Authors Meet Critics: “Cooperating with the Colossus,” by Rebecca Herman

March 6th, 2023
4:00pm-5:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

cooperating with the colossus book cover

Please join us on March 6, 2023 from 4pm-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics book panel focused on Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America, by Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Professor Herman will be joined in conversation by Julio Moreno, Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Caribbean History at UC Davis, and a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College. Elena Schneider, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History, will moderate.

This panel will be co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History.

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About the Book

During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality.

Cooperating with the Colossus reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites. Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the “Colossus of the North” as best they could.

Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice.

Drawing on archival research in five countries, Cooperating with the Colossus is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways.

About the Panelists

Rebecca Herman is an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of History. Her work explores twentieth-century Latin American social and political history in a global context, probing the intersections between grand narratives and local history. Her book, Cooperating with the Colossus, reconstructs a contentious U.S. military basing project advanced in Latin America during World War II under the banner of inter-American cooperation in hemisphere defense.

Julio Moreno is a Professor of History at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Yankee Don’t go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950. His other publications are on U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War. His research and publications center on the intersection of U.S. business and diplomacy through the subfields of diplomatic, business, and cultural history. He is currently writing a book on the history of Coca-Cola in Latin America.

José Juan Pérez Meléndez is an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of California, Davis, and a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College. His work is concerned with nineteenth-century colonization dynamics in Brazil in global perspective, and with the international dilemmas of decolonization in the twentieth-century Caribbean. His forthcoming book, Peopling for Profit, charts the co-production of migrations and regulatory powers in the Brazilian Empire with a special focus on the driving force of oligarchic business dynamics.

Elena Schneider (moderator) is Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She is a a historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. Her research focuses on Cuba and the Caribbean, comparative colonialism and slavery, and the Black Atlantic. Methodologically, she seeks to write history that moves across regional, imperial, and national boundaries, integrating diverse stories normally told separately. She is also committed to the practice of writing history “from below” and the challenging archival work that makes reconstructing the experiences of historically marginalized peoples possible. Her book, The Occupation of Havana, is a longue durée history of the causes, central dynamics, and enduring consequences of a crucial incident of imperial warfare, the British invasion, occupation, and return of Havana (1762-3) during the final stages of the Seven Years’ War.

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Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present

February 1st, 2023
1:00pm-2:30pm Pacific

Part of the Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" Series

Please register to join us on February 1, 2023 at 1pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present, by Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Professor Riley will be joined in conversation by Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and Donna Jones, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. The panel will be moderated by Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

This panel will be co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. This will be a hybrid (in-person and online) event.

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About the Book

Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.

Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and Fraser, to weigh sociology’s relationship to Marxism and the operations of class, race, and gender, alongside discursions into the workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in a pandemic.

Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the ‘present as history’.

About the Panelists

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019) and Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present (Verso, 2022), as well as co-author with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed of Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States and Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States (Palgrave 2016). In addition to these books, he has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English and affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Most recently, she is the co-editor, with Chris Nealon, of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge UP 2022).

Donna V. Jones is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and serves as Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, and is also affiliated with Gender and Women’s Studies. Her most recent book is The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity.

Alexei Yurchak (moderator) is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. His interests include political anthropology, linguistic anthropology, anthropology of science and anthropology of the image, especially in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. He is the author of the award-winning book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. He is currently finishing a book on the political, scientific and aesthetic histories of Lenin’s body that has been maintained and displayed for a century in the Mausoleum in Moscow.

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Nature-based Solutions for Flood Risk Management: What it is and What it’s not

January 17th, 2023
9:00am-11:00am PST

2023 EU-US Knowledge Exchange Webinar

In the context of flood risk management, nature-based solutions (NbS) are seen as a promising way to overcome the divide between flood protection and river restoration projects. However, so far little is known about how this concept unfolds at national and sub-national scales. In the US some agencies use the term NbS interchangeably with concepts such as green infrastructure, including engineered systems, while others see nature-based solutions as actions focused on protecting and restoring ecosystem’s natural processes and functions to improve ecosystems’ health so that this healthier ecosystem can provide benefits to society. Some clarity and consistent language in statute and policy is recommended for this concept to bring new insights on how we should reframe the current approach to manage natural resources and mitigate risk at the same time.

In this webinar, representatives from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the European Commission (EC), and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) will talk about how this concept is being conceptualized — internationally (IUCN, UN), in the EU, and in the US — and how different institutions are now defining what is a nature-based solution in the context of risk management versus what it is not.

