Recap Archives - Page 8 of 13 - Social Science Matrix

Berkeley Conversation: Defending Against Disinformation

Published September 23, 2021

On September 21, UC Berkeley Public Affairs presented a panel discussion focused on the proliferation of disinformation and what can be done about it. Social Science Matrix helped organize this event, which featured a group of preeminent scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. The write-up of the event below, “Can we thwart disinformation? Yes, scholars say — but it won’t be easy,” was written by Berkeley News reporter Edward Lempinen.

Rising death tolls from COVID-19, a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, efforts to ban teaching of critical race theory — all of these recent attacks on public health and political values have been driven, in part, by aggressive disinformation. But while the costs are clear, UC Berkeley scholars said in a recent panel that there are no easy answers, even as disinformation threatens democracy.

In the latest episode of Berkeley Conversations, an elite panel of scholars described a range of potential solutions, from measures to strengthen old-school local news media to government regulation of titans like Facebook and Twitter. But there’s a critical obstacle: Efforts to directly block disinformation could challenge core American values, such as free speech and freedom of the press.

That’s the challenge facing a troubled American democracy — and that was the crux of the provocative, and sometimes impassioned, online discussion.

Dean Chemerinsky — Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Berkeley Law

“The alternative to allowing the marketplace of ideas to work is to give the government the power to decide what’s true and false — and to censor what’s false,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s leading constitutional experts. “I am much more afraid of that than I am of allowing all ideas to be expressed, even in light of the problems.”

Others, however, argued the threats to democracy have grown so acute that, without action, the First Amendment could be used to undermine the Constitution.

“It will be a real shame if democracy dies on the altar of free speech,” said Susan D. Hyde, chair of the political science department at Berkeley and an expert in democratic backsliding. The increasing frequency and intensity of disinformation “is not going to fix itself,” added john powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. “It’s not clear to me that democracies will survive this, unless we do something very deliberate and very robust.”

Susan Hyde, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley

Berkeley Conversations is an online discussion series that convenes world-class scholars to discuss a range of critical issues at a moment of historic challenge and instability in the U.S. and worldwide. Tuesday’s event, “Defending Against Disinformation,” was sponsored by Berkeley Law, the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, with support from the Social Science Matrix.

Disinformation, in simple terms, is the dissemination of false information to shape political and social outcomes. It’s different from misinformation — and more malicious — because it is deliberately false. Not only does it contribute to our deep polarization, but, clearly, it costs lives and erodes democracy.

“I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say these are existential threats to our society and democracy,” said Hany Farid, associate dean and head of the School of Information. “I don’t know how we have a stable society if we can’t agree on basic facts, because everybody is being manipulated by attention-grabbing, dopamine-fueled algorithms that promote the dregs of the Internet, creating these bizarre, fact-free alternate realities.”

Disinformation finds an audience — and influence — in a society that still suffers from racial and ethnic segregation, said powell. Research shows that in segregated societies, different groups don’t understand each other, powell said, and lack of understanding leads to exaggerated negative views of other group.

john powell, professor of law, ethnic studies and African American studies — john powell, UC Berkeley Professor of Law, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies; Director, Othering and Belonging Institute

Plus, he said, research shows that U.S. segregation is growing worse, not better. In such an environment, those who peddle disinformation find a receptive audience. “Fear moves faster than a positive emotion,” powell explained. “If you’re trying to create fear, you have a huge advantage. If you try to increase hate, you have a huge advantage.”

That’s a social problem, powell said, but one that’s “hypercharged by technology.”

The power of disinformation is further compounded by the steep decline of conventional news media in the U.S., said Geeta Anand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who’s now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism.

Advertising revenue for traditional news publications dropped 62% from 2008 to 2018, Anand said. More than 50% of advertising revenue has shifted from traditional news organizations to social media. Of 9,000 publications operating in 1995, some 2,000 have closed.

“It’s expensive to train reporters to go out and report news, to check sources, to make phone calls, to check public records,” Anand explained. “Disinformation is cheap. … Social media companies are making billions, and news organizations are barely hanging on.”

