New Directions: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Perspectives

March 10th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the New Directions event series

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Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel — part of the Social Science Matrix New Directions series — will bring together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.

This panel will feature Jaleel Plummer, a Joint PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory; Andrea Lara-Garcia, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography; Anna Feign, a graduate student in sociology; and Sophia Perez, graduate student in Geography at UC Berkeley. Ricarda Hammer, Assistant Professor of Sociology, will moderate.

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Trevor Jackson: “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World”

April 7th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Tuesday, April 7th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Professor Jackson will be joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, will moderate.

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.

About the Book

Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way. How did it happen?

With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.

Panelists

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and over-accumulation since the 17th century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health. His second book, a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. He sometimes writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for the popular press, at places like Dissent, The Baffler, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.

Chenzi Xu is Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest on understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She holds a BA from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history, where she was the William Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College and a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar.

Dylan John Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. Reviewers have called this book “the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of Fascism that has appeared in years,” and “brilliant and courageous.” A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed in preparation for Palgrave), argues, against state centered accounts of official information, that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society. In addition, Riley has started a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, and the New Left Review. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.

Abhishek Kaicker (moderator) is an historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900), with focus on the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial South Asia. His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2020), shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. More immediately, he is writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.

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Daniela Cammack: “Demos: How the People Ruled Athens”

April 20th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on April 20th from 12:00pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). The book is scheduled to be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press.

Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by Alison McQueen, the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; and James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. Marianne Constable, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, will moderate.

About the Book

Historians and political theorists have long believed that they knew the meaning of the ancient Greek word demokratia. To democracy’s detractors, it meant mob rule; to its supporters, it meant the rule of the entire citizen community over itself. This book argues, by contrast, that the ancient Greeks shared a conception of demokratia that partly overlapped with each of these interpretations while transcending them both. Demokratia was the organized rule of the mass over its leading men. Ordinary citizens, assembled in large numbers, ruled over their own politicians and thereby over the community as a whole.

This regime was underpinned by kratos, the power of the stronger, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts in 508, 411, and 404 BC. But it was routinely manifested by the supreme political authority — or “sovereignty,” to use Hobbes’s term — of large crowds of ordinary men acting as policymakers, citizen-judges, and lawmakers. Especially in the years 403 to 322, which Aristotle correctly diagnosed as the era of “ultimate democracy,” the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by democrats today: making use of talented and ambitious politicians without being ruled by them. Demos asks: can we do the same?

Panelists

Daniela Cammack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). She holds a B.A. in Modern History and English Literature (2002) from Oxford, an M.Phil. in Political Theory and Intellectual History (2005) from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Political Theory (2013) from Harvard, where her dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, won Harvard’s Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in Political Science. Before moving to Berkeley in 2019, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor at Yale. Over the past decade, she has published in numerous edited volumes and journals including Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Polis, The Journal of Politics, Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and The Journal of Sortition. Cammack studies the differences and similarities between ancient and modern democratic ideas and practices, focusing on the themes of crowd power, deliberation, representation, and sovereignty. Authors of special interest are Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Her first book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, will be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press. A sequel, entitled What was Democracy? A Short History, is in progress and also under contract with Princeton.

Alison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought. McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists — Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau — to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought.

James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. His teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception, and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010; pbk. 2016). A continuation of this inquiry is The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk. 2020), which received the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies (2017). A further strand is Jewish literary and critical thought in authors from Spinoza to Freud, Adorno, and Arendt. His most recent book is Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021; pbk. 2023), which captures some of his interest in classical reception studies. He is co-editor of the preeminent series in this field, “Classical Presences” (Oxford University Press, 2005– ), and a member of the collective that published “Postclassicisms” (Chicago University Press, 2019). All of these topics spill over into his teaching, and many of them have begun their life there, because he finds that the classroom is one of the most productive places you can ever be.

Marianne Constable (moderator), Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014), Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History). An expert on law and language, she has co-edited two books on law and society, another in interdisciplinary legal studies, and a special issue in legal history. She has written numerous articles on such topics as Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of “community,” Arendt and the rhetoric of sustainability, law in the liberal arts, the paper shredder, and language in politics. She is currently completing a history of the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a hundred years ago; she also has some shorter pieces on philosophical dialogues in the works.

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American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

January 21st, 2026
4:00pm-5:15pm

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Please join us on Wednesday, January 21, 2026 from 4:00pm-5:15pm for a book talk by Paul Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. Professor Starr will discuss his book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.

The talk will be moderated by Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

About the Book

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama-and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture, in a nutshell, what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

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Paola Bacchetta, “Co-Motion: Rethinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances”

February 5th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on February 5th from 12pm-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances, by Paola Bacchetta, Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Bacchetta will be joined in conversation by Roshanak Kheshti, Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and Leti Volpp, Professor and Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Chair in Access to Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. Lawrence Cohen, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

About the Book

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transform power, and to enact freedom.

