Matrix on Point: The Rights and Lives of Non-Citizens

October 29th, 2021
10am PDT

Brownbag Discussions About Issues That Matter

Please join us for a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion on the Rights and Lives of Non-Citizens. This timely panel will consider forms of non-citizenship and marginalization around the world, with a special focus on refugees, stateless people, and undocumented migrants.

This event is presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary 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.

The event will be moderated by Irene Bloemraad, of the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. This event is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI).

Panelists

Noora Lori: Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Her research broadly focuses on citizenship, migration, and institutions. She studies citizenship, statelessness, temporary migration schemes and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Lori’s book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019), received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020), the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association (2021), and the Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics from the APSA-MENA Politics section of the American Political Science Association. She has published in the Journal of Global Security Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, The Shifting Border, the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, and the Journal of Politics & Society among other journals and edited volumes. Her research has been funded by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the ZEIT-Stiftung “Settling into Motion” Fellowship, the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computer Engineering (BU), the Initiative on Cities (BU) (2016; 2019), as well as other grants. Professor Lori is the Founding Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking, which she co-directs with Professor Schilde. She serves on the steering committee of the Inter-University Committee for International Migration.

Itamar Mann: Dr. Mann’s research and teaching interests are in international law (especially at the intersections with refugee and migration law), environmental law, and legal theory. Alongside an introductory course on public international law, and one on jurisprudence, he teaches electives on human rights and environmental law. In 2021 attorney Sharon Madel Artzy of FBC & co and Dr. Mann started a workshop on law and climate change, first of its kind in Israel. A large part of Dr. Mann’s research focuses on legal, political, and ethical questions that arise from largescale migration. His book, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law, came out with Cambridge University Press in 2016. His articles appeared in leading journals including the European Journal of International Law, the Texas Law Review, and more. He also works as a legal advisor to the international human rights organization GLAN (the Global Legal Action Network). Prior to coming to Haifa Dr. Mann was a National Security Law Fellow at Georgetown Law Centre. He holds JSD and LLM degrees from Yale Law School, and an LLB degree from Tel Aviv University.

Cecilia Menjívar: Professor Cecilia Menjívar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair and is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She specializes in immigration, gender, family dynamics, social networks, and broad conceptualizations of violence. Her research explores the impact of immigration laws and enforcement on immigrants and the effects of multisided violence on individuals, especially Central American immigrants. She also focuses on the political, state, and judicial failures that sustain gender-based violence in Central America. Prominent books she has authored or edited include, “Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America,” “Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala,” “Immigrant Families,” “Constructing Immigrant ‘Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses,” and “The Oxford Handbook of Immigration Crises.” Professor Menjívar has co-authored several amicus briefs regarding the effects of detention, asylum based on gender-based violence, and the one on the DACA lawsuit. She is both, a John S Guggenheim Fellow and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She has served as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association and was elected President in 2020.

Serena Parekh: Serena Parekh is a Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and co-editor of the journal, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. She is the author of three books, including her most recent book, No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford 2020), which one the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. Other books include, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge in 2017) and Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (Routledge 2008), which was translated into Chinese. Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy. She has also published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Human Rights Quarterly.

Irene Bloemraad (Moderator): Irene Bloemraad is the founding director of Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI) and the Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Bloemraad studies how migrants become incorporated into the political communities where they live, and the consequences of migration for politics and understandings of membership. She has investigated why immigrants become citizens, whether immigrant communities face inequities in building and accessing community-based organizations, and how non-immigrants’ attitudes about immigration policy shifts depending on whether we talk about human rights, citizenship, family unity, or appeals to national values. Her research has been published in academic journals spanning sociology, political science, history, and ethnic/ migration studies, and she has authored or co-edited five books, including The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017), Rallying for Immigrant Rights (2011) and Becoming a Citizen (2006). The International Migration Review, the top North American migration journal, named Bloemraad its “Featured Scholar of 2018.” In 2014- 15, she served as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel reporting on the integration of immigrants into U.S. society. Bloemraad’s research spans North America and Western Europe. She has a special interest in comparative U.S.-Canada analysis. She also holds the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at UC-Berkeley and co-directs the Toronto-based Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s “Boundaries, Membership and Belonging” program. A proud product of the Saskatoon public school system, she received her B.A. (Political Science) and M.A. (Sociology) from McGill University and her Ph.D. (Sociology) from Harvard University.

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The Secular State and Religious Tolerance

September 13th, 2021
5:00pm

Is secularism compatible with religious tolerance?

Sponsored by Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance. Co-sponsored with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Is secularism (laïcité) compatible with religious tolerance? In raising this question, Professor Denis Lacorne, Senior Research Fellow at CERI (Centre d’Etudes et des Researches Internationales), Sciences Po, will explore the impact of secular regimes on religious tolerance, emphasizing religious symbols and the space granted to religious symbols in the public square. In drawing examples from France, the United States and Italy, he will attempt to demonstrate that a nominally secular state is not necessarily a neutral or blind state with regard to religious beliefs. While the secular state does regulate the presence of religious symbols, this regulation can be mild—for instance, nativity scenes allowed under certain conditions—or aggressive and even punitive when it prohibits ostentatious religious clothings, such as the hijab, the niqab or the burquini in the public square. The wall of separation between church and state is rarely “high and impregnable” and the institutional tolerance of religious symbols varies widely according to countries and regimes of secularism.

