The Du Boisian Challenge and the Future of the Social Sciences

October 19th, 2023
2:00pm

Organized by UC Berkeley Sociology Professors Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz and Ricarda Hammer, with support from Berkeley Sociology, the Division of Social Sciences, the Latinx Research Center, and Social Science Matrix.

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Agenda

Reflections on the Recent Uptake of Du Bois (2-2:50pm)

While the social sciences have begun to seriously engage W.E.B. Du Bois, he has long been a fixture in Black Studies. As mainstream disciplines take up Du Bois, what is gained and what is lost? How does this moment challenge us to rethink the structures of the academy and knowledge production?

Panelists: Tina Park (Head of Inclusive Research & Design at Partnership on AI) Jacob Grumbach (Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley) Tianna Paschel (Sociology and African American Studies, UC Berkeley)

Dialoguing among Critical Traditions: Solidarity and Liberation (3-3:50pm)

Opening a dialogue between Du Boisian thought and other critical traditions, this panel asks: What are their distinct imaginaries of liberation and how do different traditions rethink the social sciences? What is the transformative potential of greater pollination?

Panelists: Cedric de Leon (Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) Keith Feldman (Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley); Zophia Edwards (Sociology, Johns Hopkins University)

KEYNOTE: Towards a Du Boisian Sociological Methodology (4-5:15pm)

Opening Remarks: prabhdeep singh kehal (Sociology, University of Wisconsin)

Presenter: José Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology, Brown University

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If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

October 17th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Please join us on October 17 for a talk by Vincent Bevins, an award-winning journalist and correspondent, focused on his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The panel will be moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Co-sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative and Social Science Matrix.

Time and Location: October 17, 12pm – 1:30 pm, 8th Floor, Social Science Building; lunch will be provided for those registered by Oct 13.

About the Book

Vincent Bevins’ brilliant new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, tells the story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world – and what comes next.

From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Over four years, the acclaimed journalist Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world. The result is a stirring work of history built around one question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, If We Burn renders street movements and their consequences in gripping detail. Bevins draws on his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change has been gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.

Praise for If We Burn

“This is a wondrous work of mystery writing, an effort to solve the riddle: Why has a decade of large-scale rolling revolts produced no revolution, no significant structural reform? I can’t think of any journalist other than Bevins who would dare to ask such a question, or be capable of weaving together seemingly discrete global events into a stunning history of now. Have we planted seeds for a better future, or have the gears of change frozen for good? Bevins lets the people he talked to, those on the street, answer.” —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth.

“In this remarkably assured and sweeping history of the present, Vincent introduces us to the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and the millions of ordinary people whose spontaneous acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. Bevins’s clear-eyed, sympathetic account of the unfulfilled promise of these protests leaves his reader with a bold vision of the future—one in which his book’s lessons are used to transform an uprising into a true revolution.” —Merve Emre, critic, New Yorker

Praise for The Jakarta Method

“The Jakarta Method dismantles and re-positions the American mythos, similar to two recent Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth…. The Jakarta Method is a devastating critique of US hypocrisy during the Cold War, and a mournful hypothetical of what the world might have looked like if Third World movements had succeeded.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books<

Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London.

Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and more. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Brazil.
Moderator: Daniel Aldana Cohen

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019).

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Authors Meet Critics: Trevor Jackson, “Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830”

December 5th, 2023
3:30pm-5:00pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Please join us on December 5 at 3:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), by Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson will be joined by William H. Janeway, Affiliated Member of the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University; David Singh Grewal, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; and Anat Admati, the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and the UC Berkeley Department of History. 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.

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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.

About the Book

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe’s richest man in 1709, to the world’s first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

Panelists

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the seventeenth century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. He also has ongoing research interests in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health.

William H. Janeway is an Affiliated Member of the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University and the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (2nd. ed., Cambridge University Press: 2018). He is a Special Limited Partner of Warburg Pincus, having joined the firm in 1988 and served as head of its information technology investment practice for 15 years. He is chair of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council. He is founder of the Cambridge Endowment for Research and the Janeway Institute for Economics at Cambridge University. He was co-founder of the Institute for New Economics Thinking. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

David Singh Grewal is Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. His teaching and research interests include legal and political theory; intellectual history, particularly the history of economic thought; global economic governance and international trade law; intellectual property law and biotechnology; and law and economics. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. His second book, The Invention of the Economy, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He has published on legal topics in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and several other law reviews, and on a variety of questions in political theory and intellectual history in several peer-reviewed journals. His public writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the BioBricks Foundation and a co-founder of the Law and Political Economy blog. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and holds B.A. (Economics) and Ph.D. (Political Science) degrees from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Faculty Director of the Corporations and Society Initiative and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research who is writing and teaching on the interactions of business, law and policy. Admati is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of The Bankers’ New Clothes: Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton Press 2013) whose new and expanded edition is forthcoming in January 2024. In 2014, she was named one of Time Magazine 100 most influential people and one of the Foreign Policy Magazine 100 global thinkers. Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University and an honorary doctorate from University of Zurich.