Henry Brady, Dean, Goldman School of Public Policy

In their 90-minute discussion, the scholars focused on two areas for reform that might check the advance and impact of disinformation: strengthening local journalism and finding ways to moderate the influence of social media, whether through social and financial pressure or through government regulation.

For example, panel moderator Henry Brady, former dean of the Goldman School, suggested a tax on Internet companies, with proceeds used to support local journalism. He also suggested aggressive efforts to break up massive companies like Facebook, in hopes that new and more socially responsible social media platforms would emerge.

But many proposals for containing disinformation collide with the requirements of the First Amendment.

The panelists focused particularly on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which holds that Internet companies cannot be held legally liable for content posted on their sites by others. That protection was crucial for building the Internet and unleashing its vast power.

But changing that, and making the companies liable, would require them to review billions of posts a day, Chemerinsky said. Inevitably, they would block many more posts, with less than surgical precision.

Hany Farid, Associate Dean, Head of the UC Berkeley School of Information

On the right and on the left, “everyone wants to criticize Section 230,” Chemerinsky said. “I don’t see a better alternative.” Instead, he said, social media companies should be pressured to change practices and algorithms that lead them to allow and promote communication that is harmful, hateful and threatening to democracy.

Other panelists challenged that reasoning.

“The problem with disinformation on social media today is not primarily one of technology, but one of corporate responsibility,” Farid said. “We have been waiting for now several decades for the technology sector to find their moral compass, and they have not seemed to be able to do that. They continue to unleash technology that is harmful to individuals, to groups, to societies and to democracies.

“Left to their own devices,” he added, “that will continue.”

Farid and others acknowledged the need to balance interests and to work within the Constitution — but also argued that the moment requires urgent action.

“What we’re talking about is continuing to sort of dance the tango on a sinking ship,” said Hyde, co-director of the Institute of International Studies. “It’s just not working. … The Constitution is not going to matter on some level if we get to this really extreme worst-case scenario.”

Geeta Anand, Dean, UC Berkeley Journalism

Anand and others suggested that Berkeley could help to convene other universities and scholars to focus on solutions for disinformation and the challenges to democracy.

“I think Berkeley can do that,” she said. “We have the most incredible brains — legal brains, technology experts, public policy, government, belonging experts, journalism experts — right here on our campus. … There cannot be any area that we refuse to consider, or reconsider. We have to think outside the box. And we have to include the industry in helping us understand where the solutions lie.”

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: Leaving Afghanistan

Published September 13, 2021

On September 7, 2021, UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the Institute of International Studies (IIS) hosted a panel discussion, “Matrix on Point: Leaving Afghanistan,” that featured a group of scholars examining the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences of the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

“‘Leaving Afghanistan’ refers to the withdrawal of the remainder of US troops from the country, as we approach what would have been a 20th anniversary of a long war and military presence on the ground,” explained Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix, in an introduction to the event. “More tragically, ‘Leaving Afghanistan’ evokes the thousands of people who have departed the country in recent weeks, under tremendously painful, chaotic, and dangerous circumstances, and the many more who might still be trying to leave at this very moment, or will in the near future.”

Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, moderated the panel, which featured a series of presentations followed by an open discussion. The event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point event series, which features focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues.

Omar Sharifi, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Humanities, American University of Afghanistan, and Country Director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, led off the presentations. Sharifi explained how Afghanistan was transformed by 20-year war. “For a lot of Afghans, it was not simply a war, it was also an age of transformation, and it exposed Afghanistan for the first time to what we today call ‘international community’,” Sharifi said. “And with the international community comes a lot of rules and regulations, and new concepts for how we have to organize ourselves to conform to this image that the United States and the world want us to be.”

