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The Future of Money: Mobile Money, Social Media, and Cashless Economies

Published April 15, 2022

A series of cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues

How does the shift away from cash economies affect relationships of debt and belonging? Through studying forms of cashless payment, such as mobile money and apps, this panel of scholars explored questions about how the social connections made through money are changing, and what the implications might be for our understanding of money, trust, and social connection.

Recorded on April 14, 2022, this panel discussion was presented as part of the Matrix on Point series and co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE). The panel featured Kevin Donovan, Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh; Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; and Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The panel was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix.

Panelists

Kevin P. Donovan is an anthropologist and historian at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently writing a book on the history of economic decolonization in East Africa, focusing on central banks, the politics of price, and smuggling. In addition, he and Emma Park are working on a book about digital money, intimate infrastructures, and the corporate-state in Kenya. Writing on these topics is available at https://kevinpdonovan.com/.

Lana Swartz is assistant professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia. She is author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale 2020) and co-author of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT 2017). She is currently working on two projects: a collaborative project about the promises and perils of CBDCs, and a book-length project about scams in the digital economy.

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years. She is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include The making of a catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian economy, Aleph Books forthcoming 2022; When governments fail: Covid-19 and the economy, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press 2021 (co-edited); Women workers in the informal economy, Routledge 2021 (edited); Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India, Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2009; co-edited Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2014; co-edited After Crisis, Tulika 2009; co-authored Demonetisation Decoded, Routledge 2017; She has published more than 200 scholarly articles. She has received several prizes, including for the 2015 Adisheshaiah Award for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (www.networkideas.org), an international network of heterodox development economists, from 2002 to 2021. She has consulted for international organisations including ILO, UNDP, UNCTAD, UN-DESA, UNRISD and UN Women and is member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the Commission on Global Economic Transformation of INET, the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). In 2021 she was appointed to the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato. She writes regularly for popular media like newspapers, journals and blogs.

California Spotlight

The Social and Economic Impacts of Wildfires

Published April 12, 2022

Part of the Matrix California Spotlight Series.

Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive. Recorded on April 4, 2022, this panel focused on the contemporary social and economic impacts of wildfires in California during another record-breaking fire season. How have fires changed during the last five years, and with what impacts on the economy? How might policy-makers and economists respond to the changing fire season?

The panel was co-sponsored by the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) and presented as part of the Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series.

Panelists

Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE). He is also a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones is a candidate for the California State Senate. He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021, and served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018 and regulated the largest insurance market in the United States. He founded and chaired the Sustainable Insurance Forum (SIF), an international network of insurance regulators developing climate risk regulatory best practices. Jones was the first US financial regulator to require disclosure of investments in fossil fuel assets due to concerns about climate change related transition risk, the first to call for divesting investments in thermal coal, and the first to conduct climate risk scenario analysis of insurers’ investment portfolios. Jones is a graduate of DePauw University and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Luiz Oliveira is a Senior Associate Economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which he joined in 2018. His expertise focuses on applied economic policy, developed over his career as a member of several macroeconomic policy and analysis teams at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group and the Federal Reserve System. Luiz’s research focus includes macroeconomic forecasting, inflation, and climate risks.

Steve Pyne is an urban farmer and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is best known for his work on the history of fire and humanity, most recently his book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. He has published 35 books, most of them dealing with fire, but others on Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, the Voyager mission, and with his oldest daughter, an inquiry into the Pleistocene. His fire histories include surveys of America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth.

Bruce Riordan (moderator) is the Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network, a collaborative of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers working on top climate issues. Previously, Mr. Riordan was the Director of the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network (BayCAN) and the Coordinator of the Climate Readiness Institute. He has been working on climate change solutions for the Bay Area and California for nearly 20 years.

Matrix On Point

Matrix on Point: The War in Ukraine and Its Consequences

Published March 16, 2022

Watch below or on YouTube.

