California Spotlight: Tech Authoritarianism

September 22nd, 2025
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the California Spotlight series

map of california with a silicon chip overlay

REGISTER

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.

Panelists

Elijah Baucom is a digital security and privacy activist positioned at the intersection of tech and humanity. As the Director of the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic (a public interest cybersecurity clinic), Elijah trains students and partners with them to support social sector organizations that are often more susceptible to ideologically based attacks. Elijah is the founder of Everyday Security, a company that provides enterprise-level Cyber, IT, and Business consulting and solutions to Everyday People and organizations that support them. This often includes social justice organizations, non-profits, co-ops, activists, and individuals. He holds dual Master’s degrees in Business Administration and Telecommunication Systems Management from Murray State University.

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.

View Map

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

REGISTER

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.

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.

View Map

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.

REGISTER

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.

View Map

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

REGISTER

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.

REGISTER

View Map

Global Perspectives on Anti-Blackness and Gender Violence

April 9th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

REGISTER TO ATTEND

This panel brings together interdisciplinary experts to discuss how anti-Blackness extends beyond history and carries continued implications for ongoing technologies of anti-Black gender violence. Panelists will take an interdisciplinary approach to grappling with how assumptions of Blackness bracket the divide between the violence of (un)gendering and resistance.

The panel will feature Patrice Douglass, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow; Matheuzza Xavier, artist and researcher, and PhD candidate in Performing Arts at UFBA; and Márcia Ribeiro, Brazilian lawyer, specialist in Criminal Procedure Law, Master’s in Law from UFMG, and currently a PhD candidate at the same institution.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender, Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of Geography, Department of History of Art, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research (IGSR).

Panelists

Patrice Douglass is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also currently a Matrix Faculty Fellow.

Márcia Ribeiro is a Brazilian lawyer, specialist in Criminal Procedure Law, Master in Law from UFMG, and currently a PhD candidate at the same institution. She is a researcher at Diverso UFMG – Legal Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and a Legal Analyst at Mapa do Acolhimento, a Brazilian organization that provides legal and psychological support to women survivors of gender-based violence across Brazil. She is currently conducting a doctoral research internship at the University of California, Berkeley. Her expertise lies in integrating legal knowledge and experience in assisting women survivors of gender-based violence to create technical and compassionate interventions that generate impact.

Matheuzza Xavier is a Travesti (Trans femme), an artist residing between Brazil and the United States since 2022, pursuing a multifaceted career in the film industry. Matheuzza is an actor, playwright, writer, screenwriter, director, art curator, organizer and researcher on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Their work primarily focuses on investigating the intersection of antiblackness and transgerderness within the domains of performance, performing arts, media, social and gender studies. Matheuzza is a PhD Candidate and holds an MA in the Performing Arts Program at The Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Currently she is a Visiting Scholar in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at UC Berkeley, and holds a BA in Theater and Performing Arts from the same institution in Bahia, Brazil. In 2023, Matheuzza’s television show project, OCEANS, was recognized and awarded by PrimeVideo Amazon Studios during the Black Stories Screenwriting Lab. Matheuzza’s feature film project, Overbrook, has received numerous awards and is currently in the development phase. Furthermore, Matheuzza has engaged in various theatrical performances, art exhibitions, and performances since 2016 in Brazil.

View Map

150 Years of Border Control: The Legacy of the 1875 Page Act

April 23rd, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

a scene from the 1800s showing chinese immigrants

REGISTER TO ATTEND

This event marks the 150th anniversary of the Page Act of 1875, one of the first federal laws to restrict immigration to the United States — especially Asian immigration, as the law prohibited the importation of Asian contract workers, prostitutes (a provision targeted against Chinese women), and criminals.

The event will use the anniversary as an opportunity to discuss issues of race, gender, and labor in US immigration and Asian American history. The interdisciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors will discuss their past or current work related to race, gender, or labor in US immigration history or Asian American Studies, and their thoughts on the legacies of the Page Act and related issues for the United States today.

Panelists include Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Leti Volpp, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley; and Matrix Faculty Fellow Hidetaka Hirota, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Department of History, Department of Ethnic Studies, the Asian American Research Center, and the Center for Race and Gender.

Panelists

Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and an award-winning historian of Asian American history. She is the author of Asian American Histories of the United States (2022), which examines nearly 200 years of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the U.S. Her previous books include Empire of Care (2003) on Filipino nurses in U.S. history and Global Families (2013) on Asian international adoption. Choy has been widely cited in media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Atlantic. She previously served as chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and associate dean in multiple university divisions.

Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, received a BA in history and economics from UC San Diego in 1997 and a PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University in 2007. Her main research interests include the welfare state, immigration, race and ethnic relations, American political development, as well as historical and political sociology. Her most recent book, Three Worlds of Relief (Princeton University Press, 2012), compares the incorporation of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the American welfare system from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Fox won six book awards for Three Worlds of Relief, including the 2012 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her next book project focuses on the rise of legal status restrictions in American social welfare policy since the New Deal. Her work has appeared in the American Behavioral Scientist, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of American History, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Social Science History, Political Science Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, Law & Social Inquiry, and Studies in American Political Development. She is also co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (Basic Books, 2004).

Leti Volpp is Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory, examining how law is shaped by culture and identity. She has published extensively on issues of immigration, gender, and race, with work appearing in Constitutional Commentary, Columbia Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others. She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places and Legal Borderlands. Volpp has received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations, and is a member of the American Law Institute. She directs the Center for Race and Gender and is affiliated with multiple interdisciplinary programs at Berkeley.

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 is also a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

View Map

Governing Giants: Law, Politics, and Antitrust

April 25th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

Antitrust as a complex subject, related to important topics. Pictured as a puzzle and a word cloud made of most important ideas and phrases related to antitrust. ,3d illustration

REGISTER

Large corporations increasingly dominate markets, the flow of information, and political influence. In response, many governments have used antitrust policies in an attempt to rein in companies. Examples include investigations and cases brought by the United States and the European Union against Google, in addition to major investigations against Microsoft, Facebook, and others.

This panel brings together scholars of political science, economics, and law to discuss the changing landscape of antitrust policy in an era of multinational corporations. Ryan Brutger (UC Berkeley, Political Science) will moderate the panel. Panelists include Amy Pond (Washington University St. Louis, Political Science), Prasad Krishnamurthy (UC Berkeley, Law), and Michael Allen (Stanford, Political Science). The panelists will speak about new challenges in competition policy, the domestic and international dimensions of antitrust policy, and the economic, political, and social considerations that shape antitrust policy and enforcement.

Panelists

Amy Pond is an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining WashU, she taught at the Technical University of Munich and at Texas A&M University. Professor Pond conducts research in international and comparative political economy. Her current research looks at how market concentration and international ownership affect domestic policies, including the provision of public goods like property rights and democratic representation. She has also worked on trade and financial liberalization and the broader logic of institutional change.

Michael Allen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests span international political economy, international institutions, and law, with a focus on the politics of global capitalism. He studies how the growth of private authority influences domestic legal development and the power of countries to regulate foreign commerce. He also has ongoing research projects in related areas including special economic zones, transnational anti-corruption efforts and global competition law. Prior to joining Stanford, he earned a PhD in Government from Cornell University and held postdoctoral positions at Yale University and Harvard University.

Prasad Krishnamurthy joined the Berkeley Law Faculty in 2010. He holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in economics from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. Prasad’s research and teaching interests include financial regulation, antitrust and competition policy, consumer law and policy, and distributive justice.

Ryan Brutger is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in the department of Politics at Princeton University, where he received a Harold W. Dodds Fellowship. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Brutger specializes in experimental methodology, public opinion, and international relations. His research crosses political economy, international law, and international security, examining the domestic politics and political psychology of politics and economics. He also researches experimental methodology, with a focus on experimental design and survey experiments. He is also a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

View Map

CANCELED: Theorizing The “Non-Conventional Revolution”: Fracking, Tar Sands, and the Unwanted Energy Transition

February 28th, 2025
3:00pm-5:00pm

This event has been canceled by the organizers due to the University of California healthcare, research, and technical employees’ three-day strike, which will begin on February 26. We will let you know if this workshop is rescheduled at a future date.

Over the last two decades, the rise of “nonconventional” fossil-fuel extraction has wildly transformed local landscapes within the North American hinterland, the Earth’s climatic system, and the political-economic balance between northern and southern nations. This workshop is devoted to the critical discussion of two works in progress that aim to theorize the ongoing revolution in non-conventional fossil fuels.