Panelists

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the first Chair of Berkeley’s Gender Consortium. She currently serves as Co-coordinator of Decolonizing Sexualities Network, a transnational convergence of scholars, artivists and activists. Her other books include Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, co-edited with Minoo Moallem (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali (co-edited with Laura Fantone, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (India: Women Ink, 2004); and Right-Wing Women (co-edited with Margaret Power, New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published over 70 articles and book chapters on: feminist queer decolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer theory; lesbian and queer of color theorie artivisms and activisms; decolonial feminist translating; gender, sexuality and right-wing movements (India, France, U.S., Brazil). She has translated multiple texts, including Fatima Mernissi’s only (co-authored) film project, The Lionesses (French to English). She recently oversaw the translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza into French (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards: Harvard Divinity School, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, State of Kerala Erudite Scholar Award, European Union funding awards, France-Berkeley Fund award, and more.

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice and the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. Her most recent publications include “Crossing Borders, Criminality, and Indigenous Sovereignty” in Critical Times (2024) and “Weep the People: On the Limits of Citizenship,” in UC Law Review (2024). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019), and of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). At Berkeley, she is also an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies. She is also a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Roshanak Kheshtiis an anthropologist, feminist, queer and race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work sits at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics”. She has previously published in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!

Lawrence Cohen is Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program. His current work is on large genealogical platforms and on the discovery of unknown kin as a mode of relatedness, with attention in particular to how kinship was digitized and monetized before the advent of genetic relatedness platforms. Like his work on Indian surveillance and platform capitalism, the focus is on “de-duplication” as an emergent rationality of both relationship and of truth. Much of this work has been centered in urban north and central India, particularly in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, and Varanasi. In addition to working with undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at UC Berkeley, he has held appointments at the University of Zurich and Tokyo University. His primary appointment at UC Berkeley is in the Department of Anthropology, with a secondary appointment in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. He was hired sometime in the previous century to teach medical anthropology, and became a part of a terrific group of scholars in the Joint UC Berkeley-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program. He currently co-directs the Berkeley side of this two-campus program. Previously he directed the Institute for South Asia Studies and held the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies.

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California Spotlight: Higher Education Under Attack

February 9th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the California Spotlight Event Series

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Higher education is facing mounting pressures, from political intervention and financial challenges to attacks on academic freedom. These tensions are visible in the University of California system, where debates over funding, governance, labor, and public mission are increasingly shaping the future of public universities. This panel brings together leading scholars to examine the forces challenging public higher education today. Drawing on areas spanning finance, policy, and labor, the discussion will explore how these dynamics are shaping the UC System, and what is at stake for students, employees, the public, and the future of higher education.

This panel will feature Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced; Katherine Newman, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California; and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego. Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at UC Irvine, will moderate.

Panelists

Charlie Eaton is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced, where he co-founded the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab. Eaton’s research investigates the role of politics, organizations, and race in the interplay between economic elites and insurgent social groups. He asks such questions as, what forms of organization support elite efforts to consolidate power in politics and the economy? And, what are effective organizational strategies by which non-elites can achieve more equitable distributions of power, wealth, and status?

His book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about finance and higher education as two central and overlapping domains in which elites and non-elites vie for status and resources. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street helped the most elite private schools achieve record endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transformed for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities have been squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. This organizational inequality has both exploited and magnified racial inequalities in household wealth and economic opportunity. This research has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CNBC, Forbes, The Nation, Institutional Investor, Market Watch, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

In ongoing research, Charlie Eaton is investigating the role of finance and race in online higher education, public university enrollment patterns, and in other domains, such as healthcare and taxation. Across this research, he employs techniques in data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring racial, class, and organizational inequalities. With his collaborators at the HERE Lab, he publishes code and data from this work at the Higher Ed Data Hub.

Katherine Newman became the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California in January of 2023. She was simultaneously appointed as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Dr. Newman was previously the University of Massachusetts System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst, and prior to that, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Newman is the author of sixteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth in Western Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.

Dr. Newman has served as the Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton, the founding Dean of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the director of Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, where she served as the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Urban Studies in the Kennedy School of Government. She taught for 16 years in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and for two years in the School of Law at UC Berkeley.

Her latest publication, coauthored with Dr. Elisabeth Jacobs, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, entitled Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor, was published in March 2023. Her current project, in collaboration with UC Berkeley doctoral student Evelyn Bellew, examines the unionization of foreign auto/bus manufacturing plants in Alabama, among the first successful efforts at collective bargaining in this sector in the US South.