The United States failed in part because of a lack of strategy and understanding of the Afghani people, Sharifi said. “Nobody understood Afghanistan — as a country, as a people, and as human beings — because Afghanistan has never been part of some major colonial power,” he said. “When the United States and the world came to Afghanistan, there was a gap in understanding. There was no Afghan voice in the whole international intervention in Afghanistan. The major question in the minds of a lot of us is, what was the purpose of the entire enterprise?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Sharifi expressed optimism that the new generation of Afghanis will be less tolerant of a return to strict Taliban rule. “One thing that we’ve learned is that we cannot move forward without being connected,” Sharifi said. “Despite a lot of pessimism, there are people here on the streets… who want their voices to be heard. The fact that we see every day that women are coming on to the streets and demanding their rights is a unique phenomenon in our history. For the first time in 40 years, they have a voice. And they want that voice to be heard.”

In his talk, Robert Crews, Professor of History, Stanford University said that analysts too often frame the withdrawal as a story about the United States, rather than about Afghanistan. “For too long, we in the United States have looked at this through a narrow framing of supposed American national interest,” Crews said. “[Afghanistan] is an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse, complicated society. It’s only grown more complicated over the last two decades.”

Crews focused his talk on a specific subset of the Afghani population, the Hazaras, a Persian-speaking ethnic group. “It’s a fascinating community that has really emerged in the last few decades,” Crews explained. “They’ve become essential, indeed crucial to the emergence of a kind of civil society in Afghanistan since 2001. They’ve been at the forefront of education, of media, and all kinds of social activism. Hazara youth have been absolutely fundamental in changing society. And here, the roles of men and women have been absolutely fundamental.”

Crews noted that the Hazaras provide a lens on how Afghanistan has evolved since the war began in 2001 — and how the rule of the Taliban could have disastrous consequences. “Because of their minority status, Hazaras have been advocates of a more pluralistic and egalitarian society,” Crews said. “It’s not exaggeration to warn of the potential of genocide at this moment. The American administrations of the last two decades have left the world with no options here. We stand on the precipice not only of a return of groups that we associate with terrorism, but also one that we should associate with genocide, and that now has extraordinary power, arms, and wealth to make that happen. And the world is powerless to do really anything about it, militarily or otherwise.”

Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor in the Global Policy Area of the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lamented the abrupt withdrawal and evacuation, noting that the “catastrophe of the evacuation is a kind of coda that punctuates and exemplifies the American project of building states in the service of the so-called war on terror.”

Mukhopadhyay said that the rise of the Taliban was predicable, and that “a lot of observers, myself included, believed in the merit of an eventual American withdrawal. But we knew that the way in which that withdrawal was managed could mean the difference between a viable peace process and the government’s collapse.”

She related how, in recent weeks, she and others have faced a harrowing challenge in trying to help Afghanis get out of their country, as they were forced to develop lists of people who might be most likely to be evacuated, based on their circumstances. “Every list I made involves this obscene set of calculations,” Mukhopadhyah said. “Are there too many children in this family to include them on the list? Has the way this journalist framed this threat scary enough to get attention? Will women make for more compelling victims than men? And all of my collaborators in this effort carried their own lists and we were negotiating with each other, hoping that if we provided information, we could get a spot on a flight for someone on our list.”

“The end of the American war is not very different from its beginning, but the hypocrisy undergirding the effort is now particularly on display,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Because today, we see this insidious narrative taking hold this notion that the United States and its allies tried so hard to get the Afghan people and their leaders a chance at democracy, but they didn’t take us up on that generous offer. And now it’s time for us to admit that promoting governance abroad is hard to do, and we’re better off focusing on matters at home. And I think it’s very important for me personally that that narrative not stand. It is imperative to stress in this moment that the American invasion of Afghanistan was for its own ends. And it unfolded in terms that the state-building project crippled the democratization effort in a number of meaningful ways. It deliberately created dependencies and conditionalities and restrictions that in effect doomed the project before it even began.”

In his remarks, Georgi Derluguian, Professor of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu Dhabi, noted the parallels to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and explained that the design of the United States in entering the war was was “world domination,” because “if you move into a place like Afghanistan, you are not only to west of China, you are to the south of Russia, you are to the north of India, and you are next to Iran. And once you move into Iraq, you’re not only next to Iran, but you’re a central member of OPEC by default.”