Conventional fossil fuel production has large plateaued since the mid-2000s, yet the development of new methods of extraction — especially SAGD in Canada’s Athabasca deposit and hydraulic fracturing in West Texas’ Permian Basin — delineate the contours of a novel, unstable, and highly destructive energy system. Previous research on these industries has largely focused on activism, environmental health, and financial networks. Yet in the scholarly literature, it remains unclear at which point a shift from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels heralds the onset of a new energy regime and why such a change matters.

To discuss these questions, Troy Vettese and Cameron Hu will discuss their respective papers on the tar sands and fracking, with Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton as discussant. They draw, variously, upon fieldwork, historical and anthropological methods, and lineages of Marxist and postcolonial thought.

Papers will be pre-circulated to registered participants by February 21. Effective participation in the workshop depends upon the papers being read closely beforehand.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental History.

About the Speakers

Cameron Hu is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, “Knowing Destroying,” received the 2022 Daniel F. Nugent Prize. His recent articles are published or forthcoming with Social Studies of Science, Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online, as well as several edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and Ciriacy-Wantrup research fellow at UC Berkeley. Previously, Vettese has held fellowships at the University of Copenhagen, Harvard University, and the European University Institute. Together with Drew Pendergrass, Vettese co-authored Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), which has been translated into five languages and turned into an educational video game that has been played by 100,000 people. Vettese’s research interests include Marxist theory, animal studies, the history of economic thought, and energy studies. His popular and scholarly work has appeared in The Guardian, n+1, Jacobin, New Left Review, and Contemporary European History.

Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton (discussant) is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. He researches the political, economic, and environmental aspects of critical mineral supply chains for energy transitions, with a focus on China and Latin America. He also conducts related research with the Climate Policy Lab in The Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Klinger Lab at the University of Delaware.

View Map

Consequential Sentences: Computational Analyses of California Parole Hearing Transcripts

April 1st, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

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

REGISTER

Please join us on April 1, 2025 for a talk by AJ Alvero, a computational sociologist at Cornell University, presenting findings from an analysis of parole hearing transcripts in California. 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. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS). This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

Abstract

In California, candidates for parole are able to present their case with the support of an attorney to commissioners appointed by the state. These hearings are professionally transcribed, making them highly amenable to a variety of social scientific questions and computational text analysis. In this talk, I will discuss a large project analyzing every parole hearing transcript in California that occurred from November 2007 until November 2019, along with a wealth of administrative data, some of which was obtained after successfully suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In some of our early work, we find that patterns in the text based on the words being used and who is using them (e.g., words used by the parole commissioner) have stronger explanatory power than variables used in past studies. To conclude, I will discuss forthcoming work which takes advantage of the unique structure of the transcripts.

About the Speaker

AJ Alvero is a computational sociologist at Cornell University with departmental affiliations in Sociology, Information Science, and Computer Science. Most of his research examines moments of high stakes evaluation, specifically college admissions and parole hearings. In doing so, he addresses questions and topics related to the sociological inquiry of artificial intelligence, culture, language, education, race and ethnicity, and organizational decision making. This work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Science Advances, Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, Sociological Methods & Research, Journal of Big Data, and other venues. AJ earned his PhD at Stanford University along with an MS in statistics.

View Map

The New Contours of Mass Incarceration

March 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS)

REGISTER

Please join us on March 18 for a talk by Alexander F. Roehrkasse, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. Roehrkasse’s research focuses on inequality, victimization, punishment, families and children, and quantitative and historical methods. His work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Social Forces, and other leading journals. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

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. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute of Data Sciences (BIDS). This event will be presented in-person and will not be livestreamed.

Abstract

The dynamics of inequality in mass incarceration are rapidly changing and poorly understood. In this talk, I present new evidence of declining Black–White inequality and skyrocketing educational inequality in U.S. prison admissions. I qualify these findings by documenting vast racial disparities in indirect contact with the carceral system through families and neighborhoods. I conclude by discussing possible causes of recent inequality trends and potential research strategies for identifying them.

View Map

Matrix on Point: Technology and China in the New Political Economy

April 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

High-tech industry in China. PCB and chinese flag background. Microprocessor manufacturing in People Republic of China. The printed circuit board is made in China. Export of Chinese radio electronics.

The innovation, use and experience, and exchange of new and emerging technologies today are influenced by the role that China plays in global politics and economy. This panel brings together experts of the Chinese political economy and law and society in a conversation to discuss the political, economic, security, and social dimensions and complexities of technology in China’s internationalization during times of global tensions. Topics covered will include the institutional foundations of China’s technological development, technology governance and industrial policy, global technology competition, and legal technology and societal impacts in today’s China.