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is a Professor in Sociology at UC San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations. In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), for example, he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets that automated trading in the late twentieth century. By looking at how experts in telecommunications created novel niches within stock exchanges, Automating Finance shows how these technical workers slowly transformed both the devices and cultures of their organizations, enabling the transition from trading floors to purely electronic exchanges. Automating Finance combines insights across fields, from the theoretical insights from science and technology studies and the analytical lenses of institutional theory, to anthropological discussions of relations and the economic metaphors of market design. Shifting emphasis to processes of marketization in higher education, his most recent book, The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences, studies labor markets in the British academia, demonstrating how market-like interventions of quality assessment introduced in the 1980s transformed the practices, career structures, and disciplines of anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists working in the United Kingdom. The book is based on a methodological innovation that synthesizes computational techniques with the ethnographic logic of the extended case study. Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers’ lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.Professor Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe. Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.

Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus, where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer.

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Matrix on Point: Corruption in America

February 3rd, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

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Corruption is a persistent challenge in America, shaping institutions, influencing policy, and eroding public trust. Understanding its roots, mechanisms, and consequences is essential for assessing the health of democratic governance. This panel, to be held on Tuesday, February 3, brings together leading scholars from business, political science, and law to examine the many facets of corruption in the United States and the ways it is identified, constrained, and addressed.

The panel will feature Ernesto Dal Bó, Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at the UC Berkeley Haas School, Sarah Anzia, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Erwin Chemerinsky, Jesse H. Chopper Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. Sean Gailmard, Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy, will moderate.

Panelists

Sarah Anzia studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shape local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly. Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She has also written about the political activity and influence of public-sector unions, the politics of public pensions, policy feedback, women in politics, political parties, and the historical development of electoral institutions. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and other scholarly journals. She has a PhD in political science from Stanford University and an MPP from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.

Ernesto Dal Bó is a political economist interested in governance broadly understood. His research focuses on a range of topics: political influence, social conflict, corruption, morality and social norms, state formation, the development of state capabilities, and the qualities and behavior of politicians and public servants. Most of his teaching takes place in the Berkeley MBA program and at the doctoral level where he teaches courses on political economy.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law. He is the author of nineteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent major books are Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (2022) and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (2021). In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the President of the Association of American Law Schools. He received his B.S. at Northwestern University and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.

Sean Gailmard studies how political institutions operate, change, and affect governance quality. His work focuses particularly on the US executive branch, checks and balances across branches of government, bureaucratic capacity, and the evolution of US institutions. Gailmard applies strategic and historical perspectives to these issues. Professor Gailmard is the author of Agents of Empire: English Imperial Governance and the Making of American Political Institutions, as well as Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch (winner of Best Book awards from APSA sections on Political Economy and Public Administration) and Statistical Modeling and Inference for Social Science, a Ph.D.-level textbook. He has published research in leading social science journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics.

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Promise & Precarity: Exploring Oakland Through Community-Engaged Scholarship

November 17th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:15 PM PT

Part of the Matrix Teach-Ins Event Series

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Join us on Monday, November 17 at 12pm for a Matrix Teach-In, part of a new event series featuring talks by UC Berkeley lecturers and professors who earn praise from students for their teaching. The speakers are invited to deliver a favorite standalone lecture, reimagined for anyone curious to learn.

This Matrix Teach-In will feature Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who will present a talk reflecting on his experiences with collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale District. Lunine’s courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, which aims to transform how faculty’s community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy.

In Fall 2024, students in Lunine’s Geography 50AC: California collaborated with Canticle Farm and Restorative Media, two nonprofits located in the Oakland Fruitvale District. ACES students developed story maps to represent the spatial histories of the Canticle Farm site. To create these story maps, they analyzed historical newspaper articles, real estate promotions, archeological reports, and city planning documents, revealing legacies of Indigenous stewardship, the Brown Power movement, redlining, and criminalization that has shaped Canticle Farm. Another group of ACES students collaborated with the Executive Director of Restorative Media, an organization led by formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people, to interview Canticle Farm stakeholders about their movement activism and life stories.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center.

Abstract

How can undergraduate research at UC Berkeley contribute meaningfully to community activism in Oakland and beyond? In this talk, I reflect on several years of collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale District. I briefly discuss course curriculum on recent patterns of racialized criminalization, exclusion, and banishment in Oakland. I then consider ongoing collaborative mapping and filmmaking projects. These address restorative justice, housing access, and environmental remediation for an array of stakeholders, including formerly-incarcerated men of color and activists involved in indigenous sovereignty, climate justice, and housing rights. Beyond intersections of coursework and community, I assert that this collaborative research provides spaces of public scholarship, critical acknowledgement, and generative healing that are perhaps more vital now than ever.