Denis Lacorne has written extensively on religion in the United States and the politics of toleration in general. He turns to history to trace the development of modern conceptions of toleration and to find precedents for new ways we can understand and apply it. In his recent book The Limits of Tolerance (2019), translated from Les frontières de la tolérance (2016), Lacorne distinguishes the “modern” definition of tolerance from predecessors and alternatives. He associates this modern account with European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, including Locke and Voltaire, who rendered tolerance a necessary condition to uphold a right to religious belief, practice and conscience. Drawing from older practices of tolerance, he uses history to mark the uniqueness of the “multicultural” regimes of toleration that have become common for nations that have seen considerable influxes of immigration from minority religions since the last decades of the twentieth century.

UPDATE: THIS EVENT WILL BE ONLINE ONLY. PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE A ZOOM LINK FOR THE WEBINAR.

Sponsored by Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance. Co-sponsored with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

REGISTER HERE

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California Votes: The Effort to Recall Governor Gavin Newsom

September 10th, 2021
12:00pm

On Tuesday, September 14, California voters will decide whether to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, and who, if anyone, should replace him. What are the forces behind the recall effort? How worried should Governor Newsom be? And what does all of this mean for the future of California?

Moderated by Democratic strategist Katie Merrill, this panel discussion will feature LA Times political reporter Seema Mehta, USC Distinguished Professor of Sociology Manuel Pastor, and IGS Poll Director Mark Di Camillo, along with results from an IGS Poll that surveyed over 8,000 California voters in the final weeks leading up to the election.

Presented by the Institute of Governmental Studies, and co-sponsored by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research and the California Constitution Center of Berkeley Law.

Registration Link: Webinar: California Votes: The Effort to Recall Governor Gavin Newsom

Event contact: Jasmine Flores, jjflores@berkeley.edu

CCRM Seminar: Paul R. Schulman and Emery Roe

June 9th, 2021
10am-12pm

The Covid-19 pandemic is arguably the seminal international event in the 21st century so far. It’s had huge consequences for public safety, with 2.8 million world-wide deaths as of April 1st. In the U.S. there was an “excess mortality” of 390,000 deaths in the 10-month period from January to Oct 2010 over the previous 5-year average mortality rate for that period.

But the pandemic has also challenged the effectiveness of many national public health agencies and regulatory processes, as well as policy-making with respect to health care resources and their priority. With early and fundamental uncertainties connected to its means of transmission and the treatment of its victims, uncertain information about case, infection and mortality rates (even the numbers cited above are hedged by their collectors) and the ability as well of the virus to generate genetic variants with different transmission and virulence properties, Covid-19 has also challenged processes of medical research, information gathering and decision-making.

In the upcoming virtual meeting of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM), we propose to review and analyze not only the practical medical and public health challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, but also the challenges the Covid-19 pandemic poses to our understanding of basic concepts applied to public organizations, their administration and management.

Our topic is not about assigning blame for “poor performance” in public health management and policy relative to the Covid pandemic. It is to explore what performance standards can we expect against problems such as the Covid-19 pandemic, but also possibly a host of public problems with similar properties in other problem domains.

What do “reliability”, “resilience”, “effectiveness” and even “accountability” mean as performance standards to apply to policy and management efforts in the face of problems that propagate with such speed and on such a global scale? How do we identify “error” under such conditions and identify it readily enough to promote policy learning and resilience? How do we appraise risks in order to better guide decision-making, when the stakes are so consequential in scale and time?

Are conventional arguments about crisis management useful when applied to crisis conditions like those in a rapidly changing, uncertain but potentially multi-year long crises like the Covid pandemic? How do you build consensus for policy action when measures such as lockdowns directed toward limiting the spread also threaten general economic well-being and strongly held values like freedom of assembly and movement?

We hope to engage participants in thinking deeply about these practical and conceptual questions in the domains of healthcare, public health and well beyond. If your time permits, this pdf of a recent article discusses at greater length some of these issues.

About the Speakers

Paul R. Schulman (B. A. Tulane University, M.A., Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University) is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley and Emeritus Professor of Government at Mills College in Oakland, California. He has written extensively on managing hazardous technical systems to high levels of reliability and safety, within organizations and across networks of organizations. His books include (with Emery Roe), Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Critical Infrastructures (Stanford University Press, 2016), High Reliability Management (also with Emery Roe) (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Large-Scale Policy-Making (Elsevier, 1980). He has been a consultant to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the California Independent System Operator, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Invitae, a genetic testing start-up and an advisor to the California Public Utilities Commission. He is currently a member of the Joint Genome Institute’s Synthetic Biology Internal Review Committee in the U.S. Department of Energy.

Emery Roe is a senior research associate at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, University of California Berkeley. He has been a practicing policy analyst and is author of many articles and other publications. His most recent book, co-authored with Paul Schulman, has been published by Stanford University Press in 2016 as Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. His other books include Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (2013, Duke University Press); High Reliability Management: Operating on the Edge (with Paul Schulman, 2008, Stanford University Press); and Narrative Policy Analysis (1994, Duke University Press). Read his blog.