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)

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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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Financializing Disaster: Insurance and the Climate Crisis

November 13th, 2025
4:00pm-5:15pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

A compass needle pointing to insurance when the other directions are labeled as risk

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The technical world of insurance is a critical lens through which to understand the escalating crises in climate change and housing. As climate risks intensify, both public and private homeowner insurance markets face unprecedented pressure, revealing the interconnections between housing affordability, wealth inequality, and the broader financialization of our communities. This panel brings together experts to explore the intersection of insurance, housing, and climate.

The panel will feature Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. This panel is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).

Panelists

Stephen Collier is Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. He is the author of Post-Soviet Social (Princeton, 2011) and, with Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency (Princeton, 2021). His current work addresses fire risk, insurance, and urban adaptation in California, the topic of two articles currently under review: “Insurance and the ‘Irrationalization’ of Disaster Policy” and “Disorderly Urban Adaptation to Climate Change.” His previous publications on insurance include “Enacting Catastrophe” (Economy and Society, 2008), “Neoliberalism and Natural Disaster” (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2014), “Climate Change and Insurance” (Economy and Society, 2021), “Governing Urban Resilience” (Economy and Society, 2021), and “The Disaster Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism” (Geoforum, 2025).

Desiree Fields is an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, where she is also a faculty affiliate with Global Metropolitan Studies and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She also co-leads an interdisciplinary research group concerned with digital transformations in global land, housing, and property. She is a critical economic geographer and urban scholar. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship investigate property, finance, and technology with a focus on how they reproduce social and spatial hierarchies in the United States. At its core, her work is about how these processes of economic and technological change unevenly restructure urban space and the social relations of land and housing.

Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) and a former Senior Fellow at The ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones served two terms as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 to 2018. He led the Department of Insurance and was responsible for regulating the largest insurance market in the United States. Jones led the Department’s response to California’s increasingly deadly and destructive catastrophic wildfires, including the 2015 Butte and Valley Fires, the 2017 NorthBay and Thomas Fires, and the 2018 Mendocino, Carr, Woolsey, and Camp Fires. Prior to serving as Insurance Commissioner, Jones served in the California State Assembly (2004-2010), as a Sacramento City Councilmember (1999-2004), as Special Assistant and then Counsel to United States Attorney General Janet Reno (1995-1998) and provided free legal representation to low income families and individuals with the non-profit Legal Services of Northern California (1989-1995).

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Patrice Douglass, “Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence”

October 15th, 2025
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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Please join us on October 15 from 12-1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, by Patrice Douglass, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Douglass will be joined in conversation by Salar Mameni, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and Henry Washington, Jr., Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Womens Studies at UC Berkeley, 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. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies.

About the Book

In this incisive new book, Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

Panelists

Patrice D. Douglass (author) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Engendering Blackness: Slavery and The Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford University Press, 2025) examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Her current book project, Race and Abortion Ethics: Antiblackness and the Opacity of Liberty interrogates the (im)permissibility of abortion in US law and politics. Specifically this project critically examines how situating abortion as an ethic is sutured by the vexed relationship between philosophical and juridical notions of liberty and property. By attending to social and legal histories, U.S. geographies, the rhetorical strategies of abortion concerns, Race and Abortion Ethics illumines how racial Blackness subtends the conceptual framework of reproductive rights and anxieties about their inevitable usurpation. Her research of Blackness, gender, afro-pessimism, reproductive justice, and Black philosophies appear in or forthcoming from Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Political Theology, Journal of Legal Anthropology, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Souls, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory and Event, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (ZAA), and The Black Scholar.

Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke, 2023), which considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” Mameni proposes the term “Terracene” in order to think of the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. The book engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Mameni has published articles in Qui Parle, Catalyst, Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review, and Canadian Art Journal, and has written for exhibition catalogues in Dubai, Sharjah and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of “Snail Fever,” at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied, viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.