Biography

My experience growing up in the East Bay shaped my academic interests in the historical roots of contemporary urban transformations in California. These interests structured my B.A. and Ph.D. in Geography at U.C. Berkeley, as well as my M.A. at California State University, Northridge. My dissertation, Iron, Oil, and Emeryville: Resource Industrialization and Metropolitan Expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1900, combined urban and economic geography to study the role of industrialization in both regional capitalism and metropolitan growth. I am currently building on this research by writing about urban politics, commercial entertainment, and popular culture in a book manuscript, Sin Suburb: Manufacturing Vice in Emeryville and the San Francisco Bay Area. New projects on the early high explosives sector and specialized Bay Area corporations depict the decisive but overlooked role of innovative industries in not only California’s development but also in broader patterns of U.S. economic expansion during the late-19th century.

Participation in the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship Program (ACES) has enhanced my teaching and helped me continue exploring issues of power, race, and class in the contemporary city. Drawing on my experience in the nonprofit sector, I have designed and implemented student partnerships with artists, activists, and community organizations that are confronting gentrification, displacement, and homelessness in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and SOMA districts.

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Maximilian Kasy: “The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits)”

December 2nd, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

Registration for in-person attendance for this event is at capacity. Due to popular demand, we have added a livestream option. Please register through the link below and we will send a Zoom link in advance of the event.

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Join us on December 2, 2025 at 4:00pm for a talk by Maximilian Kasy, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, presenting his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits)

The talk is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Economics.

About the Book

AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate.

As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology’s owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI’s objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls “the means of prediction,” or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity’s most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power.

Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI’s capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI’s risks and harms. The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.

About the Speaker

Maximilian Kasy received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His current research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. Kasy teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. Learn more at his website.

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Legitimation by (Mis)identification: Credit, Discrimination, and The Racial Epistemology of Algorithmic Expansion

September 22nd, 2025
2:00pm-3:30pm

Part of the Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

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Please join us on September 22 at 2pm for a talk by Davon Norris, Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) and Faculty Associate at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan. The talk is entitled, “Legitimation by (Mis)identification: Credit, Discrimination, and The Racial Epistemology of Algorithmic Expansion.”

Professor Norris’s research is broadly oriented to understanding how our ways of determining what is valuable informs patterns of inequality with an acute focus on racism and racial inequality. Often, this means he studies the history, construction, and operation of various ratings, scores, and rankings whether that be at the government level (i.e., government credit ratings) or individual level (i.e., consumer credit scores). Other work that comes out of this interest in valuation processes further probes questions related to finance and the role of credit and debt in shaping inequality.

His research has been published in outlets such as Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Social Problems, and Sociological Forum, and has received awards from the Future of Privacy Forum and American Sociological Association. His work has been funded by the American Sociological Association. Davon received his Bachelor of Science in Accounting (2014), Master of Arts in Sociology (2018) and Ph.D. (2022) in Sociology all from The Ohio State University. Learn more about Davon at his website.

This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The event is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

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CANCELED – Marlene Daut: “From Slavery to Freedom: An Anti-Colonial Perspective of Abolition”

September 17th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

This event has been canceled.

We will contact registrants if the talk is rescheduled at a future date.

Join us on September 17 for a lecture by Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.

This talk reframes the story of slavery and freedom showing Haiti at the vanguard of abolition and challenging the idea that Africans and Black Americans were mere passengers on a seemingly linear road from slavery to freedom. As underscored in Daut’s book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, Atlantic World leaders perpetuated slavery until Haiti’s revolutionaries redefined it as a “crime against humanity.” Understanding this trajectory necessitates delving into over four hundred years of history, from European colonization to the rise of slavery and plantations in the Americas, to the pivotal role of Haiti’s revolution in sparking the Age of Abolition. Haiti was the driving force for abolition, and its profound influence stretches beyond inspiration, as Haitians actively contributed to the destruction of slavery throughout the Americas.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Global South Lab at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley; the Center for Research on Social Change; the Department of Sociology; and the Anticolonial Lab.

The talk will be introduced and moderated by Ricarda Hammer, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

About the Speaker

Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, teaches courses in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Primarily a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, she writes about the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media, especially as appears in film, television, and art. Professor Daut’s public-facing articles have appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; The Nation; Essence Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Avidly: A Channel of the LA Review of Books; The Conversation; and Public Books, among others. Her peer-reviewed articles can be found in journals such as, New Literary History, archipelagos, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and more.

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Alexis Madrigal: “To Know a Place”

December 4th, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm

Matrix Distinguished Lecture

Please register to join us on December 4, 2025 at 4pm for the Matrix Distinguished Lecture, “To Know a Place,” presented by journalist and author Alexis Madrigal.

Alexis Madrigal has long explored how technology, culture, and environment shape our lives; from his work co-founding The COVID Tracking Project to his books Powering the Dream and The Pacific Circuit. In this talk, Madrigal turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he will explore different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us.

About the Speaker

Alexis Madrigal is a journalist in Oakland, California. He is the co-host of KQED’s current affairs show, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, The Pacific Circuit, came out in March 2025 from MCD x FSG.

He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. Madrigal authored the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.

He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Information School and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard.

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