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Matrix on Point: New Directions in Gender and Sexuality

November 30th, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

While the last 20 years have marked a significant change in increased acceptance of varied gender expressions and sexual orientations, these changes haven’t made the importance of gender and sexuality as concepts disappear. If anything, they’ve become more relevant for understanding the world today. This panel will bring together a group of graduate students from the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and political science for a discussion of gender and sexuality through the lens of such topics as medicine, transnational migration, and marriage.

The panel will feature David Pham, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies; Emily Ruppel, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology; and Soosun You, a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Laura C. Nelson, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

This will be a hybrid event (presented in-person and online). Register to receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

REGISTER HERE

Co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender (CRG) and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. This event is part of the Matrix on Point series, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Panelists

David Pham is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He holds an MA in Ethnic Studies (2019) from the department and an AB in Sociology (2017) from Vassar College. His research interests include: Asian American literary and cultural studies; queer of color critique; gender and sexuality studies, women of color feminisms; visual culture; theories of racialized subjectivity.

Emily Ruppel is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in labor, medicine, and gender/sexuality. Her dissertation focuses empirically on job training programs for disabled workers, using historical research to trace the growth of this industry since the 1970s and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate contemporary labor practices. Other projects address the co-construction of gender and autism in scientific discourse, class dynamics in LGBTQ communities, and the causal effects of social networks on health. Her work has been published in journals including Sexualities, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, and Family Relations and has been funded by Policy Research, Inc. and recognized by the Disability in Society section of the American Sociological Association. She holds an M.A. from Berkeley and a B.A. from Smith College, both in sociology.

Soosun You is a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her work focuses on addressing various challenges to gender equality. Her dissertation examines how politics of the marriage market has shaped the feminist and antifeminist movements in South Korea (and East Asia more broadly). She examines how the anti-natalist and pro-natalist government campaigns and policies have affected different dimensions of women’s empowerment using both qualitative and quantitative methods such as in-depth interviews, surveys, and natural experiments.

Laura C. Nelson (moderator) is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford, and holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley with a focus on housing and community economic development. Her current research project is a study of breast cancer as a medical, cultural, personal, environmental, political and transnational phenomenon in South Korea. Her first book, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (Columbia University Press, 2000) utilized ethnographic and media materials to examine ways how institutions shaped consumer culture in pursuit of national goals during the period 1960-1997. The text examines the response of South Koreans, particularly women, in various social positions as political conditions and consumer oriented messages evolved. Before joining the GWS faculty in 2013, Laura taught for eleven years in the Anthropology Department at California State University, East Bay, where she served as chair from 2008-2013. In addition to her academic positions, Laura’s career includes work in applied anthropology in the US: public policy evaluation, microenterprise development, and building employment linkages to poorly-connected communities.

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Authors Meet Critics: Sharad Chari, “Gramsci at Sea”

November 28th, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

Please join us on Tuesday, November 28 at 12pm Pacific for an in-person “Authors Meet Critics” panel featuring Gramsci at Sea, by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor in Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Professor Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.

Professor Chari will be joined in conversation by Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography and the Program in Critical Theory.

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Panelists

Sharad Chari is an Associate Professor in Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and affiliated to Rhetoric, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asian Studies, the Center for African Studies, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and Global Metropolitan Studies. He is also part of the Marxist Institute of Research, and a research scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa. His recent and forthcoming works included the co-edited Ethnographies of Power (Wits 2022, with Melanie Samson and Mark Hunter), this book, and the forthcoming Apartheid Remains (Duke, 2024). His abiding interest is in spatial histories of the racial capitalist present in South India, South Africa and the Indian Ocean, and he is currently finishing a book that bends an account of the life of Black lesbian activist and filmmaker Beverley Palesa Ditsie in a critique of sexuality in the new/ old South Africa.