Derluguian noted that the next phase could entail a ripple effect that transforms other Central Asian republics, including Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. “They seem patently defenseless, including against their own populations,” Derluguian said. “Is it going to be a big and spreading region of failed states?”

He also pointed out that nations like Russia, Pakistan, and China will also play a role in determining the fate of Afghanistan and surrounding nations in the coming years. “This s a moment of enormous danger,” Derluguian said.

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

Social Science / Data Science

Julia Lane, NYU: “Democratizing our Data”

Published September 1, 2021

On August 26, 2021, Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab presented a lecture by Julia Lane, Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytic. The talk, entitled “Democratizing Our Data,” provided an overview of a research collaboration designed to improve the sharing of data across state agencies.

Lane cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility. The approach is attracting national attention, including from the Commission on Evidence Based Policy and the Federal Data Strategy.

The lecture featured an overview of Lane’s book, Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto (2020, MIT Press), which “calls for a more automated, transparent, and accountable framework for creating high-quality public data that would empower citizens and inspire the government that serves them.” In her Manifesto, Lane outlines an organizational model that has the potential to make data more accessible and useful.

“There is enormous interest in building a better understanding of how evidence and data can inform policy,” Lane explained in the abstract for the lecture. “New possibilities have opened up to enable data to be shared and used across states and agencies. One is a technical approach – the Administrative Data Research Facility – which provides a secure environment within which education, training, and workforce data can be shared across agencies and states. The other is human – the Applied Data Analytics training program – which trains government agency staff how to combine and use the data to serve their agency missions. Over 650 participants from over 150 agencies have participated and produced new products and new networks in the process.”

The presentation discusses the approach sponsored by the California Department of Social Services, joint with the Department of Education and the Economic Development Department. The D-Lab worked with the Coleridge Initiative to successfully combine the two approaches. The presentation also addresses the broader vision of how approaches like this can serve to democratize data for the United States.

Watch the video of the lecture above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: America’s Pursuit of Racial Justice

Published May 21, 2021

On May 14, 2021, Social Science Matrix convened a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion focused on the long (and continuing) struggle for racial justice in America. At the center of the discussion: the critical momentum of Black-led protests and the Black Lives Matter movement from the past year, situated within the larger historical context of social movements for racial justice in the United States and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.

The panel featured Monica Bell, Associate Professor of Law & Sociology at Yale Law School; Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; and Brandon M. Terry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. The panel was moderated by Christopher Muller, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues.

“We started conceiving of this panel in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations,” explained Marion Fourcade, Director of Matrix and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. “The fact that these protests represented by some measures the largest social movement in U.S. history would have been reason enough to address it on its own terms. But it seemed equally urgent to take a longer historical perspective, and place that movement in the broader context of the very long and unfinished struggle for racial justice and equality in the United States. Today’s panel is a conversation about the past and about the present of that struggle.”

Each of the panelists presented a roughly 15-minute talk. In his remarks, Harvard’s Brandon Terry noted that the concept of racial equality in the U.S. has always been a “bad check,” a form of promissory note that has no real value. Terry explained that this metaphor was also used by Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

Speaking of the murder of George Floyd, Terry said, “When the state fails in this way, when it fails in an enduring and systematic fashion to protect the basic rights, dignity, and even lives of its ostensible citizens, it seems only right to speak of it as akin to money without value or currency without credit…. One of the central questions that the civil rights movement raised was whether the idea of egalitarian citizenship for ordinary African Americans in this society was a promissory note with real value, with a possible future of real fulfillment, or whether the basic structure of American society is organized such that these kinds of aspirations will always prove counterfeit or worthless.”

UC Berkeley’s Leigh Raiford focused on the evolving role of visual imagery in relation to the racial justice movement. Raiford’s book, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, addresses how activists in the racial justice movement have used imagery to gain political recognition and re-shape the dialogue about Black lives.

“In the movements of last summer, visual images played an extraordinarily central role, from the circulation of videos of police violence as a catalyst for protest, to narratives around images of protest and police repression, as well as a range of social media strategies to visualize black futures,” Raiford said. “The concept of representation is always at once political and cultural. They cannot be separated, especially in the context of Black life and the lives of marginalized people.”

