Authors Meet Critics: Darieck Scott, “Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics”

October 14th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Join us on October 14, 2022 from 12pm-1:30pm Pacific for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Scott will be joined in conversation by Ula Taylor, Professor & 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African-American Studies and African Diaspora; and Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. The panel will be moderated by Greg Niemeyer, Professor of Media Innovation, Toban Fellow, Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

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About the Book

Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.

Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.

Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry.

Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Darieck Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.

Panelists

Darieck Scott Darieck Scott is a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. In addition to Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, Scott authored Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), which was the winner of the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies of the Modern Language Association.

Ula Taylor: Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Scott Bukatman: Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His work explores the ways popular forms mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins and, most recently, Black Panther (University of Texas Press).

Greg Niemeyer (moderator): Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He is the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Niemeyer’s work is data-driven: large datasets and data streams are raw materials for visual and sonic experiences. His work theorizes data as mirrors, reflecting to us what we don’t see about our essential resources (air, water, care) from novel points of view. These patterns hold the hope that we can learn something new about what is to come and that we can evolve from the impossible present to more possible futures.

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Authors Meet Critics: “The Government of Emergency”

September 9th, 2022
1:00pm-2:30pm Pacific

Part of the Matrix Authors Meet Critics event series

Please join us on Friday, September 9, from 1-2:30pm PDT for an “Authors Meet Critics” discussion focused on The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, by Stephen Collier, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, and Andrew Lakoff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. The authors will be joined in conversation by Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus at UC Berkeley, and Cathryn Carson, Chair of the UC Berkeley Department of History. The panel will be moderated by Aihwa Ong, Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies.

This will be a hybrid event (both in-person and livestreamed). A Zoom link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.

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About the Book

From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends.

The Government of Emergency (Princeton 2021) tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events.

Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.

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.

About the Panelists

Stephen Collier, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. Collier’s current research examines urban resilience as a significant new paradigm and practice in city and regional planning. He has conducted fieldwork on urban resilience in New Orleans and New York, with ongoing comparative projects in other U.S. cities that examine how urban governments are developing and financing resilience interventions. Collier’s ongoing work on resilience builds on longer-term research on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States, which resulted in a co-authored book, The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security.

Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where he is also the founding director of the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. He is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge, 2006), Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (California, 2017), and with Stephen J. Collier, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security.

Cathryn Carson holds the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Before receiving her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, she was trained in condensed matter physics. Her research deals with the intellectual, political, and institutional history of contemporary science, including theoretical physics and data science. She has served as Associate Dean of Social Sciences, founding Director of the Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab), founding Senior Fellow of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Faculty Lead of the Data Science Education Program, and Chair of the Faculty Advisory Board for Berkeley’s Data Science Planning Initiative.

Michael J. Watts is Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus, and Co-Director of Development Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught for 40 years. He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994-2004, and was Director of Social Science Matrix from 2019-2020. Among his books are Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (1983, 2013); Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (1992, with Allan Pred); and Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years in the Niger Delta (2008, with photojournalist Ed Kashi). Watts was educated at University College London and the University of Michigan and has held visiting appointments at the Smithsonian Institution, Bergen, Bologna, and London. He served on the Board of Advisors of a number of non-profits, including Food First and the Pacific Institute and was Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Council. Watts is a member of the British Academy, a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2004, and the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin 2016.

Aihwa Ong (moderator) is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Ong’s study of flows and their ensuing entanglements tends to unsettle stabilized viewpoints and units of analysis in the social sciences. Her inquiry explores how assemblages of technology, politics and cultures crystallize emerging contexts of globality. More recently, she studies how Asian life science projects, and Chinese experimental art, respectively, mediate and transform global flows. Ong is the author of several books, including most recently: Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life (2016). In 2020, Ong gave the SSRC Fellow lecture, “Near-Humans, Cloned Monkeys, and CRISPR Babies: Productive Uncertainty in China’s Quest for Biosecurity.

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Floods and Equity: A Panel Discussion

May 12th, 2022
10:30am-11:30am

Floods are the most destructive natural hazard, both at the national and international scale, and they disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. To understand this uneven exposure to floods requires that we understand the history of land use and institutional structures that have resulted in current exposure and inequitable allocation of resources for flood protection and for post-disaster aid (‘procedural vulnerability’).

One of the most critical agencies is the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose cost-benefit analysis approach tends to preclude flood risk management projects in poor communities.

In this presentation, panelists Danielle Zoe Rivera (UC Berkeley) and Jessica Ludy (US Army Corps) will draw upon their research on these topics and discuss pathways to improving on the current situation.

Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, Global Metropolitan Studies, and River-Lab, from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Panelists

Danielle Zoe Rivera is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design. Rivera’s research examines movements for environmental and climate justice. Her current work uses community-based research methods to address the impacts of climate-induced disasters affecting low-income communities throughout South Texas and Puerto Rico. Rivera teaches on environmental planning and design, community engagement, and environmental justice. Her work has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association, Environment and Planning, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining the University of California Berkeley, Rivera taught Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Jessica Ludy (she/her) is the Flood Risk Program Manager and Environmental Justice Coordinator for the San Francisco District US Army Corps of Engineers. Through the Army Corps’ “Technical Assistance Programs,” Jessica and her team partner with communities in the San Francisco District Area of Responsibility to identify and implement solutions for equitable, just, and sustainable climate adaptation. Jessica also leads the San Francisco district’s efforts to implement the federal government’s priorities to advance social and environmental justice. Jessica’s work is informed and inspired by collaborations and scholarship of researchers and colleagues both inside and out of the federal government, and by the decades of environmental and disability justice leadership from indigenous peoples, people of color, and other historically-marginalized groups. Jessica is a co-chair of the Social Justice and Floodplain Management Task Force at the Association of State Floodplain Managers. Prior to the Army Corps, she worked on flood risk management and floodplain restoration as an environmental consultant, a Fulbright scholar, and at nonprofits. Jessica completed her Master’s in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley in 2009 where her thesis was on flood risk perception behind levees sent her down a rabbit hole to change the way we ‘do’ flood risk management… forever.

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Matrix on Point: One Million COVID Deaths

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

A series of cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues

As we approach the grim milestone of one million deaths in the United States, taking stock of the personal and collective consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic becomes an urgent task for social scientists. This Matrix on Point panel will examine the physical, material and psychological toll of the past two years of rampant disease, on and off social distancing, and shifting economic ground. It will analyze the unequal distribution of the pandemic’s burden across the population, discuss the long-term scarring that may ensue, and contemplate the (possibly more uplifting) lessons to be drawn for the future.

Panelists

Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center
Tina Sacks, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare; author, Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the American Healthcare System (Oxford, 2019)
Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology
Iris Mauss (moderator), Professor, Berkeley Psychology

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The Public University as Growth Machine: Contradiction or Opportunity?

April 18th, 2022
5:00pm-6:30pm PSDT

Professor Davarian L. Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College in dialogue with Regent John A. Pérez, Regent of the University of California, Speaker Emeritus of the California State Assembly.

Is it possible to reconcile growing student enrollment with the housing crisis, increased use of lecturers, and reliance on private capital for housing development reliant on debt-financed student rent and non-unionized labor? As a public university, UC Berkeley aspires to be an agent of class mobility and racial justice. Can these roles be served when the university is also a landlord dependent on property developers and philanthropists to meet the housing needs of a dramatically expanding student body? Is the public university as a growth machine a contradiction or an opportunity as the university aims to fulfill its public mission? The Berkeley Faculty Association brings two leading figures in the public conversation on the public university to unpack its public mission, including its relationship to surrounding cities, the environment, Black and Latinx workers and students, and the conditions of teaching and learning.

Davarian Baldwin is one of the country’s leading urban historians and Black radical thinkers, author of several books and recipient of many awards. His most recent book, entitled In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities, explores the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through exhaustive research, Baldwin interrogates the deep social costs of turning universities into growth machines that gentrify neighborhoods, deepen urban inequalities, steward police forces, deplete tax coffers and exploit low-waged Black and Brown labor.

John A. Pérez is a Regent of the University of California, former California Assembly member representing Downtown and East Los Angeles, and the 68^th Speaker Emeritus. He has a distinguished record in the labor movement as former Political Director of the California Labor Federation, as well as in fighting for the rights of working families. He has championed affordability and accessibility of public higher education, notably in the landmark Middle Class Scholarship Act. He has been President of the National Speakers Conference and has served on the President’s Commission on HIV/AIDS, and on the Democratic National Committee.

Co-Sponsors: Department of Geography, Graduate School of Education Equity Committee and Social Science Matrix

Register for remote access via Zoom and ask questions of the speakers.

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Digital Transformations in Global Land, Housing, and Property

April 27th, 2022
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

An online panel discussion presented by a Matrix Research Team

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Since the 17th-century invention of the surveyor’s chain, new technologies have been embedded in real estate market devices. While technologies targeting land are not new, the capture and application of big data, as well as the technological affordances of digital platforms and the structural power of their corporate owners, are catalysing novel processes of claiming and commodifying space globally. This panel discussion brings together members of the Matrix Research Team on Digital Transformations in Property and Development to discuss how state, corporations, and grassroots actors are employing digital technologies to remake global land, housing, and property.