Colleen Lye (Ph.D, Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is a founding member of the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Most recently, Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Lye is writing a book that reconstructs Asian American literary and theoretical contributions to marxism in the United States since the 1960s, with an emphasis on Asian American perspectives into questions of racial capitalism and social reproduction.

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9001.html), analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.”

James Vernon (moderator) is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is a historian of Britain and its empire with broad comparative and theoretical interests in the relationships between the political and the social as well as the nation and the world. His books include Politics and the People (1993), Hunger. A Modern History (2007), Distant Strangers. How Britain Became Modern (2014), and the last volume of the Cambridge History of Britain, Britain since 1750 to the Present (2017). He is editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) and ‘The Berkeley Series in British Studies’ with University of California Press, as well as co-editor (with Simon Gunn) of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011) and (with Colleen Lye and Christopher Newfield) “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University” in Representations (2011). His work has been supported by the British Academy, the ESRC, the ACLS, the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently writing a book about the racialized and globalized formation of neoliberalism in Britain after empire told though Heathrow Airport. He is trying to avoid twitter @James11Vernon.

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Simon Johnson: “Power and Progress”

October 10th, 2023
4pm-5:30pm

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

Please join us as Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses his recent co-authored book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, based on a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence. Johnson will be joined in conversation with Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley.

Presented by the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative (BESI). This will be a hybrid event (in-person and via Zoom). Registrants will receive a Zoom link on the day of the event.

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About the Book

A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again be—brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.

With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances.

About the Author

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae.

Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.

His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support.

Johnson was previously a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors, and a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to early 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group.

“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research papers on long-term economic development, corporate finance, political economy, and public health are widely cited.

“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail”, Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013.

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U.S. Industrial Policy at the Crossroads

September 12th, 2023
3:00pm-6:00pm

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

The Biden administration has resurrected industrial policy with a vengeance, reviving old intellectual debates about the virtues and vices of industrial policy and sparking new ones. This program brings together scholarly debates about industrial policy with a discussion of the practical challenges of designing and implementing industrial policy in the United States.

The first panel (3:10-4:30 PM) will review the lessons from the study of the comparative political economy of industrial policy and apply them to the US today. The second panel (4:40-6 PM) will examine the economic and political impact of US industrial policy on European and Asian partners, and assess the potential for collaboration and conflict. We will have a 10-minute break between the two sessions.

Panel 1: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on US Industrial Policy (3:10-4:30 PM)
Panel 2: The New US Industrial Policy: Cooperation or Conflict with our Allies? (4:40-6)

Panelists

Todd Tucker, Director, Industrial Policy and Trade, The Roosevelt Institute
Kate Gordon, former Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm
Laura Tyson, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business
John Zysman, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley Department of Political Science
Paul Pierson, John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative
Steve Vogel, Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and Political Economy

This will be a hybrid (in-person and online) event. Registrants will be sent a Zoom link on the day of the event.

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Peter Spiegler: “Marketcrafting”

October 3rd, 2023
4pm-5:30pm

Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI)

We are witnessing a sea change in policy, toward an embrace of the state shaping markets toward certain social and economic ends. This talk will feature Peter Spiegler, Senior Researcher at The New Institute of Political Economy, celebrating the launch of Spiegler’s new report, “Marketcrafting” (co-authored with Chris Hughes), which argues for a specifically progressive marketcrafting vision that can achieve major policy goals in a just and equitable manner while also minimizing inflationary impacts.

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POSTPONED: Jedediah Purdy: “Thinking Democratically”

September 7th, 2023

Please note that this event has been postponed to a future date to be determined. If you register through the link below, we will notify you when the event has been rescheduled.

If we took democracy seriously, what would that mean for thinking about questions such as ecology, constitutionalism, the rule of law, political economy, and social trust?

Please join us for a talk by Jedediah Purdy, the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke Law School (formerly the William S. Beinecke Professor at Columbia) and the author of seven books on these themes, most recently Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope (Basic Books 2022). He is working on a book on democratic trust.

David Singh Grewal, Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, will moderate.

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Presented by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and Social Science Matrix.

About the Speaker

Jedediah S. Purdy re-joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from Columbia Law School, where he was the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law and co-director of the Constitutional Democracy Initiative. He previously served on the Duke Law faculty from 2004 to 2019, most recently as the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law.

A prolific scholar, Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. He is the author of two books forthcoming in 2022, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Scary, Flawed, and Our Best Hope (Basic) and a new Norton College edition of Thoreau’s writings, including Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and essays on slavery.