Raiford described how, since the advent of photography, visual images have been used to advance white supremacy (for example, through the circulation of images of lynchings) as well as to promote racial justice. “Visuality broadly has been a way to underscore white supremacy, to underscore ideas about hierarchy,” Raiford said. “It’s been a way to promote violence or promote dehumanization.”

Raiford also pointed out that images of police violence have led to greater awareness of the need for racial justice, but also carry their own toll. “One of the effects on Black people in particular is that the circulation of these images has led to increased levels of stress and trauma,” Raiford said. “They bring people to the streets on one hand, but there’s also there’s a toll, a cost to their circulation. And this is something that movements have been wrestling with, in our contemporary moment.”

In her comments, Yale Law School’s Monica Bell focused on how the Black Lives Matter movement has evolved since its inception, marked by what she described as the Obama era, the Trump era, and the current era, under the Biden Administration.

BLM began, Bell explained, as a movement similar to Occupy Wall Street, with a goal to “demand recognition of Black life” and raise visibility and awareness. “It was, Black people are here, and Black Lives Matter, but the policy prescription aspect was really secondary,” Bell said. “It was a demand for recognition, more than a demand for particular political arguments. Policy prescription was not at the heart of advocacy in that first era.”

The Trump era, Bell argued, saw the transition of the movement toward “thinking much harder about policy,” a shift marked by the advent of more formal campaigns like Campaign Zero and Eight Can’t Wait, which detailed specific police reforms and policy changes necessary for change. “The elephant in the room here when talking about the summer of 2020 is ‘defund the police,’ which emerged out of local organizing that was occurring in this move between the Obama era and the Trump era in Black Lives Matter,” Bell said. “What we see in racial justice advocacy around policing now is a move toward demands not just to stopping killing us, but instead for liberation.”

Bell said that the next phase under the Biden Administration will be a test for the racial justice movement, as more radical views about what policy changes are necessary (such as abolishing the police) are viewed with skepticism by many in the Black community. “There’s a way in which certain types of activists claims are out of sync with what many Black people feel, if they’re not radicalized and organized,” Bell said. “It does present a number of interesting questions about how the movement will continue to maintain its legitimacy as representing this demand for recognition of Black lives mattering, as the specific policy prescriptions that have been introduced in the Trump and Biden eras become ever more detached from what many Black people would demand.”

The conversation continued as the panelists engaged with each other’s provocative ideas, and with questions from the audience.

Watch the full video above or on YouTube.

Affiliated Centers

President Biden’s First 100 Days: An Assessment

Published May 19, 2021

Recorded on April 22, 2021, and presented by UC Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, a Social Science Matrix Affiliated Center, this online panel evaluated the first 100 days of the Biden Administration.

Speakers included:

Mark Barabak, National Political Correspondent, Los Angeles Times
Terri Bimes, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Vanessa Tyson, Associate Professor of Politics, Scripps College
George Breslauer, Professor of Political Science Emeritus, UC Berkeley
Thomas Mann (Chair), Senior Fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution and Distinguished Resident Scholar at UC Berkeley.

Matrix Book Salon

Matrix Book Salon: “Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics”

Published May 11, 2021

On May 7, 2021, Social Science Matrix presented a Matrix Book Salon featuring the book, Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Professor Stephens-Dougan was joined in conversation by Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley.

“The central argument of my book is that politicians across the racial and political spectrum can, and often do, engage in what I refer to as ‘racial distancing,'” Stephens-Dougan explained. “Racial distancing is a political strategy whereby some politicians want to indicate to racially moderate and racially conservative whites that they will not disrupt the racial status quo — in other words, that they will not be too beholden to their Black constituents, but also communities of color more broadly. This racial status quo is characterized, I would argue, by racial inequality, with whites at the top of the hierarchy, including white dominance in political, social, and economic institutions. The degree to which politicians are really able to engage in this racial distancing is influenced by both their partisanship and their race.”

