Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis

November 24th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Cover of "Until the Last Ton," showing women hauling baskets of coal-like rocks

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Please join us on Tuesday, November 24th from 4:00–5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis by Matthew Shutzer, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Professor Shutzer will be joined in conversation by Youjin Chung, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy & Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. The talk will be moderated by Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of South & Southeast Asia Studies and Geography, and the Energy and Resources Group.

About the Book

India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from climate change, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependence has left many searching for how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.

In the book, Matthew Shutzer recasts the origins of the fossil economy by showing how European industrialization unleashed a global search for fossil energy in the colonial world. Placing India at the center of this history, Shutzer traces how the highland forests of eastern India became early frontiers for global coal investment, transforming this landscape into the largest site of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. At the heart of these shifts was a legal framework of subterranean property, which redefined local relations of land ownership and social power, while tying the growth of India’s fossil economy to the progressive ecological destruction of the forest frontier.

Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property on independent India’s energy history, shedding new light on postwar struggles for energy development and resource sovereignty, as well as the violent conflicts over mining dispossession that have haunted India’s economic ascent in an age of climate crisis.

Panelists

Matthew Shutzer is an environmental historian of South Asia. His research and teaching are concerned with the place of the environment in global history, with a particular focus on fossil fuels, agriculture, forests, climate change, and environmental politics. He has also worked on topics that connect global environmental history to histories of law, capitalism, post-colonial development, the earth sciences, and photography. His book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis, is the first history of fossil fuels in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. He is currently at work on a second book project on climate change and the making of the Third World after 1945.

Youjin B. Chung studies the relationship between gender and inequality, rural development, and socio-environmental change in East Africa, with a focus on Tanzania. The overarching question that drives her research program is: how and why do development policies and processes that aim to improve sustainability and equity outcomes often reinforce existing power structures and marginalize the groups they intend to serve? Over the years, she has channeled this central animating concern into three specific research projects. Using Tanzania as an analytic case, these projects investigate some of the most contentious issues in global development and environmental politics: large-scale farmland investments, sustainable livestock intensification, and the critical minerals rush. She is the author of Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures (Cornell University Press, 2024). At Berkeley, she convenes the Critical Ruralities Lab, a research workshop and collaborative mentoring space that promotes empirically grounded and justice-oriented scholarship on development and socio-environmental change in the global countryside.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serves as a faculty affiliate in the graduate program on Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive climate and economy think tank. He has been a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-24) and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2018-19). He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019). Cohen works on the intersections of the climate emergency, housing, political economy, social movements, and inequalities of race and class in the United States and Brazil. As Director of (SC)2, he is leading qualitative and quantitative research projects on Whole Community Climate Mapping, green political economy, and eco-apartheid. He was also co-founder and co-PI of the Superstorm Research Lab, in New York City.

Michael Watts is Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley. He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994 to 2004 and was Director of Social Science Matrix at Berkeley in 2019–20. He was most recently a Non-resident Long-term Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). Watts is a member of the British Academy, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003, and was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2004, and the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin in 2016. He was awarded the Ester Boserup Prize in 2024. Watts’ writing has addressed a number of development issues especially famine and food security, political violence and the agrarian question in Africa, South Asia and Vietnam, natural resources and especially the energy and mineral sectors, and the political economy of development and governance, more generally. Watts has worked for UNDP, OECD and other development organizations, including the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations. He has published over fifteen books and three hundred articles and has worked extensively with the renowned photographer Ed Kashi. Watts has written extensively on the oil industry, extractive economies and international commodity trading firms.

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New Directions: Green Transitions

October 14th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the New Directions Event Series

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The transition to a low-carbon economy is reshaping how societies produce and consume energy, with far-reaching implications for technology, industry, policy, and everyday life. Yet moving away from fossil fuels brings complex challenges around infrastructure, affordability, political economy, and the distribution of costs and benefits.

This panel brings together advanced graduate students from UC Berkeley whose research examines the forces shaping green energy transitions around the world. Drawing on emerging scholarship spanning energy systems, technological change, environmental policy, and social equity, the discussion will explore how societies can navigate the opportunities and tradeoffs of decarbonization, and what is at stake for communities, economies, and the future of the planet.

The panel will feature August Rud Jacobsen, PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; Janna Zou Huang, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton, PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the Energy and Resources Group.