In the last three weeks, Russia’s political ambitions in Ukraine have escalated into a full-fledged invasion and war. As politicians attempt to negotiate a ceasefire, thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians have likely been killed, and more than two million people have fled the country into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries. The conflict has upended international relations, raised questions about the dependence of the United States and Europe on Russian fossil fuels, and strained infrastructures of refugee assistance and resettlement. How does the war change what we thought we knew about geopolitics, international macroeconomics, the European refugee crisis, and the conduct of modern warfare?

In this Matrix on Point event, co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars discussed the Ukraine-Russia War conflict and its implications. Panelists included John Connelly, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor in the Department of History; Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor in the Department of Economics; Gérard Roland, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science; and Katerina Linos, the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law. Daniel Sargent Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley, moderated.

Panelists

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a native of Ukraine, is a Quantedge Presidential professor in the Department of Economics at U.C. Berkeley. A significant part of his research has been about monetary policy (effects, optimal design, inflation targeting), fiscal policy (countercyclical policy, government spending multipliers), taxation (tax evasion, inequality), economic growth (long-run determinants, globalization, innovation, financial frictions), and business cycles. Yuriy serves on many editorial boards, including Journal of Monetary Economics and VoxUkraine. Yuriy is a prolific researcher, with works published in leading economics journals and cited in policy discussions and media. Yuriy has received numerous awards for his research.

Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox professor of economics and professor of political science at U.C. Berkeley where he has been since 2001. He has received many honors including an honorary professorship from the Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2002 and the medal “De Scientia et humanitate optime meritis” by the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2018. The Association for Comparative Economic Studies created an annual dissertation fellowship in his name to recognize his contributions to the field. He is the author of over 150 journal articles, chapters in books, and books and has been published in leading economics journals on topics of transition, political economy, culture and comparative economics. He wrote the leading graduate textbook Transition and Economics published in 2000 and translated in various languages, including Chinese and Russian. In recent years, his research has broadened to developing economies in general with special emphasis on the role of institutions and culture.

John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor in the Department of History at U.C. Berkeley and the director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. His scholarship focuses on the history of East and Central Europe, with special concern for problems of religious and ethnic identity in multinational space. He has published Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, and From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, and is at work on a history of democracy in Europe, 1076 to present.

Katerina Linos is the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, where she also serves as Co-Faculty Director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law. Her research interests include international law, comparative law, European Union law, and migration law. To address questions in these fields, her work combines legal analysis with empirical methods. In 2017, Linos was awarded a Carnegie fellowship to study the European refugee crisis. She investigated how communication barriers frustrate fundamental rights, explored the potential of new technologies to facilitate refugee and migrant integration, and developed digital refuge. Linos’ research appears in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the California Law Review, and many others.

Daniel J. Sargent (moderator) is Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds faculty appointments in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, and he serves as co-director of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is writing an interpretive history of the postwar international order, titled Pax Americana: The Rise and Fall of the American World Order.

Matrix On Point

Cryptography and the Future of Money

Published March 14, 2022

Part of the “Matrix on Point” event series

The emergence of cryptocurrencies and digital payment systems poses a number of fundamental questions to the social sciences. What, after all, is money and who should be allowed to issue it? On the one hand, competition from private digital currencies could spur innovation, improve the efficiency and speed of payments, increase financial inclusion, and at the very least jolt public actors into upgrading an old and creaky payment system. On the other hand, money is a public good and private competition could trigger momentous — and perhaps unwelcome — changes to the economic, social and political infrastructure. Even public options, such as Central Bank Digital Currencies, could profoundly reshape the financial system. Around the world, monetary institutions are watching these developments with anxiety, and calls for a coordinated response are growing.

Recorded on March 2, 2022, this panel discussion was presented by Social Science Matrix as part of the Matrix on Point series. The panel was co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy. Moderated by Barry Eichengreen, the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, the panel features presentations by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the Economics Department at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance; Stefan Eich, Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University; and Christine Parlour, the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics

Published March 8, 2022

Recorded on March 7th, 2022, this “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa, by Martha Wilfahrt, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science.

Professor Wilfahrt was joined in conversation by Scott Straus, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Leonardo Arriola, Associate Dean of Social Sciences at UC Berkeley, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for African Studies, moderated.

