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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Orlando Patterson: “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil”

May 1st, 2023
4pm-5:30pm

Please join us on May 1 at 4pm for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. The title of Professor Patterson’s lecture will be “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil.” Stephen Best, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, will be the discussant. Co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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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.

About Stephen Best

Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines. To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice.

Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018).

His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

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Lecture: Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University

March 8th, 2023
4pm-6pm

Part of the Social Science / Data Science event series

Please join us on March 8 at 4pm for a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi’s lecture will be entitled “Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century.”

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History and D-Lab. Presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab.

About the Lecture

A world awash in text requires interpretive tools that traditional quantitative science cannot provide. Text mining is dangerous because analysts trained in quantification often lack a sense of what could go wrong when archives are biased or incomplete. Professor Guldi’s talk will review a brief catalogue of disasters created by data science experts who voyage into humanistic study. It finds a solution in “hybrid knowledge,” or the application of historical methods to algorithm and analysis. Case studies engage recent work from the philosophy of history (including Koselleck, Erle, Assman, Tanaka, Chakrabarty, Jay, Sewell, and others) and investigate the “fit” of algorithms with each historical frame of reference on the past.

This talk will profile recent research into the status of “memory” in British politics. It will profile the persistence of references to previous eras in British history, to historical conditions per se, and to futures hoped for and planned, using NLP analysis. It will present the promise and limits of text-mining strategies such as Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech Analysis for modeling temporal experience as a whole, suggesting how these methods might support students of social science and the humanities, and also revealing how traditional topics in these subjects offer a new research frontier for students of data science and informatics.

About the Speaker

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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Matrix on Point: Border Crossing

April 20th, 2023
12pm-1:30pm Pacific

Changing economic and legal circumstances alongside humanitarian crises are shifting the politics and histories of borders today, and reshaping the interdisciplinary field of border studies.

For this Matrix on Point panel, we asked UC Berkeley PhD candidates to share their ongoing research on borders and migration. The panel will be moderated by Irene Bloemraad, Class of 1951 Professor, Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies & Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), which is a co-sponsor of this event.

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Panelists

Pauline White Meeusen is a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. Her research interests include law and social movements, immigration law and policy, the legal profession, and border theory. Her dissertation explores whether and how attorneys and legal advocates who have served asylum seekers at the U.S. border and in detention come to see themselves as part of a social movement. As part of this project, she is bringing together immigration law and policy with border theory to explore the multi-layered borderscape in which these legal actors are embedded. Pauline received her B.A. in International Relations from Wellesley College, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and her J.D. with a specialization in International Law from the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Gisselle Perez-Leon is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Originally from Mexico City, and raised in Queens, NY, her research covers urban history and migration in modern Latin America. Her dissertation traces the development of public services and municipal governance in the border city of Nogales, Sonora. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Racial Justice Program.

Adriana P. Ramirez is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, race and ethnicity, and youth. Her current work explores what happens when young migrants leave the U.S. to “return” to Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Matrix on Point: Wealth and Taxes

April 3rd, 2023
12:00pm - 1:30pm Pacific

How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices? In this panel, experts will explain the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes.

The panel will include:

Duncan Wigan, Professor with Special Responsibilities in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School
Leonard Seabrooke, Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School
Gabriel Zucman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley

Co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

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Economics and Geopolitics in US International Relations: China, Europe, and the Global South

February 16th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PDT

US and China flags depicted on interlocking gears

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped global geopolitics, trade, and security. How will these changes affect the relationship between the US and China, Europe, and the Global South? How will they impact US firms operating globally, and how might foreign leaders — and notably the Chinese leadership — respond? In this panel discussion, a group of distinguished scholars will answer these questions and address the possible implications for the global multilateral order established in the second half of the 20th century.

Register to join us on February 16 at 12pm for this discussion, which will take place in Spieker Forum, Chou Hall, 6th Floor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy.

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Panelists

Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar is the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Justice Cuéllar served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies, and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades. Before serving on California’s highest court, Justice Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In this capacity, he oversaw programs on international security, governance and development, global health, cyber policy, migration, and climate change and food security. Previously, he co-directed the Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security.

James Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2012) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2002). Fearon’s research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the politics of economic development, and democratic accountability.

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund. He is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business and Director, Clausen Center for International Business and Policy. Professor Gourinchas was the editor-in-chief of the IMF Economic Review from its creation in 2009 to 2016, the managing editor of the Journal of International Economics between 2017 and 2019, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review between 2019 and 2022. He is on-leave from the National Bureau of Economic Research where he was director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program, a Research Fellow with the Center for Economic Policy Research CEPR (London) and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Laura Tyson is Class of 1939 Professor of Economics and Business Administration and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics at UC Berkeley. She is an influential scholar of economics and public policy and an expert on trade and competitiveness who has also served as a presidential adviser. She also chairs the Board of Trustees at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, which aims to develop solutions to global poverty. She is the former Faculty Director of the Berkeley Haas Institute for Business and Social Impact, which she launched in 2013. She served as Interim Dean of the Haas School from July to December 2018, and served previously as dean from 1998 to 2001.

