DEEPFAKE: A Rhetorical and Economic Alternative to Address the So-Called “Post-Truth Era”

May 10th, 2023
9:00am-7:00pm

Since Greek antiquity, there have been two fundamentally different conceptualizations of the search for truth. On the one hand, platonic politics proposed to control the city by subjecting political expression to the philosophical concept. On the other hand, the rhetorical tradition opposed the logocratic and universal claim of philosophy, in the name of the diversity of subjectivities and forms of life that composed the demos, and justified democratic deliberation as a form and process of agreement and democratic agency.

This symposium aims to develop a critique of the current debates about Post-Truth and fakeness, and specifically of Big Tech’s effort to frame the political expression of the demos as it solidifies its control over the digital economy. It will seek to rehabilitate the critical force of the rhetorical tradition, denounce the illusion of a digital democracy organized by the platforms of digital capitalism, and propose instead a productive posture rooted in the articulation between critical theory and political economy.

Going beyond calls for the prohibition of deepfakes, this conversation aims to evaluate and exploit the rhetorical potential of deepfakes for democracy. Do deepfakes, through the circulation and reappropriation of symbolic images, have democratic value? How can we promote an alternative rhetorical paradigm to the alienating alliance of surveillance capitalism, computational capitalism, computational sciences, and data sciences?

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Event Details

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Zoom link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/98640307771

Location: Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley. The event will also be streamed online via Zoom.

Organizer: Igor Galligo, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric; Founder, Automedias.org

Funding and Scientific Partners:

NEST. This project has received funding from the MSCA-RISE program under grant agreement No 101007915.
Townsend Center for the Humanities

Scientific Partners at UC Berkeley:

Other Scientific Partner:

Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art

Program

Opening 9.am – 9.15am: Igor Galligo, UC Berkeley, UPL, NEST, Founder of Automedias.org

First Session: Rhetoric, Democracy and “Post-Truth”

How are rhetoric and fakeness consubstantial with democracy? To what conception of truth does the notion of “post-truth” correspond? And why is Post-Truth a problematic notion for the rhetorical tradition?

– 9.20am – 9.45 am: James Porter (UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department)

– 9.50am – 10.15am: Linda Kinstler (UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department)

– 10.20am – 10.30am: Chiara Cappelletto (State University of Milan, CSTMS)

– 10.30am – 10.50am: Collective discussion with the audience

Second Session: Subjectivity, Digital Computationalism and Artificial Intelligence

How does the theorization of contemporary computing, which gave birth to the Internet and artificial intelligence, and which is based on computationalism, constitute a problematic conception of subjectivity? How is this conception opposed to the rhetorical and hermeneutic tradition? What conceptions of truth are discarded by computationalism?

– 11.00 – 11.25: David Bates (UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department)

– 11.30 – 11.55: Warren Neidich (Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art)

– 12.00 – 12.10: Morgan Ames (UC Berkeley, School of Information, CSTMS)

– 12.10 – 12.30: Collective discussion with the audience

Third Session: Critical Digital Rhetoric

What renewals can be made within the rhetorical tradition to adapt it to the digital political and Artificial Intelligence contexts? What critical political powers can digital rhetoric retain in the face of computational digital media, fed by data sciences in the new social spaces that are the Internet and social networks?

– 14.00 – 14.25: Nina Begus (UC Berkeley, CSTMS)

– 14.30 – 14.55: Justin Hodgson (Indiana University, Department of English)

– 15.00 – 15.10: Nathan Atkinson (UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department)

– 15.10 – 15.30: Collective discussion with the audience

Fourth Session: Computational Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism in light of the Deepfake.

What conceptions and productions of truth do computational capitalism and surveillance capitalism promote? And against what conceptions or practices of producing truth do they discriminate? To which social groups, does this discrimination pose problems of expression and individuation today?

– 15.40 – 16.05: Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley, Social Sciences Matrix, N2PE)

– 16.10 – 16.35: Igor Galligo (UC Berkeley, UPL, NEST, Founder of Automedias.org)

– 16.40 – 16.50: Konrad Posch (UC Berkeley, Political Science, N2PE)

– 16.50 – 17.10: Collective discussion with the audience

Fifth Session: For a New Digital Political Economy of Deepfake

How to extend the digital political economy to the symbolic and iconic economy? What new rhetorical and hermeneutic economy of truth can political economy invent? What circuits of collective truth production can political economy develop to grant the deepfake political meaning and value?