About the Book

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer to this question: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. Drawing on a multi-method research design, the book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization.

About the Panelists

Martha WIlfahrt studies African Politics and Political Economy of Development with a focus on historical legacies, redistributive politics and state-society relations. Her current research interests revolve around two themes. The first focuses on historical legacies in contemporary African politics, with a particular interest in the persistence of social norms and the role of concept formation in the ‘historical renaissance.’ Work from this first area of focus has been published in Comparative Politics, The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, World Development and World Politics, as well as Cambridge University Press, which just released her first book, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics. A second, ongoing stream of research studies the politics of field research in the Global South.

Scott Straus works on violence, human rights, and African politics. His most recent books are Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (US Holocuast Memorial Museum, 2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. His 2006 book on the Rwandan genocide, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press), also won several awards, including the best 2006 book in political science from the Association of American Publishers. He also has co-edited, with Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda: State-Building and Human Rights in Rwanda (UW Press, 2011) and, with Steve Stern, The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents (UW Press, 2014). Straus has published articles in American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Politics and Society, Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, African Affairs, Terrorism and Political Violence, Genocide Studies and Prevention, The Journal of Genocide Research, and other journals; he translated The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (Zone 2003); and he has received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. In 2009, Straus was awarded the campus-wide William Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2011 he was named a Winnick Fellow at the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to his academic career, Straus was a freelance journalist in Africa.

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.

Leonardo Arriola (moderator) studies the challenges associated with representation and governance in multiethnic societies. His research examines inter-ethnic political cooperation, party competition under ethnic polarization, and political violence in divided societies. His award-winning research has been published in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of Politics along with books published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. His work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Carnegie Corporation of New York, U.S. Department of Defense, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He is co-editor of Africa Spectrum, an interdisciplinary journal published by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), an associated senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway, and a board member of the African Studies Association (ASA).

Matrix Lecture

The Problem of Trust in the Digital Public Sphere

Published February 28, 2022

On February 24, 2022, Matrix was honored to host William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture.

In the lecture, Davies explores how the digitization of our public sphere has made trust harder to establish, as the ideal of “facts” has been challenged by that of “real-time data,” and consequently altered the forms of allegiance, organization, and political coalitions that are possible.

Drawing on his recent books, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason and This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain, Davies identifies pivotal ways in which liberal visions of the public sphere have been damaged, and what kinds of alternatives take their place. “I want to consider the implications of a shift from a society that at least in its self-image or ideology privileges facts as bearers of truth to one that in its self-image or ideology privileges data as the bearers of truth,” Davies explained.

Davies is the author of The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, and Unprecedented?How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy. He writes regularly for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies, the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), and the Center for British Studies.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education

Published February 8, 2022

Part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” Series

On February 3rd, 2022, Social Science Matrix, together with the Center for Studies in Higher Education, hosted an online “Author Meets Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education, by Charlie Eaton, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced.

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America, while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Eaton reveals in his book, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

Eaton, who earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, was joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.

“What I show in this book that’s new is that student loan borrowing is highly unequal across different organizational strata of colleges, and financiers play a major role in these inequalities,” Eaton said in his presentation. “I focus on the divergence of three higher education strata of student debt: at the top elite private institutions, where the fewest students borrow; in the middle are public universities, which enroll 65% of all bachelor’s degree seekers in the US; and the majority of those who borrow are at for-profit colleges, whose students are overwhelmingly working class and disproportionately Black, and whose students have the most debt. How did this divergence occur? My answer is that financiers played a big role in each of these strata.”

Eaton emphasized the role of government policy changes, including tax cuts and financial deregulation, in perpetuating these inequalities, as they allowed financiers to play new roles across the three strata of higher education. “At the top, financiers helped restore elite private universities as the last bastion of debt-free higher education. They did this by partnering with their endowments to exploit tax cuts and financial deregulation. These schools hoarded this endowment boom for their mostly small, privileged, and now debt-free student bodies. At the bottom, financiers took over for-profit colleges en masse to capture public subsidies around federal student loan expansion. In the middle, public universities were squeezed by these tax and subsidy diversions to the top and bottom strata.”

