Culture
Interview
Published March 29, 2024
Confiscated Objects of the Cultural Revolution: A Visual Interview with Puck Engman
Read an interview with Puck Engman, Assistant Professor in History at UC Berkeley and a historian of China in the postwar era, whose research concerns the reorganization of state and society in the first 30 years of the People's Republic of China, and the transition from command economy to market economy at the end of the 20th century.
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Interview
Published November 8, 2023
Mapping the Los Angeles Ethnoburbs: An Interview with Margaret Crawford
In this interview, Aidan Lee, a PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of History and a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Margaret Crawford (shown above), Director of Urban Design, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, about her research on California's “ethnoburbs,” and why they are now permanent features of America’s built landscape.
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Interview
Published September 28, 2023
Private Firms and WTO Dispute Escalation: An Interview with Ryan Brutger
On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Daniel Lobo, a PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Ryan Brutger, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, about his new article, "Litigation for Sale: Private Firms and WTO Dispute Escalation."
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Interview
Published September 25, 2023
How Student-Athlete Activism Shaped the University: An Interview with Cameron Black
Read an interview with Cameron Black, Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. Black, who completed his PhD in history at UC Berkeley in May 2023, studies the history of student-athlete protest movements in the 1960s through the lens of labor and management and the history of capital.
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Interview
Published September 20, 2023
Untimely Sacrifices: An Interview with Daena Funahashi
In this interview, Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, a Matrix Communications Scholar, spoke with Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, about her new book, “Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland,” based on her ethnographic work in Finnish rehabilitation programs for occupational burnout.
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Interview
Published August 21, 2023
Language Revitalization in Oakland: A Visual Interview with Tessa Scott
Mam, a Mayan language spoken both in the highlands of Guatemala as well as in diaspora communities in Mexico and the US, is rapidly becoming one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the San Francisco East Bay region. Mam-speaking migrants are part of a broader trend of Central American migrants in the United […]
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Interview
Published August 14, 2023
How Medical Expertise Shapes Gender-Affirming Health Care: An Interview with Tara Gonsalves
Read an interview with Tara Gonsalves, a recent PhD graduate of UC Berkeley and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, about the challenges of the categories of sex, gender, and transgender, and how these categories are used in gender-affirming health care in the United States today.
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Interview
Published August 1, 2023
Advancing Computational Psychology: A Visual Interview with Bill Thompson
Read an interview with UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Bill Thompson, who uses computational methods and large-scale experiments to understand problems like knowledge transmission, the universality of language categories, and the social aspects of human problem-solving.
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Interview
Published June 26, 2023
Balancing Property Taxes for Schools: An Interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey
Read an interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics, about his research on how reforming property taxes can reduce inequality among school districts in the United States.
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Faculty Fellows
Published April 15, 2023
2023-2024 Social Science Matrix Faculty Fellows Chosen
Four UC Berkeley professors have been selected to be Matrix Faculty Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year: Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History; Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology; Christopher Muller, Associate Professor of Sociology; and Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
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Podcast
Published September 30, 2022
The Rise of Mass Incarceration: An Interview with Chris Muller and Alex Roehrkasse
On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars whose work focuses on explaining how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years. Alex Roehrkasse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. He studies the production of racial, class, and gender inequality in the […]
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Interview
Published September 22, 2022
The Materiality of the Telegraph Revolution: A Visual Interview with Sophie FitzMaurice
How did the telegraph change the environment? Read our latest "visual interview" with Sophie FitzMaurice, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of History, whose research interests include how telegraph poles were produced, and how woodpeckers responded to the concomitant disappearance of forests and the rise of telegraph lines.
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