Purdy’s most recent book, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, explores how the land has historically united and divided Americans, shows how environmental politics has always been closely connected with issues of distribution and justice, and describes humanity as an “infrastructure species. In his previous book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, he traced the long history of environmental law as a central feature of American political and cultural life. His other books include For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination, and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Nomos, and Ecology Law Quarterly, among others. He has published essays on topics ranging from Elena Ferrante’s novels and socialism to natural disasters and the Green New Deal in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal.

Purdy clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York City. A member of the New York State Bar, he is a contributing editor of The American Prospect and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He was active in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and was voluntarily arrested for civil disobedience in 2013.

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California Spotlight: From Boom to Doom in San Francisco

October 31st, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

During the peak of the most recent tech upswing, downtown San Francisco was booming. Now, after the pandemic and a new round of tech layoffs, commentators fear that the so-called “doom loop” has come to valuable commercial real estate. While boom and bust cycles are not new to The City, what can we learn from the struggles of commercial real estate?

Join us on October 31, 2023 as a group of panelists will discuss the current state of commercial real estate in San Francisco — and what lies ahead. Panelists include Ted Egan, Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco; Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University; and Nancy Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. Amir Kermani, Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will moderate.

Co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS), Haas School of Business, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics.

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This panel is presented as part of the California Spotlight and Matrix on Point event series. This will be a hybrid event, presented both in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus) and online. All registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event.

Panelists

Ted Egan is the Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco, and directs the Office of Economic Analysis in the City Controller’s Office, which prepares independent economic analysis of major new city legislation. Since he joined in 2007, his office has published over 100 economic impact reports on policy issues like the minimum wage, affordable housing, business taxes, land use planning, sporting events, and short-term rentals. During this time at the City, he has served as an expert witness on the economics of same-sex marriage, and won a Good Government award for his work redesigning the City’s business tax. He also currently serves on the Data Users Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nicholas Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on working from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the Frisch Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He was elected to Bloomberg50 for his advice on working from home.

Nancy Wallace is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. She serves as chair of the Real Estate Group and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. Wallace is an expert in mortgages, mortgage-related securities, and other real estate topics.

Amir Kermani is Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines monetary policy, household finance, financial intermediation, and political economy.

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Matrix on Point: One Year of Protest in Iran

September 14th, 2023
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

Since the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police, women have led protests in Iran. While gender issues have been at the center of these protests, protesters have connected gender inequality to other problems of the authoritarian regime, including the struggling economy and ethnic inequality. In response to these protests, the Iranian government has detained and killed protesters. In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will discuss current events in light of Iran’s history and the significance of gender in contemporary protest movements.

Panelists include Sholeh Asgary, an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer at UC Berkeley, and Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

This panel is presented as part of Matrix on Point event series. This will be a hybrid event, presented both in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus) and online. All registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event. Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and the Berkeley Initiative for Iranian Studies (BIIS).

Panelists

Sholeh Asgary (b.Iran 1982) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works implicate the viewer participant in future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary is a Bay Area Now 9 triennial artist and a 2023 Artadia Finalist. Such institutions as Headlands Center for the Arts, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, The Lab, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and ARoS Kunstmuseum have supported her work. Asgary is a UCLA Art|Sci Collective member and a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts.

Minoo Moallem is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She is currently Director of Media Studies. Professor Moallem received her MA and BA from the University of Tehran and her Ph.D. from Université de Montréal. She has also done postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley from 2008-2010 and the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at San Francisco State University from 2001-2006. Professor Moallem is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation As a Transnational Commodity, Routledge, 2018; Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005, and the co-editor of several books and special issues.

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Zach Bleemer, “Metrics that Matter”

September 7th, 2023
12:00pm-1:00pm

Colleges sell themselves by the numbers — rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists — but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to?

This talk will feature Zachary Bleemer, Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, who co-authored a new book, Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students, that explores popular metrics used by future and current college students, with chapters focusing on colleges’ return on investment, university rankings, average student debt, average wages by college major, and more. The authors draw on decades of scholarship from many academic fields to pair each metric with a concrete recommendation for alternative information, both qualitative and quantitative, that would be more useful and meaningful for students to consider.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), UC Berkeley Department of Economics, and the Berkeley School of Education.

John Aubrey Douglass, Senior Research Fellow at CSHE, will be the moderator. This event will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

Register to attend.

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