In concluding his remarks, Eaton struck an optimistic tone, noting that “a better future is possible if we mobilize a more diverse and inclusive public university to reimagine finance from below…. More equitable higher education finance is probably only possible as part of a more equitable overall financial system. But public universities can play a central role in advancing such change by connecting people from more varied backgrounds than the Ivory Tower bankers who got us here. In fact, public universities, including Berkeley, are already doing this in many ways.”

In his remarks, Professor Jonathan Glater agreed that “it is difficult to overstate the corrosive effects of money in the financing of higher education.” Beyond student debt, Glater said, the influence of money in higher education affects credentialing of institutions, as well as the admissions and grading of students, “because students are not paying for C’s, D’s, and F’s, they’re paying for A’s.” It also leads to “inequity of opportunity in the form of increasing student debt, which not only may discourage students, but slows the possibility of socioeconomic advancement for students after they graduate.”

Glater praised Eaton’s book for challenging us to look for alternatives to the status quo. “I would suggest that inequality should be regarded as a symptom… of a broader system — social, financial, ideological,” Glater said. “One implication of this story about people, personalities, relationships, and ideas is that different people with different ideas can implement changes. Dr. Eaton’s narrative implicitly challenges us to ask… can we imagine something else? And of course, we can.”

Professor Emmanuel Saez noted how “higher education has really become the route to economic opportunity,” particularly in the United States, and this has fueled the rise of for-profit colleges. Saez referred to his own past research indicating that “if you reach a good higher-ed institution, you’re very likely to have a good economic success, regardless of your parents’ background. But of course the inequality is in who gets access to the good, higher ed institution. And that’s where the inequality here in the U.S. is truly, truly massive, with the best schools having almost three quarters of their kids coming from the top 10%.”

Saez praised Eaton’s book for exposing the damaging impacts of private equity in for-profit institutions, as they were able to “take control of the schools and change the way they were operating to really further increase the predatory nature of the schools. That government retrenchment, with less funding for community colleges or public school, led to the blooming of the for-profit, predatory school, and that is obviously highly detrimental for for opportunity and for inequality in general.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Authors Meet Critics

The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi

Published February 3, 2022

Presented as part of the Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” series.

Recorded on January 26, 2022, this video features an “Authors Meet Critics” panel discussion focused on the book, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press), by Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History.

The Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. This event was co-sponsored by the Institute of South Asia Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime that saw them only as the ruled.

“Not only is it a book of immense erudition, but it also covers a rather vast intellectual terrain,” said Pradeep Chhibber, Professor and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at UC Berkeley, who moderated the panel. “It speaks about sovereignty, it speaks about popular protests, it speaks about the writing of intellectual history — and whose history is to be trusted and whose history is not to be trusted. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which one is deeply self-conscious about the limits of sources, especially when one is doing research in an area in which the amount of primary materials is somewhat limited.”

In his opening remarks, Kaicker explained that the book aims to focus on the “ordinary people, the men and the women who lived and died in the Mughal empire and whose deeds have gone broadly unsung and unacknowledged in the history of the empire that we have written over the last century or so…. How should we see the people in Mughal Delhi, and in Mughal India, more broadly?”

In her comments, Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, noted that the book “has a great deal to offer us in terms of thinking about the subsequent histories of the subcontinent, and particularly also about where we are today…. It shows us that, in fact, political power, and a conception of sovereignty on the subcontinent, have always been located within a discourse of religion.”

Sethi explained that the book helps illuminate the rise of Hindutya, religious nationalism, in contemporary India. “Just as thinking about the sphere of religion cannot be thought of outside politics, then equally, it is not possible to think of politics outside religion. Which then means that the colonial and the postcolonial state, which attempted to forge a conception of a state not based on the principles of religion… was a brief interregnum and a brief fantasy, and that we can see the breaking of this fantasy in the way in which religion and politics mobilized through the discourse of Hindutva.”