Henry Washington, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. His research broadly explores how dominant constructions of cultural difference help justify the persistence of inequality in the era of inclusion, as well as how minoritarian cultural forms attempt to contest these constructions and produce more complex truths about Humanness. He is at work on his first book project, Looking to Be Included: Social Science, Black Imagination, and the Culture of the Criminal, 1896-, which elucidates the shifts in the nature of power and in the forms of black cultural production effected by the postbellum emergence of “the criminal” as an alleged exemplar of race and gender alterity. His writing appears or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journals Women & Performance and Camera Obscura; the edited keyword collection Think from Black: A Lexicon; and the exhibition catalog for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s New Time: Art & Feminisms in the 21st Century.

Courtney Desiree Morris(moderator) is a visual/conceptual artist and an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and is currently completing a book entitled To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. She is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and dispossession in the US Gulf South and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix.

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New Directions: Borderlands

October 1st, 2025
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM PT

Part of the New Directions event series

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Borders reflect the many social, historical, and political forces that shape global movement and identity. While borders often suggest fixed lines of division, the experiences within and around them increasingly influence national and global understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and human rights. This panel brings together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of history, sociology, and ethnic studies for a discussion on borders and their impact, particularly through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The panel will feature Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate in History; Adriana Ramirez, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Irene Franco Rubio, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies. Hidetaka Hirota, Professor of History, will moderate.

The Social Science Matrix New Directions event series features research presentations by graduate students from different social science disciplines. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Panelists

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD Candidate in History at UC Berkeley. Her research examines how Indigenous and migrant railroad workers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands navigated and resisted overlapping systems of legal and corporate control from the 1880s to the 1940s. Drawing on archives in Mexico City, Washington D.C., and various state and private collections, the project reveals how state and corporate actors deployed immigration law, federal Indian policy, and labor systems to discipline mobile racialized populations, while workers strategically exploited jurisdictional gray zones to advance autonomy and resistance.

Adriana P. Ramirez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests revolve around migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. The influence of growing up as a migrant student between Mexico and the U.S. is evident in her work, which explores transnational migration dynamics. Her current work examines how young return migrants adapt to different spheres of Mexican society and formulate their identity and sense of belonging across contexts of reception in the states of Oaxaca and Jalisco. Her previous work studied how young return migrants navigate their double Mexican-U.S. citizenship to negotiate a sense of belonging and better opportunities in Mexico, recently published in Social Problems.

Irene Franco Rubio is a first-generation Latina scholar, writer, and community organizer from Phoenix, Arizona. She is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley with Designated Emphases in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research focuses on multiracial coalition-building and cross-cultural solidarity within abolitionist movements, especially in the U.S. Southwest, drawing from her lived experience and grassroots organizing. Irene is also a Soros Justice Fellow and the host of the #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast, where she examines the intersections of immigration, incarceration, and racialized state violence. At Berkeley, she connects academic research with grassroots organizing through community-based projects that center system-impacted communities and the pursuit of collective liberation.

Hidetaka Hirota (moderator) is a social and legal historian of U.S. immigration, specializing in nativism, immigration control, and policy from the antebellum era to the Progressive Era. His first book, Expelling the Poor (Oxford, 2017), examines 19th-century deportation policies and received multiple awards. He is currently working on The American Dilemma, which explores the tension between nativism and labor demand in shaping U.S. immigration policy, as well as projects on Japanese immigrants and the history of anti-immigrant sentiment. His research has appeared in leading history and migration studies journals. At UC Berkeley, he teaches U.S. immigration history and co-directs the Canadian Studies Program. He was also a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

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Matrix on Point: Spaces for Thriving

November 3rd, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

Brain psychology mind soul and hope concept art, 3d illustration, surreal artwork, imagination painting, conceptual idea

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Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes. This panel brings together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. This discussion will bridge diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments.

The panel will feature You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, and the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography and Anthropology.

