Financializing Disaster: Insurance and the Climate Crisis

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

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

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

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

The panel will feature Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Meg Mills-Novoa, Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group, will moderate. This panel is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).

Panelists

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

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

Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021 and a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones served two terms as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 to 2018. He led the Department of Insurance and was responsible for regulating the largest insurance market in the United States Jones pioneered insurance regulatory best practices regarding climate risk, including requiring insurers to disclose fossil fuel investments, asking insurers to divest from coal investment, implementing climate risk scenario analysis on insurer investment portfolios, and serving as founding chair of the international consortium of insurance regulators focused on climate risk (Sustainable Insurance Forum). Jones has testified before Congress, state legislatures, the G-20 Financial Stability Board, and numerous regulatory agencies, about the need for financial regulators to address climate change and the risks it poses to the financial system. Jones has degrees from DePauw University (B.A.) and Harvard University (JD/MPP).

Meg Mills-Novoa (moderator) is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group. Meg is the director of the Climate Futures Lab, a hub for social science research on the impact and equity of climate change responses. As a human-environment geographer, her research focuses on climate change adaptation and decarbonization. She uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, from spatial analysis and quantitative surveys to archival research and interviews. She collaborates closely with communities and practitioners to improve the design, implementation, and outcomes of adaptation and energy transition initiatives that promote inclusion and equity. Regionally, Meg is working with communities across the Arid Americas, including the Andes (Ecuador) and Great Basin (U.S.).

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

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

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

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

Professor Douglass will be joined in conversation by Salar Mameni, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Henry Washington, Jr., Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies.

About the Book

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

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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New Directions: Borderlands

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

Part of the New Directions event series

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

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

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

Panelists

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

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

Irene Franco Rubio is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing designated emphases in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research examines multiracial coalition-building, grassroots resistance, and social movement histories in the U.S. Southwest, with a focus on how cross-cultural solidarity emerges in response to racialized state violence. Drawing on critical ethnography, oral histories, and community-engaged methods, her work highlights how communities resist criminalization and reimagine abolitionist futures, offering new frameworks for understanding coalition-based resistance. She is a Soros Justice Open Society Foundations Fellow and host of the award-winning #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast, which examines the entanglements of the criminal legal system. Irene also received the Dr. Iris Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship, a Social Science Matrix award given annually to one graduate student dedicated to addressing urgent, real-world issues through their scholarship.

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

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Matrix on Point: Spaces for Thriving

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

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

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

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

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

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

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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Matrix on Point: Conspiracy Theories

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

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

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

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Registration for this event has reached capacity. Thank you for your interest.

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

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

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

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian, African American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory.

Panelists

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

Tim Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair of Undergraduate Education, is a Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Folklore Archive. He has developed computational approaches to stories and storytelling over the past three decades. He has done extensive fieldwork on storytelling among paramedics, and shamanism in South Korea, as well as archival work on rural 19th century Denmark. He has developed generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives. His recent work, featured in The Guardian, the BBC, and Science Friday, has focused on conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon, and the conspiratorial machinations on social media related to the January 6^th insurrection.

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

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

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

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

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

This event will be held in person.

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About the Speaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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