This webinar is co-hosted by Social Science Matrix together with UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and the International Committee of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), with the collaboration of the EU Working Group on Floods.

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Agenda

All times are listed in Pacific Time

09:00 am: Welcome and Introduction: Anna Serra-Llobet, University of California Berkeley & Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) – International Committee

09:10 am: The IUCN NbS Framework: from Conceptual to Operational: Emmanuelle Cohen-Shacham, International Union for Conservation of Nature

09:30 am: Nature-based Solutions and the European Commission’s Perspective: Ioannis Kavvadas, European Commission

09:50 am: Nature-based Solutions According to Different US Agencies and Institutions, Eileen Shader, American Rivers

10:10 am: Q&A and Discussion

11:00 am: Adjourn

Speakers

Emmanuelle Cohen-Shacham is a consultant and the Nature-based Solutions Thematic Group lead at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Commission on Ecosystem Management.

Ioannis Kavaadas is a team leader in the Water Policy Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Environment, where he supports the implementation of the Floods Directive. He also co-chairs the EU Working Group on Floods.

Eileen Shader is the director of River Restoration at American Rivers. She also co-chairs the Natural and Beneficial Functions Committee at the American Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM).

Anna Serra-Llobet (organizer) is a researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. She also co-chairs the International Committee at the American Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM).

The 2022 Midterm Elections: A Postmortem

November 10th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research

flyer for 2020 midterm post-mortem event

Join us for a panel on the outcome of this year’s midterm elections, hosted by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. Panelists Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, Eric McGee, Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, will help us understand and interpret the election results.

REGISTER HERE

Panelists:

Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA and a contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times. She teaches courses and writes about campaigns, elections, and public opinion. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a winner of the Andrew F. Carnegie Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2014 she hosted Hillary Clinton at UCLA’s Luskin Lecture on Thought Leadership.

Eric McGhee is a senior fellow at PPIC, where he focuses on elections, legislative behavior, political reform, and surveys and polling. His research on elections and electoral reform has appeared in numerous academic journals, and his work has been profiled on National Public Radio, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Economist. He is the creator of the “efficiency gap”—a widely used measure of gerrymandering—and coauthor of a legal test based on the measure that has been presented before the US Supreme Court in recent high-profile litigation. He is an occasional contributor to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog on politics. Before joining PPIC, he was assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon and served as a congressional fellow through the American Political Science Association. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gabriel Lenz is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies democratic accountability, focusing on how to help voters hold their politicians accountable and how governments can protect people from violence and incarceration. He has published a book on elections with the University of Chicago Press and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and other journals.

Event contact: Eva Seto, evaseto@berkeley.edu

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The Future of the Global University: A Conversation between William Kirby and Nicholas Dirks

October 31st, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

For much of the 20th century, the United States’ universities were indisputably at the forefront of the creation of knowledge across the globe. Today, however, in an era of the reduction of public support for universities, contests over their political location, and calls for their fundamental reorganization, the US university faces challenges as never before. At the same time, strengthened and renewed educational institutions are appearing across Asia, challenging the dominance of the US University in research and teaching excellence without necessarily reproducing its commitments to security of employment and academic freedom. What is the future of the modern university in this emerging global context of international competition?

Please join us for a wide-ranging discussion of these and other themes arising from Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China, a new book by William C. Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, will be joined in conversation by Nicholas Dirks, President and CEO, New York Academy of Sciences, and former Chancellor and Professor of History and Anthropology Emeritus, UC Berkeley.

Discussants

Nicholas B. Dirks: Since taking over the helm of the New York Academy of Sciences in June of 2020, Nicholas Dirks, an internationally renowned historian and anthropologist, has been spearheading the effort to provide the most cutting-edge data about COVID-19 to the science and business communities as well as to the public at large. Dirks was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has taught at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. At Columbia he chaired the anthropology department, later becoming executive vice president for the arts and sciences and dean of the faculty. He then served as tenth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley where he is also a professor of history and anthropology.

As the former Chancellor at UC Berkeley, one of the world’s premier research universities, Dirks is a strong advocate for academic collaboration across disciplines and borders to solve global problems. At Berkeley, he improved facilities and programs for undergraduates while establishing a new division for the study of data science. He strengthened alumni relations and presided over record-breaking fundraising as well as invested in major research collaborations in neuroscience and genomics. Dirks developed a close working relationship with the University of California San Francisco, and helped negotiate Berkeley’s participation in the $600 million Chan Zuckerberg BioHub, as well as global partnerships with universities in the UK, China and Singapore.