Panelists

Sally Augustin is a practicing environmental/design psychologist, the principal at Design With Science, and a researcher with the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces. She has extensive experience integrating science-based insights to develop recommendations for the design of places, objects, and services that support desired cognitive, emotional, and physical experiences. Her Design With Science clients include manufacturers, service providers, and design firms in North America, Europe, and Asia. Augustin is a graduate of Wellesley College (BA), Northwestern University (MBA), and Claremont Graduate University (PhD). Dr. Augustin is the author of Designology (Mango 2019), Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009), and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Information Design (Wiley, 2012).

You-Tien Hsing is a Professor of Geography and the Pamela P. Fong Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China. She is interested in the question of power and space. Her first book, Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection, centers on the role of culture in inter-regional capital flows. In her second book, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, she examines the issue of territoriality, looking at how the transformation of the state and society shapes and is shaped by land battles in Chinese cities and villages. Her co-edited book, Reclaiming Chinese Society, explores China’s emerging social activism in struggles over distribution, recognition, and representation. Her current project concerns the cultural and environmental politics in Northwestern China. For her research, she draws inspiration from ethnographic work, including in-depth interviews and participatory observation with a reflexive perspective. She believes that theorizing starts from muddy realities and is a process of open dialogues and self-reflections, of which the historical and the geographical, the institutional and the emotional are all indispensable parts.

Karen Nakamura is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and is the director of the Disability Studies Lab. Professor Nakamura’s research focuses on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan, In 2006, she published Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, an ethnography exploring sign language and deaf social movements. Her second project on psychiatric disabilities and community-based recovery resulted in two ethnographic films and a book titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). Her books, films, and articles have resulted in numerous prizes including the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the SVA Short Film Award, and David Plath Media Award. She is currently finishing a project on trans movements as disability in Japan while launching a new project on robotics, augmentation, and prosthetic technology.

Meredith Sadin (moderator) is an Assistant Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy. She is a trained political scientist (Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2014) and her work focuses on political access, community engagement, and inequality. Dr. Sadin has extensive experience collaborating with practitioners, policymakers, and government agencies on projects designed to evaluate, implement, scale, and improve public policies and programs as well as access to the democratic process. She aims to utilize Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches in her research – conducting rigorous and systematic research with the collaboration of those directly impacted by the issue being studied. She currently serves as the Director of the Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE) as well as a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Possibility Lab. Her work has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the CARESTAR Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Sadin has published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Punishment & Society, Journal of Urban Design, and cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New Republic.

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California Spotlight: Tech Authoritarianism

September 24th, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the California Spotlight series

map of california with a silicon chip overlay

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As a hub of technological innovation, California is increasingly grappling with complex questions surrounding the influence of technology on society and governance. The rise of powerful tech entities and the rapid advancement of digital technologies are giving way to new forms of control, raising concerns about tech authoritarianism and its impact on democratic processes and communities.

Presented as part of the Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series, this panel will bring together experts to delve into the manifestations of tech authoritarianism, with a particular focus on its emergence and implications within California. Our panelists will explore how certain technological advancements and their proponents are reshaping societal structures, potentially undermining democratic frameworks, and extending their influence across various sectors. The discussion will connect these local dynamics to broader, global trends.

The panel will feature Elijah Baucom, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Director of the Cybersecurity Clinic; Finn Brunton, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis; and Lee Crandall, PhD Candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley. James Holston, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Social Apps Lab, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Anthropology, Geography, Political Science, and Sociology; the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI); the Center for Research on Social Change; and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Panelists

Elijah Baucom is a cybersecurity and privacy technologist, engineer, and activist positioned at the intersection of tech & humanity and tech & liberation. As the Director of the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic (a public interest cybersecurity clinic), Elijah teaches and trains students how to consult with and support social sector organizations that are often more susceptible to ideologically based attacks. Given the current prevailing monolithic culture in cybersecurity and IT, he is intentional in making the Clinic as accessible as possible to every student on campus, regardless of area of study or tech experience. Elijah is also the founder of Everyday Security, a company that provides cybersecurity, IT, and management consulting solutions to human rights defenders, movement based organizations, and the people they support.