Asad Ahmed, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, described The King and The People as “a scholarly gem,” noting that the book “challenges various long-held notions about the participation of the common folk, the ordinary people, in the political contestations of pre-modern South Asia.”

“Abhishek investigates the manners and modes of the participation of ordinary people in matters of politics in 17th- and 18th-century Mughal India, shedding the reductive idea that the various political upheavals of the period were either responsive to economic discontent or religious fanaticism,” Ahmed said. “He argues rather that these moments were reflective of the participation of the people in the discourse of sovereignty. The ordinary people are hidden from view. Their own voices are suppressed, and their agency is mediated by the pen of the elite….A major task of the book is to unravel the discursive codes of the authors in order to be able to tease out the nature and meaning of popular participation in political affairs. This is no easy task, but Abhishek carries it out wonderfully.”

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Special Event

Berkeley Psychology 100 Year Celebration

Published December 10, 2021

Recorded on December 8, 2021, this video features a series of talks by members of the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, in celebration of the department’s 100th anniversary. Speakers included:

Raka Ray, Dean, UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences
Rhona Weinstein, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology
Silvia Bunge, Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute | Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Lab
Allison Harvey, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic
Rich Ivry, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Cognition and Action Lab
Rodolfo Mendoza Denton, Professor, Department of Psychology | Co-Director, Relationships and Social Cognition Lab
Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Ph.D. student
Hari Srinivisan, Undergraduate Class of 2022

The event also featured a video featuring members of the Charter Hill Society for Psychology, a community of committed donors who make a three-year pledge of $1,000 or more per year to the Psychology Annual Fund.

Lightning Talks

The event featured “lightning talks,” short form-presentations from four distinguished members of the faculty, showcasing the exciting research being conducted in this top-ranked department. Following are abstracts and bios for the faculty members who presented the four lightning talks.

(How) does education change minds and brains?

Silvia Bunge, Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute | Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Lab

A disconcerting fact is that many of the details that we memorize in our classes fade away in the months or years after we complete our final exams, and it is likely that we will only leverage a small portion of it as we move forward in our careers. An important question, then, is: what, if anything, remains? Does education change us fundamentally – and, if so, how? My lab is interested in whether and how formal education hones our ability to reason logically. I will describe how my lab has approached this problem in the past through behavioral and brain imaging research. I will then mention a topic I am passionate about pursuing in the future: how ideological beliefs bias reasoning, and whether/how education can combat this pervasive societal problem.

Dr. Silvia Bunge is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research. She studies the cognitive and neural processes that support reasoning, memory, and goal-directed behavior in humans. Her lab also studies how these processes mature over childhood and adolescence, how they are shaped by education and demographic factors (for better and for worse) and how they support academic achievement. Dr. Bunge is the co-author of a forthcoming textbook titled “Fundamentals of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience”.

Mental Health and Sleep Health: Challenges Ahead

Allison Harvey, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic

Mental health challenges are common and are often chronic and difficult to treat. My team is interested in treating sleep and circadian problems as a pathway to improving mental health. As we work in this arena, we have become passionate about several challenges that impede progress, such as: How do we ensure scientific breakthroughs reach real-world practice? How do we move beyond diagnostic categories to study mental health challenges as complex, heterogeneous and multi-dimensional phenomena? How can we improve access to effective treatment? Once a person accesses treatment, how do we ensure the treatment promotes lasting change? I will describe how we can leverage implementation science and the science of behavior change to develop solutions to these pressing challenges.

Allison Harvey is a Professor and licensed Clinical Psychologist. Dr. Harvey is a treatment development researcher who conducts experimental and intervention studies focused on understanding and treating sleep and circadian problems, severe mental illness and behavior change processes. Dr. Harvey is a recipient of numerous awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society in 2020. She has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Orebro, Sweden and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Mining the secrets of the human brain

Rich Ivry, Professor, Department of Psychology | Director, Cognition and Action Lab

Cognitive neuroscientists seek to understand the biology of the mind. The development of new methods to probe and perturb the human has helped establish this interdisciplinary enterprise as an essential cornerstone of psychological research. I will review a sample of these technologies, describing how they have been exploited by researchers in our department to develop sophisticated models of the neural basis of human cognition and how these advances in basic research are leading to the development of new interventions in the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Rich Ivry is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the Cognition and Action lab, using various tools of cognitive neuroscience to explore human performance in healthy and neurologically impaired populations. He is the co-author of the textbook, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind.