Panelists include Hilary Faxon, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley; Elizabeth Resor, Phd student in the UC Berkeley School of Information; Julien Migozzi, Research Associate in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford; Luis F. Alvarez León, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Dartmouth College; and Jovanna Rosen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. The panel will be moderated by Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

Image above generated by AI by https://app.wombo.art/, based on prompts from members of the Matrix Research Team.

The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and The Challenge to American Democracy

April 29th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research

Register to join us for an in-person lecture by John Sides, William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, focused on his new co-authored book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy. This event is presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

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Watershed: Putin’s Regime, Russia, and the World

April 25th, 2022
11am-12:30pm

A panel discussion with four marquee figures among the Russian intellectuals who oppose the war in Ukraine.

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The war of aggression that the political regime in Russia unleashed on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, constitutes a watershed in post-Cold War history. The assault has also been accompanied by an unprecedented tightening of repression in Russia itself. The government rapidly muzzled what remained of the political opposition and completely destroyed independent media. How can this war, and the regime that started it, be grasped in the global and historical context of the post-Cold War? How much longer will the aggression continue? What are its likely political and geopolitical outcomes?

The four participants in this webinar — Ilya Budraitskis, Artemy Magun, Ilya Matveev, and Oxana Timofeeva — are among the foremost philosophers and political theorists in Russia who oppose this war and the authoritarian regime that launched it and who try to understand the conditions that made them possible. Within Russia, they are under the risk of persecution and had to flee or consider emigration. Their distinctive perspectives, not often heard either on the right or the left in the West, will shed a unique light on these urgent topics.

The webinar will be moderated by: Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Harsha Ram, Professor in the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages at UC Berkeley, will introduce the panelists.

This panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the Program in Critical Theory.

Panelists

Ilya Budraitskis is a political and cultural theorist, who until recent events taught at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) and the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art. He is a long-standing member of the editorial board of Moscow Art Journal, and a board member of Moscow’s Sakharov Center, a prominent human rights and educational organization that has repeatedly come under pressure from the Russian authorities. Budraitskis has published in New Left Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy. His book, Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia, was published by Verso in 2022.

Artemy Magun is Professor of Political Philosophy from St. Petersburg, Director of the Stasis Center for Practical Philosophy and editor-in-chief of Stasis, Journal in Social and Political Theory. He is the author of several books of political philosophy, including Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and its Fate After the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2013), Politics of the One (Bloomsbury 2013), and The Future of the State (Rowman & Littlefield 2020). His essays have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Constellations, Theory and Event, etc. He is a long-standing member of Chto Delat, a group of progressive Russian intellectuals and artists who oppose Putin’s regime.

Ilya Matveev is Professor of Political Philosophy who until recent events taught at the Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in St. Petersburg. He is a member of the research group Laboratory for Public Sociology which critically studies post-Soviet societies and has conducted research in both Russia and Ukraine. Matveev‘s work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Labor and Society, East European Politics, Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. He is co-host, with Budraitskis, of the popular Russian-language podcast “Political Diary,” which provides a unique perspective of the opposition to the current events in Russia.

Oxana Timofeeva is Professor of Political Philosophy from St. Petersburg and Head of its program “Geophilosophy and New Materialism.” Her essays have appeared in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture; Crisis & Critique; Mediations; Rethinking Marxism. She is the author of several books including Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (NLO, 2009), The History of Animals: A Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019), Solar Politics (Polity, 2022), and How to Love a Homeland (Kayfa, 2021). She has been a long-standing member of Chto Delat, a group of progressive Russian intellectuals and artists who oppose Putin’s regime.

Dr. Nina Ansary: The Unknown History of Women’s Activism in Iran

April 26th, 2022
4:00pm

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In this lecture, Dr. Nina Ansary, an award-winning Iranian American author, historian and UN Women Global Champion for Innovation, will speak about the unknown history of women’s activism in Iran, particularly peace activism, challenging the stereotype in the West of Iranian women as powerless and oppressed after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. She will discuss particular cases and overall trends that will make us think differently about both the challenges women have faced in Iran and about the courageous women who distinguished themselves across many fields and expanded the possibilities for women everywhere.

Dr. Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of Media Studies at UC Berkeley, will respond. Dr. Christine Philliou, Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Programs in Modern Greek/Hellenic Studies and Ottoman/Turkish Studies at UC Berkeley, will moderate. This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

About the Speakers

Nina Ansary is an award-winning Iranian American author, historian and UN Women Global Champion for Innovation. Her books Anonymous Is a Woman: A Global Chronicle of Gender Inequality (Revela Press/2020) and Jewels of Allah: The Untold Story of Women in Iran (Revela Press/2015) garnered multiple awards, including the 2016 International Book Award in “Women’s Issues” (Jewels of Allah) and the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Book Award in “Interior Design” and “History” (Anonymous Is a Woman). She is the Director of the World Affairs Councils of America (WACA) Global Women’s Lecture Series and the Director of the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum’s Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI).