Finn Brunton is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of *Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet* (MIT, 2013) and *Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency* (Princeton, 2019), and the co-author of *Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest* (with Helen Nissenbaum, MIT, 2015) and *Communication* (with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, meson press and University of Minnesota, 2019). His articles and papers have been published in venues including *Radical Philosophy,* *Artforum,* *The Guardian,* and *Representations.*

Lee Crandall is currently a PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley researching new tech cities, technoeconomic development, and the reconfiguration of nature, land, and (multispecies) lives under crypto/tech imaginaries and politics. Prior to starting the doctoral program at Berkeley, Lee was a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture in Troy, NY. Lee is also a licensed architect in New York, where they managed several large-scale projects in public transportation and infrastructure in New York City and Puerto Rico. Their work has recently been published in Progress in Economic Geography, Political Geography, Big Data and Society, and Design and Culture.

James Holston (moderator) is a political anthropologist. His work focuses on the city as a strategic site for the emergence and erosion of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and democracy. He has conducted research projects in Brazil, Denmark, Nicaragua, and the United States. His current work investigates new forms of direct democracy and develops application software for democratic assembly. His books, research articles, and software development engage these issues as an anthropology of critique and experiment. He is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and also founding director of the Social Apps Lab. He has written and edited a number of books, including The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, Cities and Citizenship, and Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.

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Matrix on Point: Conspiracy Theories

October 27th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

Fake news, online conspiracy theory and impact of disinformation. Tiny man and false facts flow from computer screen, delusion about vaccine and virus, aliens, 5G danger cartoon vector illustration

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Conspiracy theories are a pervasive and powerful force in contemporary society, shaping public discourse and influencing real-world events. Understanding their origins, spread, and impact is crucial in navigating today’s information landscape. This panel will bring together experts to delve into the multifaceted world of conspiracy theories. Drawing on diverse academic perspectives, the discussion will explore the nature of conspiracy theories, their societal implications, and how they are understood and addressed.

The panel will feature Michael M. Cohen, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and Tim Tangherlini, Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Lakshmi Sarah, journalist and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, 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 UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian, African American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory.

Panelists

Michael M Cohen was born in Denver, Colorado, the child of two public school teachers. He holds a BA in History from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University (2004). He is currently an Associate Teaching Professor at UC Berkeley with a joint appointment in American Studies and African American Studies. He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (2019). His general research and teaching areas cover the cultural and political history of the United States from the Civil War to the present. Areas of emphasis include racial capitalism and racial formations in the United States; labor, work and radical social movements; Marx and the Marxist tradition in world history and theory; cultural studies, popular culture, and US film and literature; theories of conspiracy and conspiracy theories; political cartooning and comic books; race and drugs in US history; and contemporary US politics and social change.

Tim Tangherlini is the Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education at UC Berkeley. He is a Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and in the School of Information. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories (2014), Talking Trauma (1999), and Interpreting Legend (1994). He has also published widely in academic journals. He is interested in the circulation of stories on and across social networks, and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong. In general, his work focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of folklore, literature, and culture. He is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and the Royal Gustav Adolf Academy (one of Sweden’s Royal Academies). A producer of three independent documentary films, he has also consulted on films for Disney Animation, National Geographic Television, National Geographic Specials, and PBS.

Lakshmi Sarah is an educator and journalist with a focus on experimental storytelling. She has produced content for newspapers, radio and magazines from Ahmedabad, India to Los Angeles, California including AJ+, Die Zeit Online and The New York Times. She is currently a digital producer for KQED News and a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. She has developed curriculum training journalists in video and immersive storytelling skills in the U.S., India, and around the world. Previously, as a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute, she taught multimedia and VR workshops. Her teaching and reporting have brought her to Hamburg, Germany as a Fulbright Fellow; to Berlin as an Arthur F. Burns Fellow with Die Zeit Online; and to India to report on ethnic violence in the Northeastern state of Manipur as a Pulitzer Center grant recipient.