Stephens-Dougan noted that politicians have to walk a “political tightrope” to show that they are “not racially insensitive,” while also not “hemorrhaging and not losing too many white voters. And this has implications for the sort of strategies that they pursue and how they talk about race…. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that race is still one of the most salient political divides in American politics.”

In his comments, Professor Taeku Lee lauded the book as “a virtuoso piece of social science research that I think should sit on top of everyone’s top shelf of books that help us understand what is currently happening in American politics and how we got here.” He noted that “the book makes me much more hopeful about political science,” and he described it as a “sobering account of the hapless incentives facing candidates Black and white — and the hapless choices facing voters Black and white. It’s a wonderful example of theoretical creativity and technical chops working together in magical harmony. Theoretically, Stephens Dougan very carefully and even-handedly parses competing accounts of the dynamics of race and electoral politics today.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Matrix On Point

Truth & Denial: Searching for Information in the Digital Era

Published May 4, 2021

On April 22, 2021, a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion focused on questions of objectivity, disinformation, and the construction of truth from a media-consumption (rather than media-production) perspective, focusing on how internet users find information, how algorithms play a deterministic role in search results, and how lies propagate and solidify.

This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

The panel featured Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Senior Faculty Researcher, Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life; Sun-ha Hong, Assistant Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and author of Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, 2020); Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The New York Times; author of three books, including Futureproof : Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, a guide to surviving the technological future; and the host of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast about the many ways the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior; and David Barstow (moderator), Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at Berkeley Journalism and a former senior writer for the New York Times.

Authors Meet Critics

“Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity”

Published April 26, 2021

Recorded on April 19, 2021, this Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” panel featured the book Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millán, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his book, Lara-Millán, an ethnographer and historical sociologist, takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered.

By centering the state’s use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state’s failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.

Panelists included Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University, and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law.

This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS).

Matrix On Point

The Long History and Present Surge of Anti-Asian Violence

Published April 15, 2021

From Donald Trump’s calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” to the recent wave of violent attacks in the Bay Area, the past year has seen a sharp increase in racist attacks on Asians and Asian Americans.

The causes and consequences of this racism were at the center of a Berkeley Conversations panel discussion, “The Long History and Present Surge of Anti-Asian Violence,” presented on April 1, as part of the Matrix on Point series.

“This panel is not just about the recent, horrific attacks on Asians, but it seeks to situate this violence in both the history and the present of this nation’s life,” said Raka Ray, dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences, who moderated the event. “It also points to the need for a more integrated and interconnected history of race in America.”

Ray explained that the event was organized in response “to the Asian and Asian-American students who asked us to do something that showed that they and their histories of being in this country mattered.”

Michael Lu, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, introduced the panel and spoke to the importance of creating a forum for open discussion about anti-Asian violence.

“Many of us in the (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community have been feeling invisible for much of our lives,” Lu said. “Invisible, because our history isn’t taught in the schools. Our stories aren’t told in the media. Our contributions often go unrecognized. Our struggles, our pains often go unnoticed. I’m really glad we’re having this discussion tonight, right here at the Berkeley campus, where the Asian-American movement started more than 50 years ago, to lift that veil of invisibility, to tell our stories, to make our voices heard.”

Russell Jeung, professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, presented data gathered through Stop AAPI Hate, a website he helped launch in March 2020 following a rise in anti-Asian sentiment at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I knew that unless we documented the racism that we were experiencing, policymakers and the media wouldn’t pay attention,” he explained.

Leung said that nearly 3800 hate incidents were reported through the site between March 2020 and February 2021, including verbal harassment, civil rights violations, coughing and spitting attacks, physical assaults and other forms of violence.

“We asked those who had experienced racism, what is their number one stressor? They said racism,” Jeung said. “Asian Americans are now under such a state of siege, and have experienced racism that has been so damaging, that they’re more concerned about other Americans and their hate than they are about a pandemic that’s killed half a million (Americans). That’s how widespread and how dangerous this racism is.”

Kimberly Hoang, associate professor of Sociology and director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago, called attention to how the media portrayed last month’s mass shootings in Atlanta, when eight people were killed, including six Asian women.

