Race

CRELS

Recap

Published April 23, 2025

Alex Roehrkasse: The New Contours of Mass Incarceration

Recorded on March 18, 2025, this video features a talk by Alexander F. Roehrkasse, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. In the talk, Roehrkasse presents new evidence of declining Black–White inequality and skyrocketing educational inequality in U.S. prison admissions.

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Podcast

Interview

Published April 1, 2025

Social, Spatial, Ecological, and Racial Fixes in New Deal South Carolina: Interview with Morgan Vickers

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Morgan P. Vickers, an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice at the University of Washington. Vickers received their Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley.

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Authors Meet Critics

Recap

Published December 16, 2024

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States

This Authors Meet Critics panel focused on "Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States," by Stephanie L. Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. With Kristina Lovato, Caitlin Patler, and Sarah Song.

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Podcast

Interview

Published December 4, 2024

Emotion, Race, and Gender: Interview with Gold Okafor

Listen to our interview with Gold Okafor, a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley who investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion. The interview focuses on Okafor's paper, "Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire," as well as other research topics.

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Podcast

Interview

Published September 27, 2024

Prisoner Labor Legacies: An interview with Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc

While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North […]

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Podcast

Interview

Published May 1, 2024

Sugar and the Transformation of the American West: An Interview with Bernadette Pérez

For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, J.T. Jamieson, a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Pérez is a historian of the United States and specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research focuses on migrant sugar beet workers in Colorado, and explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post Civil War.

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Lecture

Recap

Published March 3, 2024

Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice

 Recorded on February 8, 2024, this video features a lecture by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner. The talk was moderated and coordinated by Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Listen to the talk as a podcast through the player below, or on Google […]

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Authors Meet Critics

Recap

Published December 16, 2023

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

Watch a video (or listen to the podcast) of our "Authors Meet Critics" panel on "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights," by Dylan Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies at Berkeley Law. This book overturns the conventional wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement by demonstrating that Black people had long exercised “the rights of everyday use,” and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights.

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Article

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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Podcast

Interview

Published October 16, 2023

War, Diaspora, Bureaucracy: An Interview with Sherine Ebadi

How does international conflict shape immigration bureaucracy? Listen to our podcast featuring Sherine Ebadi, a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who researches the impact of Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) and employment-based visa programs on Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. military.

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Article

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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Alumni

Interview

Published September 8, 2023

Gender and Political Gatekeepers: A Visual Interview with Melanie Phillips

How do we understand the barriers that women face in becoming political candidates? Read our interview with Melanie L. Phillips, who completed her PhD in the Charles and Louise Travers Political Science Department at Berkeley in 2023 and is currently a Lecturer in the Political Science Department and a Research and Evaluation Associate at School-to-School International.

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