Nina is the recipient of the 2020 Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award, the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the 2018 Barnard College, Columbia University Trailblazer Award, and has been recognized as one of “10 Inspirational Women (who) Should be Household Names” by The Hill, one of “Five Iranian Visionaries You Need to Know” by The New York Times and one of “14 Privileged Women to Change the World” by Marie Claire. She has appeared on CNN International, Fox News, Larry King, the BBC, Sky News and been featured in a variety of publications, including Time, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, Teen Vogue and the Yale Journal of International Affairs. She regularly presents her work on women’s rights at universities including Columbia, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, the UN Social Good and Girl Up Global Leadership Summits.

Ansary holds an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and a PhD in History from Columbia University. She serves on the International Advisory Board of the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum (MENAF); a think-tank based at the University of Cambridge, the Board of Trustees of the Iranian American Women Foundation (IAWF), and the Board of Directors of My Stealthy Freedom (MSF); an independent, nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Iranian women’s actions to secure their rights. She can be found on Twitter Instagram and Facebook.

Minoo Moallem (respondent) is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of Media Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018); Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (University of California Press, 2005); and the co-editor of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and The State, (Duke University Press, 1999). She is also the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees. Her digital project “Nation-on-the Move”(design by Eric Loyer) was published in Vectors. Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Fall 2007. She was the recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor Award for Public Service in 2010. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on postcolonial and transnational feminist studies, commodity cultures, immigration and diaspora studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Iranian visual cultures and diasporas.

Christine Philliou (moderator) is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Programs in Modern Greek/Hellenic Studies and Ottoman/Turkish Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of two books: Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) and Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021). Philliou teaches courses on the Middle East and Balkans in global context.

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Machine Learning: Applications and Opportunities in Social Science Research

August 8th, 2022
Aug. 8-12

Part of the ICPSR 2022 Summer Workshops at Berkeley.

Instructor: Christopher Hare, UC Davis

The field of machine learning is most commonly associated with “big data”: how we can use massive datasets to make better predictions about things like credit card fraud, Netflix recommendations, and the like. Though machine learning has been most influential in its commercial and medical applications, a growing number of social scientists are taking advantage of these methods for data of all types to: (1) uncover patterns and structure embedded between variables, (2) test and improve model specification and predictions, and (3) perform data reduction. This course covers the mechanics underlying machine learning methods and discusses how these techniques can be leveraged by social scientists to gain new insight from their data. Specifically, the course will cover: decision trees, random forests, boosting, k-means clustering and nearest neighbors, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks, and ensemble learning. We will also discuss best practices concerning tuning, error estimation, and model interpretability. Software: The course will use R to demonstrate the theoretical properties and empirical applications of these methods, and so participants should have some basic familiarity with R or similar statistical computing environments (such as Stata, SAS, or Python). An advanced programming background is not required or assumed. Prerequisites: Participants should also have some prior exposure to linear regression models.

UC Berkeley Faculty, Students and Staff are eligible for ICPSR Member pricing.

These workshops will all be held in-person at Social Science Matrix, 8^th floor Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley campus or you may attend virtually.

To register and for further information, go to https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/sumprog/courses.html and choose the “Short Workshops” tab. Or contact Eva Seto, Associate Director Matrix via e-mail to evaseto@berkeley.edu

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Social Sciences Fest / Matrix Open House

April 28th, 2022
3:00pm-5:00pm

An annual celebration of the social sciences at UC Berkeley

The Social Sciences Fest is an occasion to celebrate the UC Berkeley Division of Social Science. We’re thrilled to gather in person again this year! Join us as we recognize our new faculty members and honor this year’s Distinguished Teaching and Service Award recipients. Please come to reconnect, celebrate each other, learn about what’s new at Social Science Matrix, and participate in the amazing community that is Berkeley Social Science!

REGISTER TO ATTEND

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(Why) Are Democrats Losing the Latino Vote?

April 19th, 2022
3:30pm-5:00pm

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel will feature:

Amanda Iovino, Vice President, Polling Director, WPA Intelligence, Youngkin for Governor
Anaís López, Senior Analyst, BSP Research
David Shor, Head of Data Science, Blue Rose Research; and
Mike Madrid, Principal, GrassrootsLab

This event will be presented in-person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building. Register to attend.

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