John Zysman (moderator) is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder/co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. He received his B.A at Harvard and his Ph.D. at MIT. Zysman’s ongoing work covers the implications of platforms and intelligent tools for work, entrepreneurship, and international competition; and the economic challenges and opportunities of climate change and the green economy. From these positions, Zysman has made contributions to the policy and intellectual debates, building a record of thought leadership on the global economy going back five decades.

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Reimagining Global Integration: A Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

February 15th, 2023
4:00pm-5:30pm

Please join us on Wednesday, February 15 at 4pm for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Justice Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The topic of the lecture will be “Reimagining Global Integration.”

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Abstract

Whether they live in vast cities or rural villages, people in virtually every corner of the world have experienced enormous growth in cross-border economic, political, and social connections since World War II. This latest chapter in the story of transnational activity has coincided with enormous changes in the well-being of billions of people. As China gained access to global markets and its share of worldwide trade increased eight-fold in a single generation, for example, the percentage of its population living in extreme poverty plunged from 72 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2010. Global life expectancy has risen from less than 47 years in 1950 to 71 years in 2021, and the male-female gap in primary and secondary schooling globally has almost disappeared.

But increased cross-border trade, migration, flows of information, and political ties have also engendered an intense backlash to “globalization” and related concepts. Today, at a time of major geopolitical upheaval and technological change, policymakers and the public are vigorously debating the merits of domestic policies suitable for an interconnected world. They are exploring new trade and migration rules, reviving strategies for national industrial and technological development, and reflecting on the lessons of 1990s-style globalization for international law and institutions substantially influenced by the United States. Discussions of “reshoring” supply chains and United States-China economic “decoupling” are just two examples of rising concerns in Washington about cross-border ties.

Yet global cooperation remains vital to solving many of humanity’s most urgent challenges: mitigating and adapting to climate change, harnessing technology for the benefit of humanity while taming its risks, reducing poverty, and preventing violent conflict. By better understanding the long-simmering conflicts over global cooperation and integration, policymakers and civil society can further develop the ideas, institutions, and coalitions necessary to create a stable foundation for a more reflective version of global integration: one that addresses the connections between economic well-being and security, and better aligns domestic realities with international norms to tackle the pressing issues of our time.

About the Speaker

A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Justice Cuéllar served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies, and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades. Before serving on California’s highest court, Justice Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In this capacity, he oversaw programs on international security, governance and development, global health, cyber policy, migration, and climate change and food security. Previously, he co-directed the Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security.

While serving in the Obama White House as the president’s special assistant for justice and regulatory policy, he led the Domestic Policy Council teams responsible for civil and criminal justice reform, public health, immigration, transnational regulatory issues, and supporting the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. He then co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, and was a presidential appointee to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States. As a California Supreme Court justice, he oversaw reforms of the California court system’s operations to better meet the needs of millions of limited-English speakers.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar is the author of Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies (2013) and has published widely on American institutions, international affairs, and technology’s impact on law and government. Cuéllar co-authored the first ever report on the use of artificial intelligence across federal agencies. He has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.

He chairs the board of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and is a member of the Harvard Corporation. He currently serves on the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Earlier, he chaired the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, and co-chaired the Obama Biden Presidential Transition Task Force on Immigration.

Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he grew up primarily in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He began his career at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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Authors Meet Critics: “To Defend This Sunrise,” by Courtney Morris

March 7th, 2023
12:30pm-2:00pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Please join us on Tuesday, March 7 from 12:30-2pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, by Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

Morris will be joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, and Jovan Scott Lewis, Associate Professor and Chair of the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. The panel will be moderated by Lok Siu, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley.

The panel will be co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Gender & Women’s Studies.

This will be a hybrid event, presented both in-person and online. All registrants will be sent a Zoom link prior to the event.

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About the Book

To Defend this Sunrise examines how Black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, Black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression.

Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, Black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine Black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

About the Panelists

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and dispossession in the US Gulf South and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. To see her art work, visit www.courtneydesireemorris.com.

Tianna Paschel is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America. Her work can be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies and various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor – along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones – of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and blackness in the Americas. Professor Paschel is a Ford Fellow, member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, the Council of the Law Section of ASA, and the Steering Committee of the Network of Anti-Racist Action and Research (RAIAR).

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research is generally concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and US. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia, which traces the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce. Jovan founded the Berkeley Black Geographies Project in 2016, which you can read more about at: theblackgeographic.com.

Lok Siu (moderator) is Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. She is also an affiliated faculty in Anthropology, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Berkeley Food Institute. Her books include Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (2005) and co-edited volumes Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (2007), Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (2009), and Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective (2021). Her latest manuscript, Worlding Chino Latino: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

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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.

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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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