“We must move away from the media’s approach to narrating the story, and the ways that opportunists have seized this moment,” Hoang said. “(We should) remember that at the heart of these shootings is an intelligent public starved for depth in understanding a group of women who were immigrant entrepreneurs, low-wage workers employed past their retirement age, single mothers and real people whose lives and families are forever broken as a result of these devastating events.”

Catherine Ceniza Choy, professor of Ethnic Studies and an associate dean in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science’s Division of Undergraduate Studies, discussed the 150-year history of anti-Asian racism in the United States.

“It is part of the history of racial violence in the United States. Yet it is not well known. It is marginalized, if not erased and overshadowed by popular mythical images of Asian Americans as a monolithic model minority,” Choy said.

“We have to confront this long history of anti-Asian violence in order to understand how tenacious it has been and how tenacious it continues to be, and to figure out what each and every one of us can do to prevent and mitigate hate and harm,” Choy said. “I take heart that we, as Asian Americans, have many allies across racial and ethnic lines, because our fates are interlinked. At stake is the health and well-being of our nation and world. We have no choice but to work together to stop Asian hate.”

The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Division initiative “Toward a Racially Just Social Science,” and by Social Science Matrix, APASD, AAPISC, the Sociology Department, the School of Public Health, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for South Asian Studies, and Stop AAPI Hate.

Solidarity and Strife

Beyond Competition: Alternative Discovery Procedures & The Postcapitalist Public Sphere

Published April 13, 2021

On March 19, 2021, Social Science Matrix presented a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Morozov is also the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. This lecture was presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, “Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by the UC Berkeley D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event was also co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group.

The title of the lecture, “Beyond Competition: Alternative Discovery Procedures & The Postcapitalist Public Sphere,” refers to an essay by Friedrich Hayek, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” (1968). In an abstract for the lecture, Morozov wrote that “Hayek’s insistence that competition is the surest and most reliable technique of eliciting innovation is well reflected in today’s digital landscape, dominated as it is by digital platforms, with their stated goal of facilitating market exchange. Yet, beyond Hayek’s favorite bugbear of central planning, there surely must be other ways of ‘discovery’ — even if they do not currently ‘scale’ as well as the techniques of competition.” Morozov’s talk aimed to “explore the intellectual and political benefits of placing ‘discovery’ at the center of our debate about the future of the digital public sphere” and to “suggest potential directions for adequate policy-making on the issue.”

In his lecture, Morozov reflected on his past work on “solutionism,” which he noted was missing “ingredients” such as capitalism, liberalism, finance, and what is happening beyond the United States. “Since then I’ve moved out of the U.S. and tried to understand what the same phenomena would mean if you were to look at them from the perspective of Europe, or Latin America, or Asia. And of course, not surprisingly, a lot of other different facets came into view that were not visible to me when I was at Stanford, or Harvard, or Georgetown — questions related to developmentalism, colonialism, or imperialism.

Morozov explained that he has a forthcoming book that takes a broader look at the topic of solutionism, but also uses a particular lens: that of “the inability of progressive forces to the left to not only make sense of digital technologists and what to do with them, but also to make sense of their own project. What should their future be, other than just defending the welfare state, and insisting that they can humanize capitalism?”

Watch the lecture above or on YouTube

Authors Meet Critics

Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica

Published March 15, 2021

A panel discussion on "Scammer's Yard" featuring Jovan Lewis, Nadia Ellis, and Deborah Thomas

Recorded on March 10, 2021, this video features a panel discussion about Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica, a book by Jovan Scott Lewis, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. Scammer’s Yard tells the story of three young and poor men striving to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. The book describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation.

As part of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series, Lewis discussed the book with Nadia Ellis, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of English; and Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Matrix On Point

Pandemic Lessons: Assessing Educational Inequalities in the Wake of COVID-19

Published March 15, 2021

A "Matrix on Point" panel addressed what we have learned about educational inequalities after a year of pandemic-related school closures.

