Michèle Lamont: “Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World”

October 4th, 2023
4pm-6pm

Please join us on October 4, 2023 from 4:00pm-6:00pm for a talk by Michèle Lamont, author of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World.

Michèle Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is also the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association and her research has received numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from six countries. The author or coauthor of over a dozen books, she can be found on MicheleLamont.org.

Co-sponsored by Berkeley Law, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Immigration and Migration Initiative (BIMI), and the Center for Race & Gender (CRG), and the Transformations of Citizenship Leibniz Research Group.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

If you require accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in an event, please contact Ariana Ceja at centerrg@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible, and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

About the Book

In this capstone work, Michèle Lamont unpacks the power of recognition—rendering others as visible and valued—by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition—from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay. She shows how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.

Decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Lamont argues, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: By reducing stigma, we put change within reach.

Just as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone did for a previous generation, Seeing Others strikes at the heart of our modern struggles and illuminates an inclusive path forward with new ways for understanding our world.

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Authors Meet Critics: Dylan Penningroth, “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights”

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

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

Please join us in-person on November 14 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, by Dylan Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies at Berkeley Law. Professor Penningroth will be joined in conversation by Ula Yvette Taylor, Professor and 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Waldo E. Martin Jr., the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at UC Berkeley.

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.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) graduate program, Berkeley School of Law, the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS), the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

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

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law—and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overturns this story, demonstrating that Black people had long exercised “the rights of everyday use,” and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights. Well-versed in the law, Black people had used it to their advantage for nearly a century to shape how they worked, worshiped, learned, and loved. Based on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses, Before the Movement recovers a vision of Black life allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Panelists

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. He is the author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (2023). His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Before joining UC Berkeley in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).

Ula Yvette Taylor: Ula Taylor is a Professor of African American Studies and the 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education. She is the author of several books including the most recent The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the UC Berkeley campus. Ula is most proud, however, of her former students who are transforming the field of Black Studies.

Eric Schickler: Eric Schickler is Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books, including Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (2016, with Douglas Kriner) and Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965. Schickler was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017.

Waldo E. Martin Jr. (moderator), the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at UC Berkeley, is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (2005), as well as Brown v. Board of Education: A Short History With Documents (2021) and The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1985). He is a coauthor, with Mia Bay and Deborah Gray White, of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, With Documents (2021), and, with Joshua Bloom, of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2016). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he coedited Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia (2000). Aspects of the modern African American freedom struggle and the history of modern social movements unite his current research and writing interests. He is currently completing A Change is Gonna Come: The Cultural Politics of the Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of Modern America.

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Authors Meet Critics: Massimo Mazzotti, “Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity”

October 17th, 2023
3:30pm-5:00pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics Series

Please join us in person on October 17, 2023 at 3:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity, by Massimo Mazzotti, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History and the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. Professor Mazzotti will be joined in conversation by Matthew L. Jones, the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, and David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Thomas Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

This event will be co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

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About the Book

A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena.

The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics.

For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.

Panelists

Massimo Mazzotti is a professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. His research focuses on the history and sociology of mathematics and technology. He has recently co-edited Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action 1500-2000. Between 2013 and 2023, he served as director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS).

Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. He focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present (W. W. Norton, 2023). He has published two books previously, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (both with Chicago). He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and is currently a CIFAR fellow in the Future Flourishing project.

David Bates is a Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His work examines the history of legal and political ideas, and the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition. His books include Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France, and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political. He is currently completing a book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, that probes the emergence of human thinking as an entanglement of machine technologies, somatic processes, media practices, and social/political organization.

Thomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. His work has been focused on the history of popular religion and literacy; on the history of the body— alive and dead; and on the history of death and memory. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Threepenny Review, among other journals and is a founding editor of Representations. Laqueur is a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton 2016). He is working on a book called “The Dog’s Gaze in Western Art” to be published by Penguin next year.

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Matrix on Point: The Future of College

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

Part of the Matrix on Point Event Series

woman studying and looking at a computer

The pandemic has rocked higher education. From Zoom classrooms to students leaving higher education, colleges have needed to change modalities to adapt to public health risks and the emergence of new technologies. Enrollment patterns are also shifting in a changing economy: while selective flagship public institutions and not-for-profit private institutions are receiving more applications, enrollments have declined, especially among lower-income students. What are the implications of these changes for economic mobility and racial equality? What lies ahead for higher education?