Psychological factors affecting equity in higher education

Rodolfo Mendoza Denton, Professor, Department of Psychology | Co-Director, Relationships and Social Cognition Lab

Despite decades of research, disparities in educational outcomes between majority and minority group students persist at all levels of education. Particularly perplexing is the persistence of these inequalities at the highest levels of training, which already selects for the most highly achieving students for specialization in their field of study. This talk will cover some of the psychological processes that can explain these inequalities, and discuss how the structure of traditional higher education may contribute to these disparities.

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton is professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Childhood experiences living in Mexico, the U.S., Ivory Coast, and Thailand cemented an early interest in cultural differences and intergroup relations. He received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Columbia University. Mendoza-Denton’s professional work covers stereotyping and prejudice from the perspective of both target and perceiver, intergroup relations, as well as how these processes influence educational outcomes. He received the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in 2015, and the University-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018.

Authors Meet Critics

Author Meets Critics: “The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis”

Published December 8, 2021

Recorded on December 3, 12pm PST, this “Authors Meet Critics” discussion focused on The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis, by Neil Fligstein, Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Professor Fligstein was joined in conversation by Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021).

This event was co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

About the Book

More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits—financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows—yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key, Neil Fligstein argues, is the convergence of major U.S. banks on an identical business model: extracting money from the securitization of mortgages. But how, and why, did this convergence come about?

The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis carefully takes the reader through the development of a banking industry dependent on mortgage securitization. Fligstein documents how banks, with help from the government, created the market for mortgage securities. The largest banks—Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Citibank, and Washington Mutual—soon came to participate in every aspect of this market. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities. Entirely reliant on the throughput of mortgages, these firms were unable to alter course even when it became clear that the market had turned on them in the mid-2000s.

With the structural features of the banking industry in view, the rest of the story falls into place. Fligstein explains how the crisis was produced, where it spread, why regulators missed the warning signs, and how banks’ dependence on mortgage securitization resulted in predatory lending and securities fraud. An illuminating account of the transformation of the American financial system, The Banks Did It offers important lessons for anyone with a stake in avoiding the next crisis.

Authors Meet Critics

Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India

Published November 29, 2021

Recorded on November 16, 2021, this video presents an “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book, Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), by Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment with DCRP and Global Metropolitan Studies.

Professor Balakrishnan was joined in conversation by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus, and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley.

Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India explores new spatial forms of urbanization by focusing on land contestations along infrastructural and economic corridors in liberalizing India. The book explores the production of private mega-enclaves amidst agricultural fields along these corridors. These corridor urbanizations defy our familiar binaries of city and village and our inherited disciplinary silos of agrarian and urban studies. Instead, the book shows how current urban development accretes onto older histories of agrarian capitalism, thus constituting processes of what Balakrishnan calls “recombinant urbanization.”

The Social Science Matrix “Authors Meet Critics” book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. This panel was co-sponsored by the Institute for South Asia Studies.

Watch the video above or on YouTube.

California Spotlight

The Labor of Fire: Wildlands Firefighting and Incarceration in California

Published November 20, 2021

Part of the California Spotlight Series

Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive. The changing wildfire season not only affects those living near wildfires, but also those charged with fighting fires and managing lands on fire.

Recorded on November 10, 2021, this panel discussion considered how changing wildfires have changed not only how fires are fought, but who fights them. The panel included Brandon Smith, Co-founder and Chief Director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP); Jameson Karns, a former firefighter from Southern California who is currently a PhD Candidate in History at UC Berkeley; and Lindsey Raisa Feldman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis, whose research and advocacy sits at the intersection of identity, labor, and incarceration, and who has conducted ethnographic research with incarcerated wildland firefighters. The panel was moderated by John Radke, a faculty member in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.