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California Spotlight: Wealth & Poverty

October 7th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the California Spotlight Series

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California is one of the wealthiest states in the country, yet it also faces persistent poverty, stark economic inequality, and some of the highest costs of living in the nation. These tensions raise fundamental questions about who benefits from California’s economic growth and why so many residents struggle to achieve economic security. This panel brings together leading scholars to examine the forces shaping wealth and poverty across the state. Drawing on research spanning inequality, affordability, economic mobility, and social policy, the discussion will explore the roots of California’s economic divides, how they are reproduced across generations, and what is at stake for families, communities, and the future of the state.

This panel will feature David Grusky, Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Sociology at Stanford; Marianne Page, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis; and Samuel Trachtman, Senior Researcher at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative at UC Berkeley.

This event is co-sponsored by The Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).

Panelists

David Grusky is Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences, Faculty Director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and coeditor of Pathways Magazine. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a corecipient of the 2004 Max Weber Award, the founder of the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality, and a former Presidential Young Investigator. His recent books are Inequality in the 21st Century (with Jasmine Hill, 2017), Social Stratification (with Kate Weisshaar, 2014), Occupy the Future (with Douglas McAdam, Robert Reich, and Debra Satz, 2012), The New Gilded Age (with Tamar Kricheli-Katz, 2011), and The Great Recession (with Bruce Western and Chris Wimer, 2011).

Marianne Page is a Professor of Economics and a founding director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and member of the Institute for Labor Economics. She currently serves as a Co-Editor of the Journal of Human Resources, and recently completed a term serving on Governor Newsom’s Council of Economic Advisors. She is an expert on policies promoting intergenerational mobility and equality of opportunity for children in the United States. Her research has appeared in economics journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review. and the Journal of Labor Economics, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Sam Trachtman is a senior researcher at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), where he leads the research program on the political economy of California. Sam completed his Ph.D. in political science in 2021 at UC Berkeley, where he honed skills in quantitative methods and policy-engaged empirical research. He has published widely in academic journals including American Political Science Review, Climatic Change, Governance, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Nature Energy, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Perspectives on Politics.

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

October 1st, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Join us on October 1 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).

Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by James Porter, Distinguished Professor and Irving Stone Chair in Literature in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, and Kinch Hoekstra, Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Departments of Political Science and Ancient Greek & Roman Studies.

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

In ancient Greece, demokratia meant “rule by the people”—but what people, and how did they rule? Scholars have long argued that demokratia signified the rule of all adult male citizens over themselves. In Demos, Daniela Cammack counters this view by arguing that demokratia meant rule by the crowd that assembled when a public meeting was held. This crowd was the demos, which the Greeks distinguished from orators, generals, councilors, public benefactors, and other civic leaders. Drawing on literary and epigraphical evidence as well as the key theoretical insights of Aristotle and Hobbes, Cammack explains how constantly changing masses of ordinary ancient Greek men ruled while their leaders were ruled over.

This political system relied on kratos, the power to prevail militarily, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts around 508 and 404 BC. In peacetime, the superior strength of the demos revealed itself in large, frequently summoned crowds of ordinary citizens acting as policymakers, legislators, and (crucially) judges, who wielded great power over politicians. Aristotle characterized the years 403 to 322 as the era of “ultimate democracy,” and it was during this period that the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by modern democrats: making use of talented and ambitious leaders without being ruled by them. By contrast, the Greeks called rule by elected office-holders “oligarchy.” As people today lose faith in democratic institutions, Cammack’s account prompts us to ask if we’ve been doing democracy all wrong—or even at all.

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.

Kinch Hoestra is Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. He works on the history of political, moral, and legal thought, especially ancient, renaissance, and early modern political philosophy. Recent contributions to ancient political thought include “Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny,” “Thucydides and the Politics of Necessity” (with Mark Fisher), and “The Liberties of the Ancients” (with Quentin Skinner). Another focus of Hoestra’s research has been the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (including studies of his theory of equality, obligation, democracy, tyranny, mixed government, natural law, and the rationality of justice); he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes. Work that bridges these two areas includes “Hobbes and Aristotle on the Foundation of Political Science” (with Nicholas Gooding), “Hobbes’s Thucydides”, “Thucydides in the Renaissance and Reformation”, and “The Melian Dilemma”. From 1996 to 2007, he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he regularly taught graduate students in the Faculty of Classics and the Department of Politics and International Relations.

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. Current projects include Existence, Crisis, and Faith: Selected Essays and Letters by Rachel Bespaloff, a Cambridge Critical Guide to The Birth of Tragedy (co-edited with Michael Forster), and The Cynics: A Very Short Introduction.