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Politics and Governance in the Digital Age: Between Populism and Technocracy

May 2nd, 2025
2:00pm-3:15pm

This talk will feature Rogers Brubaker, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, who will discuss a chapter of his recent book, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents. The talk will focus on the chapter “Politics,” addressing the epistemic, emotional, and organizational questions that digital hyperconnectivity imposes on governance, and the resulting tensions between democracy, populism, and technocracy.

The talk is sponsored by the Social Effects and Normativity of Data-Mining, Algorithms, and the Digital Economy Research Team, a Social Science Matrix Research Team.

This event will be held in person.

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About the Speaker

Rogers Brubaker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, populism, and – most recently – digital hyperconnectivity. His first book explored the idea of rationality in the work of Max Weber, while his essays on Pierre Bourdieu helped introduce Bourdieu to an English-speaking audience. His next two books analyzed European nationalism in historical and comparative perspective. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) sought to explain the sharply differing ways in which citizenship has been defined vis-à-vis immigrants in France and Germany and helped establish what has since become a flourishing field of citizenship studies; Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996) compared contemporary East European nationalisms with those of the interwar period, both emerging after the breakup of multinational states into would-be nation-states. Subsequently, in a series of analytical essays, many of them collected in Ethnicity without Groups (2004), Brubaker critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources. These informed his collaborative book Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (2006), which examined the everyday workings of ethnicity in a setting of highly charged ethnonational conflict.

Brubaker’s more recent work has taken him in new directions. Grounds for Difference (Harvard, 2015) emerged from three new lines of work, engaging three increasingly salient contexts for the contemporary politics of difference: the return of inequality, the return of biology, and the return of the sacred. The introduction can be read here.

Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton, 2016) was prompted by the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in debates about whether Caitlyn Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman and Rachel Dolezal as black. The introduction can be read here. More recent work on gender includes “Exit, Voice, and Gender” (2023) and “Emerging Pronoun Practices After the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair” (2024).

Brubaker’s work on the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment includes “Why Populism?” (2017), “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism” (2017), “Populism and Nationalism” (2020), and “Paradoxes of Populism during the Pandemic” (2020).

Brubaker’s most recent book, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents, was published by Polity in November 2022. Treating digital hyperconnectivity as a “total social fact,” the book addresses transformations of the self, social interaction, culture, economics, and politics.

Brubaker has taught at UCLA since 1991. Before coming to UCLA, he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University (1988-1991). He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99), a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994-99), and Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1995-96), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999-2000), and the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin (2016-2017). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

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The New Tariff Regime: How the Trump Administration Is Upending the Global Trade Order

April 23rd, 2025
4:30pm-6:00pm

a banner showing the details about the event with photos of the panelists

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Please join us for a fireside chat with professors Matilde Bombardini, Andrés Rodriguez-Clare, and Barry Eichengreen to learn more about rapidly evolving U.S. tariff policy and how it might impact trade, the economy, and international finance and policy. The discussion will include time for audience questions.

Panelists

- Matilde Bombardini is a professor and the Oliver E. and Dolores Williamson Chair in the Economics of Organization at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. She is also the co-faculty director of the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy. Her research focuses on international trade and interest group politics.
- Andres Rodriguez-Clare is the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Professor of Economics and department chair of the UC Berkeley Economics Department. His research focuses on gains from trade; economic growth; multinational production and technology diffusion; and industrial policy.
- Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics. His research focuses on international economic and finance issues, including exchange rates and capital flows; the European economy; Asian integration and development with a focus on exchange rates and financial markets; and the impact of China on the international economic and financial system.

Co-sponsored by the Haas School of Business, the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy, and UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix.

This event is free and will be presented in-person and online via Zoom. Please register to attend. We will send a link to the Zoom presentation in advance of the event.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Chuck Kapelke at ckapelke@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

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