Please join us on October 5, 2023 at 4pm for a panel discussion on this topic, featuring Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law and Associate Dean, J.D. Curriculum and Teaching at Berkeley Law; Michal Kurlaender, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor at the UC Davis School of Education; and Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education at Stanford University. The panel will be moderated by Lisa García Bedolla, UC Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the School of Education.

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 Studies in Higher Education (CSHE).

Panelists

Jonathan Glater joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2021. His research has focused on the ways that law promotes and limits access to education, especially higher education, and the impact that education debt has on educational opportunities. Recent publications include Qualified Sovereignty (with Kate Sablosky Elengold) (Wash. L. Rev. 2022); Pandemic Possibilities: Rethinking Measures of Merit (UCLA L. Rev. 2021), and The Civil Rights Case for Student Debt Reform (with Dalié Jiménez) (Harv. Civil Rights-Civil Liberties L. Rev. 2020). He is also coauthor with Amy Gajda on a casebook, The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court (5th ed.). Courses taught include Education Law & Policy, Criminal Law, and Disability Law. Glater is a faculty director of the Center on Consumer Law and Economic Justice at Berkeley Law. With Dalié Jiménez, he is also co-founder and co-director of the Student Loan Law Initiative, an interdisciplinary partnership with the Student Borrower Protection Center devoted to the study of the effects of student debt. In 2023 he was named a member of the California Civil Rights Council, a volunteer body tasked with developing regulations that implement California’s civil rights laws. He also serves as co-chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Education and the Law.

Michal Kurlaender is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor at UC Davis’ School of Education. Her research investigates students’ educational pathways, in particular K-12 and postsecondary alignment, and access to and success in higher education. She has expertise on alternative pathways to college and college readiness at both community colleges and four-year colleges and universities. In addition to working with national data, Kurlaender works closely with administrative data from all three of California’s public higher education sectors—the University of California, the California State University and the California Community College systems. Kurlaender’s work focuses on the causes and consequences of racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities through the education life course, and the impact of institutional policies and practices aimed at attenuating educational inequality. She also studies the impact of racial and ethnic diversity on student outcomes, including mandatory and voluntary K-12 school desegregation efforts, persistent inequalities in segregated schools, and diversity in postsecondary settings. In 2017-18 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and in 2020 Professor Kurlaender was elected into the National Academy of Education.

Mitchell Stevens is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is an organizational sociologist with longstanding interests in educational sequences, lifelong learning, alternative educational forms, and the formal organization of knowledge. His most recent book, Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (2018), was coauthored with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami.With John Mitchell, he co-directs the Stanford Pathways Lab (pathwayslab.stanford.edu).

Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the School of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question. While doing all of this, she is the proud mom of three young adults, two of whom are in high school. Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.From Lisa’s approach to research, we see she is very much at home with us today in seeking to better serve our students.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Argument

Event Details

REGISTER

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

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

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

Funding and Scientific Partners:

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

Scientific Partners at UC Berkeley:

Other Scientific Partner:

Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art

Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Session: Subjectivity, Digital Computationalism and Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

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

– 12.10 – 12.30: Collective discussion with the audience

Third Session: Critical Digital Rhetoric

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

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

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

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

– 15.10 – 15.30: Collective discussion with the audience

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

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

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

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

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

– 16.50 – 17.10: Collective discussion with the audience

Fifth Session: For a New Digital Political Economy of Deepfake

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

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

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

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

– 18.35– 18.55: Collective discussion with the audience

Illustration credit: Lyes Hammadouche

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

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

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

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

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

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About Orlando Patterson

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

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

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

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

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

Sign reading no to abusive expropriation

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

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Agenda

Arrivals: 9:30-10 AM

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

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

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

Lunch break: 12-1:15 PM

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

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

Break (3:30-3:45 PM)

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

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

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

March 22nd, 2023
12:00pm

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

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Abstract

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

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Matrix on Point: Myths and Misinformation

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

Part of the Matrix on Point event series

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

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

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

Panelists

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

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

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

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

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

March 8th, 2023
12:00pm

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

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

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About Jo Guldi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About the Speaker

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

About the Book

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

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

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

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