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Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide

September 9th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Wednesday, September 9th from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, by G. Cristina Mora, Professor of Sociology and Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of African American Studies, both at UC Berkeley.

Professors Mora and Paschel will be joined in conversation by Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Lisa García Bedolla, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley. Nicholas Vargas, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, the School of Education, and the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies.

About the Book

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention — a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world’s most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as “not as bad as the South.” Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California’s future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California’s foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.

Read a Berkeley News article about the book.

Panelists

G. Cristina Mora completed her B.A. in Sociology at UC Berkeley in 2003 and earned her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University in 2009. Before returning to Cal, she was a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Professor Mora’s award-winning research focuses mainly on questions of racial and ethnic categorization, racial politics, and immigration. Her book, Making Hispanics, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and provides a socio-historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” panethnic category in the United States. This work, along with related articles, has received wide recognition, including the Best Dissertation Award and the 2018 Early Career Award (SREM) from the American Sociological Association. Her work has also been the subject of various national media segments in venues like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA.

At UC Berkeley, her long-term efforts towards diversity and inclusion have recently been formally acknowledged. In 2021 and 2022, she received the UCB Graduate Mentoring Award and the Chancellors Award for Advancing Equity and Excellence, and she led campus’ first social-science cluster hire focused on “Latinos and Democracy.” In 2023 she received a million-dollar federal grant from the Department of Education to establish a “Latino Social Science Pipeline” initiative at UC Berkeley.

Tianna Paschel is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America. Her work can be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, and various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for Black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor – along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones – of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and Blackness in the Americas.

Professor Paschel is a Ford Fellow, member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, the Council of the Law Section of ASA, and the Steering Committee of the Network of Anti-Racist Action and Research (RAIAR).

Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of the Graduate Division, and Chancellor’s Professor of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS), among others – to shed light on these questions.

She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color. Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.

Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. His research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book will read Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that grounds the wrong of slavery in property rights in another person. His work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.

Professor Jagmohan is the winner of several awards and fellowships: The APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018), and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Hellman Fellowship at UC, Berkeley. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, he was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Nicholas Vargas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His scholarship examines Latinx racialization: how Latinx people are identified, perceived, and positioned within U.S. racial hierarchies, and how these processes intersect with immigration ideologies, state institutions, and higher education inequality. A central aim of his work is to clarify how racial categories and racial meaning are produced in everyday life and policy contexts, and how those dynamics shape public attitudes. Methodologically, Vargas draws on survey research, administrative and demographic data, and mixed-method strategies that connect macro-level structures to micro-level meaning-making. His work bridges ethnic studies, sociology, and education research, and he frequently collaborates with student researchers to develop data-rich projects that speak to pressing public questions and contribute to ongoing debates in Latino/Latinx social science. Vargas has served on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee and is Co-Director of the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at UC Berkeley. He also serves as the Program Coordinator of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and co-leads UC Berkeley’s Latinxs and Democracy Cluster.

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The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us

May 5th, 2026
4:00pm-5:15pm

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Please join us on Tuesday, May 5th from 4:00pm-5:15pm for a talk on The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us, by Benjamin Recht, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Professor Recht will be joined in conversation with Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix.

This event is co-sponsored by the D-Lab; the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG); the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS); and the UC Berkeley Departments of Sociology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Abstract

Mathematicians and engineers of the 1940s set out to design machines that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, a cluster of foundational mathematical technologies — including information theory, linear programming, game theory, and neural networks — emerged as a foundation for a mathematical formalization of rationality, reshaping how we think about human decision-making itself. The Irrational Decision traces how a narrow mathematical framework for computing came to define rationality in economics, public policy, and popular culture.

Recht’s talk will discuss how these seminal computational methods have evolved into a robust discipline and industry, with success stories in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce. These examples will highlight how automated decision systems excel in specific sweet spots with clear rules, well-defined goals, and well-constrained contexts. They will also show how, outside these narrow contexts, the rational program tends to absurdity. Given these strengths and limitations, the discussion will explore how to best harness 80 years of unfathomable computational progress while preserving human agency and judgment.

About the Author

Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 and 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Awards. He is the author of three books: Optimization for Modern Data Analysis (2022), with Stephen J. Wright; Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning (2022), with Moritz Hardt; and The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us (2026).

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Matrix on Point: The U.S. Dollar Hegemony in Transition

April 8th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

red downward arrow inside a magnifying glass placed over a U.S. dollar banknote symbolizes economic decline, financial crisis, or recession in the United States.