Dirks has published four major books, including Castes of Mind, about changes to the caste system in India under British colonial rule. The book won several major awards, including the Lionel Trilling Award, and is widely taught in graduate curricula in the U.S. and India. Dirks has held many fellowships and scholarships and received honorary degrees in Beijing, China, and Madras, India. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Foundation residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In addition, Dirks is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund, the University’s academic venture fund for China, and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai, Harvard’s first University-wide center located outside the United States.

A historian of modern China, Kirby’s work examines contemporary China’s business, economic, and political development in an international context. He writes and teaches on the growth of modern companies in China (Chinese and foreign; state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; business relations across Greater China (PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong); and China’s relations with the United States and Europe. He has authored or co-authored more than fifty HBS cases on business in China, ranging from start-ups to SOEs; agribusiness and middle-class consumption; banking and microfinance; healthcare and education; corporate governance and corporate social responsibility; and the global strategies of Chinese firms. His current projects include case studies of trend-setting Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States. His most recent books include Can China Lead? (Harvard Business Review Press) and China and Europe on the New Silk Road (Oxford University Press).

Before coming to Harvard in 1992, he was professor of history, director of Asian studies, and dean of University College at Washington University in St. Louis. At Harvard, he has served as chair of the history department, director of the Harvard University Asia Center, and director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. As dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences., he led Harvard’s largest school, with 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty members, 2,500 staff, and an annual budget of $1 billion.

Professor Kirby’s research and consulting have focused on strategies for business and education in China. In addition to the American Council of Learned Societies, he serves on the Board of Directors of Cabot Corporation; The China Fund, Inc.; The Taiwan Fund, Inc.; Harvard University Press; and Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University. He served as senior advisor on China to Duke University in the founding of Duke Kunshan University.

Kirby holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Freie Universität Berlin (Dr. Phil. honoris causa), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Dr. Phil. honoris causa), and Hong Kong Baptist University (Dr. Humanities honoris causa). He has been named Honorary Professor at Peking University, Nanjing University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Chongqing University, East China Normal University, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and National Chengchi University. He has also held appointments as visiting professor at University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them

October 13th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel will focus on challenges related to public opinion polling — and how they can be addressed.

Panelists

Elliott Morris, Data Journalist and Correspondent, The Economist
Mark Di Camillo, Director, IGS Survey, UC Berkeley
Erin Hartman, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer, Momentive/SurveyMonkey
Moderated by Jack Citrin, Professor of the Graduate School, UC Berkeley

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New Perspectives on Race and Public Opinion

September 28th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research

new perspectives on race and public opinion

Attitudes about race and ethnicity, and the groups that hold such identities, are central to political behavior and public policy, particularly among survey researchers and scholars of the American political system. Yet in recent years, we have seen presumably new forms of racial bias and discrimination in mainstream politics that challenge existing theories and offer new scholarly directions.

How can researchers push the boundaries of how we think about race to advance knowledge that informs the character of American democracy and the prospect of a just society? How can we utilize the elements of survey design to assess the explicit and subtle effects of race on public opinion? And how can our work shape policy and political decision-making to build greater equity, understanding, and social cohesion?

In this panel, we will discuss new perspectives on inter- and intra-racial attitudes, new directions for research, and new ways of theorizing, measuring, and experimenting to understand the politics of race and ethnicity.

Panelists

David C. Wilson, Dean of Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
Darren Davis, Snyder Family Mission Professor, University of Notre Dame
Naomi Levy, Associate Professor of Political Science, Santa Clara University
Moderated by Amy Lerman, Michelle Schwartz, Endowed Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, UC Berkeley

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Matrix on Point: The Court and the People

October 20th, 2022
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM PDT

Cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues

In the wake of recent decisions on abortion, First Amendment rights, gun rights, Miranda rights, and jurisdiction over Native American reservations, the Supreme Court today seems particularly out of sync with the American people. In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will discuss what these decisions and the conservative turn in the Supreme Court mean for the relationship between the court and the people.

