. “If you’d asked me five years ago, I wouldn’t have anticipated that I’d be writing about populism, but things happen. Donald Trump happened. [Viktor] Orbán happened. [Tayyip] Erdoğan happened. After my book, [Jair] Bolsonaro happened. And Brexit happened.”

Eichengreen explained that he defines populism as “a political movement with three dimensions: anti-elite, authoritarian, and nativist, or anti-other,” with different populist movements and politicians combining these dimensions in different ways.

The Populist Temptation places the global resurgence of populism in a deep historical context. It argues that populists tend to thrive in the wake of economic downturns, when it is easy to convince the masses of elite malfeasance. While bankers, financiers, and ‘bought’ politicians are partly responsible, populists’ own solutions tend to be simplistic and economically counterproductive.

By arguing that ordinary people are at the mercy of extra-national forces beyond their control, populists often degenerate into demagoguery and xenophobia. Eichengreen posits that interventions must begin with shoring up and improving the welfare state so that it is better able to act as a buffer for those who suffer most during economic slumps.

“This is an extremely erudite book,” Pierson said. “I can’t think of anyone out there who could cover this range of modern economic history and political economic history with the knowledge base and skill that Barry does. I think it’s also a very wise book, in the way that it covers an enormous amount of ground.”

View the video of this Authors Meet Critics event above, or on YouTube.

Other Events

Will It Still Be The Economy, Stupid, In 2020?

Published October 7, 2019

A video featuring panel discussion with four distinguished political scientists discussing the role of the economy in the 2020 elections. This event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Recorded on September 24, 2019, this panel discussion featured distinguished political scientists discussing the role the economy is likely to play in the 2020 elections. This event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Following introductory remarks by Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, each of the three featured panelists presented 20-minute talks.

Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, emphasized that, while the economy always plays a starring role in presidential campaigns, other factors matter as well, including who the candidates are (“all candidates come with constraints, and it matters who you’re standing next to,” she explained), as well as the messages they convey in their campaigns. She noted that it would be “super risk” for Democrats to challenge Donald Trump on the same terms as the 2016 election, and instead should seek a “new frontier” message.

Douglas Rivers, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, discussed the role of surveys themselves in determining people’s opinions about the economy. He shared that he recently conducted an experiment showing that framing a question such as “are you better off now than you were a year ago?” results in starkly different results depending on whether the question is asked in the context of a political survey or a market research survey. “Almost half of the effect goes away if you take away the context of it being a political survey,” Rivers said.

James E. Campbell, UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, also noted that, while GDP growth in an election year seems to be closely aligned to the election outcome, there are other factors. “It’s clear the economy is important, but there are complications to this in determining the effect,” Campbell said. Among the complicating factors are the question of timing of the economic growth; the fact that partisanship affects people’s opinions about the economy; and that the amount of growth that is seen as negative or positive is difficult to determine. “On top of that, we have a problem that we often don’t recognize these problems,” Campbell said.

Watch the video above (or on YouTube) to learn more about the role the economy will play in the 2020 election.

SPEAKERS

JAMES E. CAMPBELL
James E. Campbell is a UB Distinguished Professor of political science at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of four university press books and more than 80 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton University Press). His other books include The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote (Texas A&M, 2000 and 2008), Cheap Seats: The Democratic Party’s Advantage in U.S. House Elections (Ohio State, 1996), and The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections (Kentucky, 1993 and 1997).

DOUGLAS RIVERS
Doug Rivers is one of the world’s leading experts on survey research and a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He has taught at Harvard University, Caltech, UCLA, and, most recently, Stanford University, where he is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Doug has founded two successful technology companies, Preview Systems and Knowledge Networks. Preview Systems pioneered the field of digital rights management, conducted a successful IPO in 1999, and was sold in 2001. As CEO of the company, he was named Executive of the Year (2000) by Research Business Report and received the Innovator’s Award by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (2001). He is also a CBS News consultant and has published academic papers in numerous journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and the American Economics Review, to name a few. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

LYNN VAVRECK
Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, a contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, and a recipient of the Andrew F. Carnegie Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of five books, including the “most ominous” book on the 2016 election: Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, and The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, described as the “definitive account” of the 2012 election. Political consultants on both sides of the aisle refer to her work on political messaging in The Message Matters as “required reading” for presidential candidates. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and she has served on the advisory boards of both the British and American National Election Studies. At UCLA, she teaches courses on campaigns, elections, public opinion, and the 1960s. Professor Vavreck holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester and held previous appointments at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and The White House. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she remains a loyal Browns fan and is a “known equestrian,” to draw on a phrase from the 2012 presidential campaign.

GABRIEL LENZ
Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, Gabriel Lenz researches voters’ ability to control their elected officials. His aim is to further our understanding of when voters succeed in holding politicians accountable, when they fail, and how to help them avoid failures. He has published a book, “Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Performance and Policies,” with the University of Chicago Press, and his articles have appeared the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, and Political Psychology. His work draws on insights from social psychology and economics, and his research and teaching interests are in the areas of elections, public opinion, political psychology, and political economy. Although specializing in American democracy, he also conducts research on Canada, UK, Mexico, Netherlands, and Brazil. He has ongoing projects about improving voters’ assessments of the performance of politicians, reducing the role of candidate appearance in elections, and measuring political corruption.

Other Events

How Do Communities Heal After an Incident of Sexual Violence?

Published May 23, 2019

How do we move forward after an incident of sexual violence or harassment involving members of our community? What does a trauma-informed community look like? Recorded on May 13, 2019, this video features a panel discussion addressing these and other questions, featuring representatives from different resource centers on the UC Berkeley campus.

Sexual violence occurs in our communities, and the last year has begun to demonstrate just how often. But what next? How do we move forward after an incident of sexual violence or harassment involving members of our community? Acknowledging the impact of an incident on not only the survivor but the community as a whole is essential to preventing retraumatization and future harmful behavior. How can communities address the traumatization of the survivor and those around them? What does a trauma-informed community look like?

Recorded on May 13, 2019, this video features a panel discussion featuring representatives from different resource centers on the UC Berkeley campus. The panel was presented as part of a Matrix Research Team entitled “Community Conversations on Sexual Violence and Harassment: Narratives of Activism, Inclusion, Confidentiality, Accountability, and Healing,” led by the Special Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor on Sexual Violence/Sexual Harassment.

The panel was moderated by Rudolfo Mendoza-Denton, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley. Panelists included Kendra Fox-Davis, Complaint Resolution Officer, Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, UC Berkeley; Tobirus Newby, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, UHS Social Services, UC Berkeley; Julie Shackford-Bradley, Coordinator and co-founder, Restorative Justice Center, UC Berkeley; and Liat Wexler, Prevention Manager for Staff and Faculty, PATH to Care Center, UC Berkeley.