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The global dominance of the U.S. dollar has long shaped international trade, financial markets, and geopolitical power. Amid shifting global dynamics and the rapid development of stablecoins and other digital assets, new questions are emerging around the structure and evolution of dollar hegemony. How are technological innovation and geopolitical change reshaping the international monetary system, and what possibilities lie ahead?

This panel will bring together scholars and industry voices to examine the foundation of U.S. monetary influence and the role of financial innovation in an evolving global economy. The panel will feature Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, Rohan Kekre, Assistant Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley Haas, and Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Brian Judge, Research Director for the UC Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, will moderate.

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

Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center, the Institute for International Studies, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Program on Finance and Democracy, and the UC Departments of Economics and Political Science.

Panelists

Barry Eichengreen is George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). Professor Eichengreen is the convener of the Bellagio Group of academics and economic officials and chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peterson Institute of International Economics. He has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). He is a regular monthly columnist for Project Syndicate.

His books include The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (2018), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future, with Livia Chitu and Arnaud Mehl, (2017), The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future (Harvard East Asian Monographs) with Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park and Dwight H. Perkins, (2015), Renminbi Internationalization: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges, co-edited with Masahiro Kawai, (2015), Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History, (2015). He was awarded the Economic History Association’s Jonathan R.T. Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2002 and the University of California at Berkeley Social Science Division’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004. He is also the recipient of a doctor honoris causa from the American University in Paris.

Rohan Kekre’s research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a particular focus on international finance. Among other topics, he has studied the drivers of exchange rates and interest rates, the transmission of monetary policy through financial markets, and the unique roles of the U.S. in the international financial system. His papers have been published in leading journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economic Studies. Prior to joining UC Berkeley Haas, Kekre served on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He received his AB, AM, and PhD from Harvard University.

Chenzi Xu is an assistant professor of economics 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 in 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.

Brian Judge is the research director of the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), where he leads research on how finance drives inequality and erodes democratic governance. His current work focuses on central bank digital currencies and using large language models to demystify public budget documents. His first book, Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores how finance reshaped American political economy. His next book project, The Economy of Knowledge, examines how economic knowledge both constructs and constrains what can be known about what we call “the economy.” He has published in Policy & Society, New Political Economy, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Brian holds a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley and was a policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Before academia, he was a portfolio analyst at a hedge fund.

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Social Science Matrix – BESI Open House

March 11th, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

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Please register to join us on March 11 at 4:00pm for the very first Matrix-BESI Open House.

Co-organized by Social Science Matrix and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), this event is an opportunity to network with other members of the Berkeley social science community, engage with colleagues from different disciplines, and learn more about our projects, events, and funding and research opportunities.

Light bites and refreshments will be served.

All are welcome, though please note that advance registration is required.

We hope you can make it!

Marion Fourcade, Director, Social Science Matrix

Paul Pierson, Director, BESI

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Scoring Justice: Risk Assessment Tools, Court Practices, and Fairness Perceptions

April 21st, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm

A presentation of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

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Please join us on Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00pm for a lecture by Simone Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University.

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 talk is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Department of Sociology, the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG), the Criminal Law and Justice Center, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.

Abstract

Risk assessment algorithms are increasingly adopted to improve criminal court decisions, yet their consequences remain contested. This talk presents findings from two studies leveraging a randomized controlled trial of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) — a popular pretrial risk assessment tool — that randomized access to risk reports across cases.

In the first study, I combine transcripts of court hearings with decision outcomes to examine how risk scores shape bail decisions. When courts had access to the PSA, judges imposed cash bail at higher rates when the tool recommended it, with risk assessments serving as a rhetorical resource to justify harsher conditions.

In the second study, I investigate whether the PSA’s influence on proceedings alters how the public perceives court decisions. I randomly assigned U.S. adults to read transcripts from hearings conducted with and without the PSA. Although the PSA shifted decision-making, participants rated algorithm-assisted and algorithm-unassisted decision-making as comparable in quality, fairness, and trustworthiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that algorithmic tools can alter the punitiveness of pretrial decisions without diminishing or enhancing public perceptions of courts, complicating prospects for public accountability.

About the Speaker

Simone Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. Her research examines how classification systems, predictive models, and AI shape the distribution of benefits, burdens, and recognition in society. Much of her work focuses on the implications of these systems for institutional decision-making in social policy, education, and law. She received a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University.