Presented by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix on March 9, 2021, this video features an online panel discussion from the “Matrix on Point” event series.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the shutdown of schools and colleges around the world. In the United States, the prolonged shutdown exacerbated the myriad inequalities that pervade our educational system. While the shift to online learning amplified the digital divide, exacerbating losses in learning for students who lack access to modern technologies, it also revealed enduring racial and economic divisions within urban, suburban, and rural communities across the country.

This panel addressed what we have learned about educational inequalities after a year of pandemic-related school closures.

Panelists included: Prudence L. Carter, the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley; Emily J. Ozer, Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; and Matthew Rafalow, a Sociologist (PhD, University of California-Irvine), a social scientist at Google, and a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Zeus Leonardo, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

About the Panelists

Prudence L. Carter

Prudence L. Carter is the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. Dean Carter’s research focuses on factors that both shape and reduce economic, social and cultural inequalities among social groups in schools and society. A sociologist, she examines academic and mobility differences influenced by the dynamics of race, ethnicity, poverty, class, and gender in U.S. and global society. Before being appointed Dean at Berkeley, she was the Jacks Family Professor of Education and Professor of Sociology (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She was also the Faculty Director of John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, and the Director of the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, she was Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Dean Carter’s award-winning book, Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press, 2005), engages with and interrogates cultural explanations used to explain school achievement and racial identity for low-income Black and Latino youth in the United States. Her other books include Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. & South African Schools(link is external) (2012) and Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance(link is external) (2013), co-edited with Dr. Kevin Welner — both published by Oxford University Press. Her other publications have appeared in various journals and book volumes. Her research has also been featured in the Peabody Award-winning documentary “Mind the Gap: Why Are Good Schools Failing Black Students” by journalist Nancy Solomon and has been featured on dozens of National Public Radio (NPR) shows across the United States.

Emily Ozer

Emily J. Ozer is a clinical and community psychologist and Professor at the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health whose research focuses on the role of school climate in adolescent development and mental health; school-based interventions; and participatory action research (YPAR), an equity-focused approach in which youth are trained to generate systematic research evidence to address problems they want to improve in their schools and communities. She is the co-founder and co-Director of Innovations for Youth (I4Y) at UC Berkeley. Much of her research on YPAR including the development of the YPAR Hub has been in partnership with San Francisco Peer Resources, a non-profit youth social justice organization. Funded by a William T. Grant Institutional Challenge Grant, she is actively working in a research-practice partnership (RPP) with the San Francisco Unified School District to integrate student-led research in equity and school improvement initiatives. She also leads a 6-district study funded by WT Grant in California, Colorado, NJ, and Ohio on the use of research evidence from YPAR in K-12 school systems.

Matthew Rafalow

Matt Rafalow is a Sociologist (PhD, University of California-Irvine), a social scientist at Google, and a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. At Google, he leads a research program on live streaming experiences. He strives to conduct research that blends academic inquiry with applied solutions that have a meaningful impact. Most of his publishing is on education. In Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020), he studied how digital technologies are used in middle schools. He found that teachers draw on organization-level understandings of student race and class to construct students as either risky hackers or Steve Jobs potentials. Digital technologies were not magic bullets to address educational inequities – rather, teachers adopted very similar technologies quite differently depending on the race and class of their student body. In Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning (NYU Press, 2018), he and his co-authors studied how informal learning communities online function to help youth and young adults level up in digital skills.

Zeus Leonardo (moderator)

Zeus Leonardo, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, has published numerous articles and book chapters on critical social thought in education. His articles have appeared in Educational Researcher; Race, Ethnicity, and Education; Teachers College Record; and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Some of his essays include: “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge,” “The Souls of White Folk,” “The Color of Supremacy,” “Contracting Race,” and “Dis-orienting Western Knowledge.” His most recent books are Race, Whiteness, and Education (Routledge), Race Frameworks (Teachers College Press), Education and Racism (with Grubb, Routledge, 2nd ed), and he is the editor the Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education (SensePublishers). Professor Leonardo’s current research interests involve the study of ideologies and discourses in education with respect to structural relations of power.