Join us on October 20 for a discussion with Thomas Biolsi, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley; Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law; and Ronit Stahl, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Panelists

Khiara M. Bridges is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. He is the author of fifteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (Norton 2021), and The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (with Howard Gillman) (Oxford University Press 2020). He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

Thomas Biolsi is Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His research has focused largely on Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota, home of the Sicangu Lakota or Rosebud Sioux. His books include Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation (University of Minnesota Press, Spring, 2018), which examines how the federal government exercised power over the people, land, and resources of “the Rosebud Country” (Rosebud Reservation and surrounding territory).

Ronit Stahl is an Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. A historian of modern America, Stahl focuses on pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the uneven processes through which the military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism over the twentieth century. Her current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and of end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present.

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.

Top photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

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Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

September 1st, 2022
4:00pm-5:30pm

Co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE)

Join us on September 1 for a book talk with Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, focused on his recent book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. DeLong will be joined in conversation by Robert Brenner, Professor Emeritus and Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA. The talk will be moderated by Steven Vogel, Co-Director of the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

This event is co-sponsored with the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

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About the Book

From one of the world’s leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

Panelists

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a weblogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 and 1987. He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993 and became a full professor in 1997. Professor DeLong also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He worked on the Clinton Administration’s 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort.

Robert Brenner is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, and the author of several books, including The Economics of Global Turbulence: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso, 2006) and Property and Progress: the Historical Origins and Social Foundations of Self-sustaining Growth (Verso, 2009). He is an editor of Against the Current and New Left Review.

Steven K. Vogel is Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of the advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan. His most recent book, entitled Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (Oxford, 2018), argues that markets do not arise spontaneously but rather are crafted by individuals, firms, and most of all by governments.

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Authors Meet Critics: How the Clinic Made Gender

November 9th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Part of the Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" Series

Register to join us on November 9 for an “Authors Meet Critics” panel on How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Sandra Eder, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Eder will be joined in conversation by Laura Nelson, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and Danya Lagos, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. The panel will be moderated by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History, the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS).

For 30% off, purchase from the University of Chicago Press website and enter code UCPNEW at checkout.

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About the Book

Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: gender was first used in clinical practice.

In How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, Sandra Eder tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. Eder tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.

Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested.

In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.

Panelists

Sandra Eder is Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. Her research focuses on the emergence of modern ideas about the self and formulations of identity through scientific knowledge production and in medical practice, the interplay of gender, sexuality, identity, ethnicity, and medicine, patient records and clinical practices, and gender and sexuality in popular culture. In addition to How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, Eder was co-editor of Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children (Rutgers University Press, 2021).

Danya Lagos, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, specializes in how gender is changing in the 21st century. She is particularly interested in the social demography of LGBTQ populations. Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography and the Annual Review of Sociology. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in April of 2019. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was an NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Population Research Center.

Laura Nelson is Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. She was trained as a cultural anthropologist, and she has focused her research on issues of gender in the context of cultural change. Her earlier interest in gender and economic inequality has led her to questions of how gendering interacts with practice in domains of health and caring.

Catherine Ceniza Choy (moderator) is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Her most recent book is Asian American Histories of the United States (Beacon Press, 2022). It features the themes of anti-Asian hate and violence, erasure of Asian American history, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted in a nearly 200 year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US.

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Matrix on Point: Humanitarian Technologies

September 26th, 2022
1:00pm-2:30pm

Cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, and the Human Rights Center.

Now more than ever, humanitarianism is being conducted at a distance. As humanitarian efforts shift from in-kind and in-person assistance to cash- and information-based assistance, how does this change what humanitarian work looks like? At this September 26 Matrix on Point panel, a group of experts will examine how technology raises new questions about the efficacy of humanitarian interventions, the human rights of recipients, and the broader power relations between donors and recipients.

The panel will include Daragh Murray, Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre & School of Law; Fleur Johns, Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney; and Wendy H. Wong, Principal’s Research Chair, Professor, Political Science, The University of British Columbia. The panel will be moderated by Laurel E. Fletcher, Clinical Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she directs the International Human Rights Law Clinic.

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

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 or Eva Seto at matrixssdo@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

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Panelists

Daragh Murray: Daragh Murray is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre & School of Law. He was recently awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: ‘What does Artificial Intelligence Mean for the Future of Democratic Society? Examining the societal impact of AI and whether human rights can respond’. This four-year interdisciplinary project began in January 2020, and the project team will draw on expertise in human rights law, sociology, and philosophy. Current research has a particular emphasis on law enforcement, intelligence agency, and military AI applications, although the scope of the project is broader. Daragh’s research expertise is in international human rights law and the law of armed conflict. He has a specific interest in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, and in using human rights law to more effectively inform ex ante decision-making processes.