This panel will feature Mark Dallas, Professor of Political Science and Science, Technology, and Society at Union College; Roselyn Hsueh, Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at U.C. Berkeley. AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the School of Information, will chair and moderate.

The panel is co-presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies (IIS), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science. This public panel is a part of the two-day Bringing the Sector Back In conference, also co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

This panel will be presented in-person and will also be livestreamed via Zoom. A link to the webinar will be sent to registrants in advance.

REGISTER

Panelists

Roselyn Hsueh is a Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She is the author of Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge, 2022) and China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell, 2011), and scholarship on states and markets and industrial policy. Her current research examines the technological intensity of trade and Chinese outward foreign direct investment, and the economic and security nexus in technology governance. She held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and the University of Southern California. She conducted international fieldwork as a Fulbright Global Scholar, served as a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University, and was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics (China). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mark Dallas is temporarily on leave as Professor in the departments of Political Science, Asian Studies and Science, Technology & Society at Union College in New York to serve in the U.S. government. His research focuses on industrial organization, global value chains, China, industrial and technology policy and their economic and security implications. His publications cross multiple disciplines, including in leading journals in business management and technology innovation, geography and development studies. He has also worked with the World Bank in the Trade and International Integration Development Research Group, as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the Wilson Center. He also was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. All comments made are purely his own as a private citizen, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of the U.S. government.

Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science (by courtesy) in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law, where she also currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. She is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence, as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization, courts, political space and professionalization in contemporary China. Stern is currently working on a comparative project on the politics of access to legal information and the emergent market for court data in China, France and the United States, which explores how different political systems responded to the rise of big data, machine learning and natural language processing in the 2010s. She was previously a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows.

AnnaLee Saxenian is professor of information and economic development at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as dean of the School of Information from 2004-19. Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. She is author of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994) and The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard, 2006) and has published widely on the geography and dynamics of industrial change. She chaired the Advisory Committee for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation from 2010-15. She holds degrees from MIT, UC Berkeley, and Williams College.

View Map

Los Angeles Wildfires: Risk, Resilience, and Collective Action

February 18th, 2025
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

As wildfires grow more frequent and devastating, they expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, governance, and community preparedness. Tackling this escalating threat demands interdisciplinary solutions that address not just the immediate risks but also the broader systemic changes driving extreme weather events.

This Matrix on Point discussion will feature Christopher Ansell, Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM); Kenichi Soga, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure; and Marta Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning. Louise Comfort, Professor Emerita and Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will moderate.

This panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

The panel is presented as part of Matrix On Point, 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.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Panelists

Christopher Ansell received his B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia in 1979 and worked at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment from 1979 through 1984. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1993. His fields of interest include public policy, public administration, governance, and organization theory, with a geographical focus on Europe. His current research focuses on collaborative modes of governance with a focus on collective problem-solving, democracy and sustainability. He also studies the politics and management of risk and has an ongoing interest in public health, environmental policy and crisis management. His work is inspired by the philosophy of Pragmatism.

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Soga is also the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves as a Special Advisor to the Dean of the College of Engineering for Resilient and Sustainable Systems. Soga’s research focuses on infrastructure sensing and modeling, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan. He is the PI of the NSF-funded Smart and Connected Communities project “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities: Modeling Risk Across Scales of Time and Space”.

Marta Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gonzalez’s research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies. She is the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016.

Louise K. Comfort is Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and co-principal investigator for the National Science Foundation grant titled “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities,” 2022-2025, at UC Berkeley. She is professor Emerita, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and was the Director of the Center for Disaster Management at the University of Pittsburgh from 2009-2017. A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration since 2006, she received the 2020 Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement, Section on International Comparative Administration, for the American Society of Public Administration. Her recent books include The Dynamics of Risk Changing Technologies and Collective Action in Seismic Events, Princeton University Press, 2019; Global Risk Management: The Role of Collective Cognition in Response to COVID-19, Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Mary Lee Rhodes’ and Hazardous Seas: A Sociotechnical Framework for Early Tsunami Detection and Warning, Island Press, 2023, co-edited with H.P. Rahayu. She studies the dynamics of decision making in response to urgent events: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfire, and COVID-19.

View Map