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Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

April 9th, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on Thursday, April 9th from 12-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Briggs will be joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, will moderate.

The panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.

About the Book

In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.

Panelists

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley; he is the co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology and the co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. His books include The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico, Learning How to Ask, Competence in Performance, Voices of Modernity (with Richard Bauman), Making Health Public (with Daniel Hallin), Stories in the Time of Cholera and Tell Me Why My Children Died (both with Clara Mantini-Briggs), Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge, and Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine. He has received many awards and honors, including being elected in 2023 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elinor Ochs is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She co-pioneered the field of language socialization, which examines how children and other novices become socio-culturally competent as they acquire language. Drawing upon fieldwork in Madagascar, Samoa, Italy and the United States, her studies bridge linguistic, psychological, and medical anthropology. Ochs directed the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (2001-2010), which analyzed how social class configures communication, connectedness, childcare, health, commensality, leisure, and work. She has led 18 major research projects, with support from NSF, NIMH, NICHD, NEH, Guggenheim Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Selected honors include MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member, and Honorary Doctorate from Linkoping University, Sweden.

Eric Snoey: For the past 35 years, Dr. Snoey has been an Emergency Medicine physician and core faculty at Highland Hospital; a teaching and safety net hospital in Oakland, California. His areas of expertise include cardiovascular emergencies, the application of point-of-care ultrasound and medical education. More recently, Dr. Snoey has begun to focus more on macro-issues and threats to the delivery of emergency healthcare: ER over crowding, the problem of over testing and defensive medicine, budget cuts, predicted work force shortages and the challenges of end-of-life care.

Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Lara-Millán does political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and politics. He is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape.

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Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa

March 18th, 2026
1:30pm

Part of the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program

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Please join us on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 1:30pm for a public lecture by Julien Migozzi, an economic geographer and Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Migozzi’s lecture, “Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa,” will examine how 21st-century class dynamics become connected with data-driven stratification systems, focusing on the digital transformation of property markets.

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

Abstract

How do persistent inequalities and rapid technological change shape class formation? Centred on South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, this presentation examines how contemporary class dynamics become intertwined with racialised, data-driven mechanisms of social sorting.

Integrating computational analysis with in-depth fieldwork across the suburbs and corporate boardrooms of Cape Town, I demonstrate how digital, legal, and financial transformations have reorganised the housing market around a data imperative. Once based on racial categories to exclude the majority from urban property under apartheid, the market is now structured around credit scoring to allocate mortgages and sort the “good” from the “bad” home-seeker, encoding racial inequalities in seemingly colour-blind market outcomes.

Thinking class from the realm of digitised markets, I document and theorise how the making of the South African middle-class rests upon the production of a “mortgaged periphery”, where middle-income households earn their middle-class stripes by scoring “high enough” to access debt-leveraged homeownership in gated estates. In this suburban, post-apartheid space, physical fences and algorithmic barriers regulate the production and access to housing wealth, materialising class boundaries through asset ownership, capital gains, property aesthetics, and debt relationships.

About the Speaker

Julien Migozzi is an economic geographer and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, after appointments at Oxford University and the École Normale Supérieure. At the intersection of geography, urban studies and economic sociology, Julien’s research investigates how digital technologies affect markets, cities, and inequalities, with a particular interest in housing and financial markets. At Cambridge, Julien is teaching a course on digital capitalism. He is a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024).

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Matrix Teach-In: Ula Taylor, “The Making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House”

February 19th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:15 PM PT

Part of the Matrix Teach-Ins Event Series

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Please join us on Thursday, February 19 at 12:00pm as Ula Taylor, Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies, will present a Matrix Teach-In. The talk will center on Professor Taylor’s current work in progress, an oral biography of Frances M. Beal.

This talk is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

About Matrix Teach-Ins

Have you ever wished you could hear your colleague deliver the lecture that students rave about, or revisit a favorite subject yourself? Matrix Teach-Ins are a new series designed to bring UC Berkeley’s most engaging social science lectures into a public setting. Instructors will share their favorite lesson, the one students remember long after the semester ends, as a stand-alone lecture reimagined for anyone curious to learn.

Abstract

In this talk, I am going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments where she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical during the 1960s and 70s. Understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st-century activists because I explore fatigue and failures alongside empowering sisterhood, pleasurable heterosexual sex, and disciplined study. By doing so, I aim to bring to the fore the exhaustion and exhilaration.

About the Speaker

Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes.

In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for UC Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor, and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.

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