– 17.20 – 17.45: Martin Kenney (UC Davis, Department of Human Ecology, BRIE)

– 17.50 – 18.15: Mark Nitzberg (UC Berkeley, BRIE, BCHC, BAIR)

– 18.20 – 18.35: John Zysman (UC Berkeley, BRIE, CITRIS)

– 18.35– 18.55: Collective discussion with the audience

Illustration credit: Lyes Hammadouche

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Roundtable with Orlando Patterson: “The Nature and Invention of Freedom”

May 2nd, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Join us on May 2 at 12pm for a lunchtime roundtable conversation with Orlando Patterson focused on “The Paradox of Freedom“, an interview with Patterson by David Scott, published in Small Axe (2013). In this long, book-length interview, Scott and Patterson discuss the sociologist and novelist’s childhood, education, public service, and books.

We especially encourage graduate students to attend this event, which will reflect on Patterson’s intellectual biography and his groundbreaking analysis of the political entanglement between slavery and freedom. The original interview is soon to be republished as a book. Participants are requested to read the interview in advance of attending.

Ricarda Hammer, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science (political theory), will kick off the conversation with Professor Patterson. The discussion will be moderated by Caitlin Rosenthal, Associate Professor of History.

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About Orlando Patterson

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of the West Indies, his alma mater, and the London School of Economics where he received his Ph.D. His academic interests include the culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean and African American youth. He has also written on the cultural sociology of sports, especially the game of cricket. Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 6 major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); The Ordeal of Integration (1997); and The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (2015).

A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was a guest columnist for several weeks. His columns have also appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and The Washington Post.

He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for Non-Fiction which he won in 1991 for his book on freedom; the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association; co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on pluralism from the American Political Science Association; and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including the University of Chicago, U.C.L.A and La Trobe University in Australia. He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999. Professor Patterson has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.

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Matrix on Point: Expropriation: Global Perspectives on Property and Power

May 4th, 2023
3:30pm-5:00pm

Sign reading no to abusive expropriation

Expropriation — the seizing of property by a state authority for public use — is seeing an upsurge in interest as a possible response to a number of pressing global challenges, including the climate crisis, outdated infrastructure, new technologies, and renewed commitments to economic sovereignty. To provide context for current discussions, it is useful to take stock of how expropriation has been used in the past. This panel will bring together experts from diverse regions to discuss the use of expropriation for the common good in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Panelists

Sai Balakrishnan is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, in a joint appointment with the Department of City & Regional Planning and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley.
Puck Engman is Assistant Professor of China Since 1949 in the Department of History at UC Berkeley and a 2022-2023 Matrix Faculty Fellow.
Noel Maurer is Associate Professor of International Affairs and International Business at the George Washington University
Caitlin Rosenthal (moderator) is Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History.

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Symposium: Jews and Other Groups Who Resisted the Nazis: Means, Motivations, and Limitations

April 28th, 2023
9:30AM-4:30PM

A Jewish partisan group in German-occupied Soviet territories, c. 1942-1944

This day-long symposium will probe what remains an under-examined topic in the history of World War II and the Holocaust: the multivarious paths through which ordinary men and women resisted the Nazis. While scholarship on the choices, backgrounds, and motivations of perpetrators and collaborators has become quite robust, it is only in recent years that resistance has received growing scholarly scrutiny.

At this interdisciplinary, comparative symposium, historians and sociologists focusing on a variety of locales from Eastern Europe, to France to North Africa to the Netherlands, will explore a range of subjects that illuminate distinctive paths of resistance, among both Jews and non-Jews. Through their case studies, they will illuminate how factors that include religious community and theology, proximate danger, pre-war political engagement, and social geography could become decisive in the choice and circumstances of resistance.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. Coordinated by Dr. Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies and 2022-2023 Matrix Faculty Fellow.

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Agenda

Arrivals: 9:30-10 AM

Welcome & Introduction: 10-10:15 AM – Ethan Katz (UC Berkeley History & Center for Jewish Studies)

First Panel: Religion and Resistance, 10:15-11:45 AM (Paper Presentations)

Robert Braun (UC Berkeley, Sociology & Center for Jewish Studies), “Religion and the Protection of Jews During the Holocaust: Evidence from the Netherlands”
Johanna Lehr (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), “Biblical resistance and the Reinvention of French Judaism Under the Occupation”
Moderator: Deena Aranoff (Graduate Theological Union, Jewish Studies)

Lunch break: 12-1:15 PM

Second Panel: Structures of Resistance, 1:30-3:30 PM (Works-in-Progress)