Fleur Johns: Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney working in international law, legal theory, and law and technology. She is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and, in 2021-2024, a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has published four books and has a forthcoming monograph under contract with Oxford University Press, co-authored with Caroline Compton, entitled #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order. Fleur has held visiting appointments in Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada and serves on a range of editorial boards, including those of the American Journal of International Law and the journals Science, Technology & Human Values and Technology and Regulation. Fleur was elected to Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2020 and currently serves on its Executive Committee as International Secretary. Fleur is a graduate of Melbourne University (BA, LLB(Hons)) and Harvard University (LLM, SJD; Menzies Scholar; Laylin Prize). Her Twitter handle is @FleurEJ.

Wendy H. Wong: Wendy H. Wong studies global governance. She is particularly attentive to how non-state actors (e.g. nongovernmental organizations, civil society actors, social movements, and corporations) govern at the global and domestic levels. Her areas of interest are emerging technologies like AI, Big Data, human rights, and humanitarian assistance. Dr. Wong has written two award-winning books, penned dozens of peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and has contributed to outlets such as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Conversation. She has been awarded grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, among other granting agencies.

Currently, she is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (Sylix Okanagan Nation Territory) and Principal’s Research Chair. Dr. Wong is a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She is currently on leave from the University of Toronto, where she is Canada Research in Global Governance and Civil Society and Professor of Political Science. Previously, she was Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. From 2012-2017, she was Director of the Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Laurel E. Fletcher (moderator) is Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, School of Law where she directs the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Fletcher is active in the areas of human rights, humanitarian law, international criminal justice, and transitional justice. As director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, she utilizes an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to human rights research, advocacy, and policy.

Fletcher has advocated on behalf of victims before international courts and tribunals, and has issued numerous human rights reports on topics ranging from sexual violence in armed conflict to human rights violations of tipped workers in the US restaurant industry. She also has conducted several empirical human rights studies, including of the impact of detention on former detainees who were held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2011-2015). Fletcher was selected as a Herbert Smith Freehills Visitor to the Faculty of Law in the University of Cambridge for 2019.

Her recent publications include A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? Transitional Justice and the Effacement of State Accountability for International Crimes, 39 Fordham Int’l L.J. 447 (2016); Refracted Justice: The Imagined Victim and the International Criminal Court, in “Contested Justice: the Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions” 302 (C.M. De Vos, Sara Kendall & Carsten Stahn eds., Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015); and Writing Transitional Justice: An Empirical Evaluation of Transitional Justice Scholarship in Academic Journals, 7 J. Hum. Rts. Prac. 177 (2015) (co-author: Harvey M. Weinstein). In 2009, she and Eric Stover published “The Guantanamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices” (UC Press).

Author Meets Critics: “Voices in the Code”

October 10th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Join us on October 10 for an “Authors Meet Critics” panel about the book Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made, by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Social Science Matrix and a member of the faculty at Apple University. Robinson will be joined in conversation by Iason Gabriel, a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, and Deirdre Mulligan, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG).

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About the Book

Algorithms – rules written into software – shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person’s traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?

Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software — exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.

In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm – a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.

Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.

Panelists

David Robinson is a visiting scholar at Social Science Matrix and a member of the faculty at Apple University. From 2018 to 2021, he developed this book as a Visiting Scientist at Cornell’s AI Policy and Practice Project. Earlier, Robinson co-founded and led Upturn, an NGO that partners with civil rights organizations to advance equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of digital technology.

Iason Gabriel is a Staff Research Scientist who works in the ethics research team at DeepMind. His work focuses on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human values, including questions of democracy, participation, and social justice in the context of AI. Iason’s background is in political and moral philosophy. He taught at the University of Oxford and worked for the United Nations Development Program before joining DeepMind.

Deirdre K. Mulligan is a Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, a co-organizer of the Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group. Mulligan is also an affiliated faculty of the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and a faculty advisor to the Center for Technology, Society & Policy. Mulligan’s research explores legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems. Her book, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, a study of privacy practices in large corporations in five countries (conducted with UC Berkeley Law Prof. Kenneth Bamberger) was published by MIT Press.

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