Rachel Einwohner (Purdue University, Sociology), “Certain-Risk Activism: Risk, Threat, and Participation in Jewish Resistance in Warsaw and Vilna”
Ethan Katz (UC Berkeley, History & Jewish Studies), “Paths of Resistance in Algiers: Family and Community as Decisive Factors”
Sarah Farmer (UC-Irvine, History), “Resistance and Rescue: Hidden Jews in Rural France”
Moderator: Alma Heckman (UC Santa Cruz, History & Jewish Studies)

Break (3:30-3:45 PM)

Concluding Roundtable (all participants), 3:45-4:15 PM

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Image credit: A Jewish partisan group in German-occupied Soviet territories, c. 1942-1944. From the Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

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The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out

March 22nd, 2023
12:00pm

Please join us on March 22 at 12pm for a talk by Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet. Boushey is co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she was President and CEO from 2013 – 2020. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary Clinton’s 2016 transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.

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Abstract

The Biden-Harris Administration began at a time of intersecting crises, including the pandemic, rising inequality, stagnating economic growth, and the large and growing costs of climate change. The President, in partnership with Congress and state and local governments, took rapid action with policies that have spurred the strongest and most equitable economic and labor market recovery in modern history — including legislation to enhance the resilience of our supply chains, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. These historic measures, together forming the core of the Modern American Industrial Strategy, were designed with an understanding that strategic public investments are essential to achieving the full potential of our nation’s economy — one built from the bottom up and middle out, where the gains of economic growth are shared.

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Matrix on Point: Myths and Misinformation

March 15th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

Please join us on March 15 for a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion on “Myths and Misinformation.”

Misinformation and conspiracy theories have become a central feature of modern life, but they have a long history that have served to justify surveillance and prosecution of marginalized groups. In this Matrix on Point panel, we asked scholars who study these histories to reveal how misinformation circulates, and the effects of such myths and stories on society.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), and the Othering and Belonging Institute.

Panelists

Timothy R. Tangherlini is Professor in the Scandinavian Department and Director of the Graduate Program in Folklore at UC Berkeley. He explores informal storytelling at large scale, greatly supported in recent years by the emergence of social media) and considerable advances in natural language processing, machine learning and network science. Recent work has focused on exploring the narrative frameworks of Pizzagate and Bridgegate, understanding how parents reached consensus on vaccine exemption thereby undermining enormous gains in the public health arena, following the emergence of diverse competing conspiratorial narratives during the pandemic, and tracing how seditious groups used internet forums to develop plans to storm the capitol.

Robert Braun is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society and Social Forces. His first book “Protectors of Pluralism” tries to explain why some local communities step up to protect victims of mass persecution while others refrain from doing so and is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. My second book project, “Bogeymen”, traces the evolution of fear in Central Europe throughout the 19th and 20th century by studying the spread of frightful figures in children’s stories.

Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and is affiliated faculty in the Programs for Critical Theory and for Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, and the Department of Department of South and South East Asian Studies. Their research and teaching interests span postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature, feminist and queer theory, critical theory, and psychoanalytic critique. Their first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association. Saha’s scholarship has appeared in differences, qui parle, Signs, Interventions, The Journal of Modern Literature, Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and the Journal of American Studies, among other places. She is currently at work on Fascination: America’s “Hindu” Cults.

Elena Conis (moderator), Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. She is the author of How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT; Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization; and, with Aimee Medeiros and Sandra Eder, Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture and the Health of Children. Conis’s research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute. She is an affiliate of Berkeley’s History Department and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Previously, she was a professor of history and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University and an award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

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“The Long Land War,” Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University

March 8th, 2023
12:00pm

Most nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa experienced some form of “land reform” in the twentieth century. But what is land reform? In her book, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Professor Jo Guldi approaches the problem from the point of view of Britain’s disintegrating empire. She makes the case that land reform movements originated as an argument about reparations for the experience of colonization, and that they were championed by a set of leading administrators within British empire and in UN agencies at the beginning of the postwar period. Using methods from the history of technology, she sets out to explain how international governments, national governments, market evangelists, and grassroots movements advanced their own solutions for realizing the redistribution of land. Her conclusions lead her to revisit the question of how states were changing in the twentieth century — and to extend our history of property ownership over the longue durée.

Register to join us on March 8 at 12pm at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley) for this book talk. This event is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

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About Jo Guldi

Jo Guldi, professor of history and practicing data scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include “The Distinctiveness of Different Eras,” American Historical Review (August 2022) and “The Official Mind’s View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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Book Talk: Phil Gorski, “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy”

March 23rd, 2023
4pm-5:30pm

Jointly sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR)

Please register to join us on March 23 at 4pm for an event featuring Phil Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, discussing his new book (co-authored with Samuel Perry), The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. The respondent will be David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. Carolyn Chen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Ethnic Studies, will moderate.

Jointly sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) and the Center for Right-Wing Studies. This event will be presented in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building) and streamed online via Zoom. Registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

This event is part of the BCSR Public Forum on Race, Religion, Democracy and the American Dream, and is generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

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About the Speaker

Philip S. Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. His other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. Among his recent publications are The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003); Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford, 2004); and “The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation,” Sociological Methodology, 2004. Gorski is Co-Director (with Julia Adams) of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research (CCR), and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center.

About the Book

Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation’s Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; “Jesus saves” and “Don’t Tread on Me;” Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus’ name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism.

In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it’s headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries—and especially its influence over the last three decades—they show how, throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand “sacrifice” from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their “rights” in the names of “liberty” and “property.”

White Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment. The future of American democracy, Gorski and Perry argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.

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Orlando Patterson: “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil”

May 1st, 2023
4pm-5:30pm

Please join us on May 1 at 4pm for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. The title of Professor Patterson’s lecture will be “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil.” Stephen Best, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, will be the discussant. Co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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About Orlando Patterson

About Stephen Best

Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines. To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice.

Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018).

His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

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Lecture: Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University

March 8th, 2023
4pm-6pm

Part of the Social Science / Data Science event series

Please join us on March 8 at 4pm for a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi’s lecture will be entitled “Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century.”

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History and D-Lab. Presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab.

About the Lecture

A world awash in text requires interpretive tools that traditional quantitative science cannot provide. Text mining is dangerous because analysts trained in quantification often lack a sense of what could go wrong when archives are biased or incomplete. Professor Guldi’s talk will review a brief catalogue of disasters created by data science experts who voyage into humanistic study. It finds a solution in “hybrid knowledge,” or the application of historical methods to algorithm and analysis. Case studies engage recent work from the philosophy of history (including Koselleck, Erle, Assman, Tanaka, Chakrabarty, Jay, Sewell, and others) and investigate the “fit” of algorithms with each historical frame of reference on the past.

This talk will profile recent research into the status of “memory” in British politics. It will profile the persistence of references to previous eras in British history, to historical conditions per se, and to futures hoped for and planned, using NLP analysis. It will present the promise and limits of text-mining strategies such as Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech Analysis for modeling temporal experience as a whole, suggesting how these methods might support students of social science and the humanities, and also revealing how traditional topics in these subjects offer a new research frontier for students of data science and informatics.

About the Speaker

Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include “The Distinctiveness of Different Eras,” American Historical Review (August 2022) and “The Official Mind’s View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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Matrix on Point: Border Crossing

April 20th, 2023
12pm-1:30pm Pacific

Changing economic and legal circumstances alongside humanitarian crises are shifting the politics and histories of borders today, and reshaping the interdisciplinary field of border studies.

For this Matrix on Point panel, we asked UC Berkeley PhD candidates to share their ongoing research on borders and migration. The panel will be moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Class of 1951 Professor, Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies & Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), which is a co-sponsor of this event.

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Panelists

Pauline White Meeusen is a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. Her research interests include law and social movements, immigration law and policy, the legal profession, and border theory. Her dissertation explores whether and how attorneys and legal advocates who have served asylum seekers at the U.S. border and in detention come to see themselves as part of a social movement. As part of this project, she is bringing together immigration law and policy with border theory to explore the multi-layered borderscape in which these legal actors are embedded. Pauline received her B.A. in International Relations from Wellesley College, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and her J.D. with a specialization in International Law from the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Gisselle Perez-Leon is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Originally from Mexico City, and raised in Queens, NY, her research covers urban history and migration in modern Latin America. Her dissertation traces the development of public services and municipal governance in the border city of Nogales, Sonora. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Racial Justice Program.

Adriana P. Ramirez is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, race and ethnicity, and youth. Her current work explores what happens when young migrants leave the U.S. to “return” to Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Matrix on Point: Wealth and Taxes

April 3rd, 2023
12:00pm - 1:30pm Pacific

How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices? In this panel, experts will explain the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes.

The panel will include:

Duncan Wigan, Professor with Special Responsibilities in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School
Leonard Seabrooke, Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School
Gabriel Zucman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley

Co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

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