In this panel, moderated by Berkeley Journalism’s Dean Geeta Anand, journalists who have redressed the wrongs of journalism will discuss what goes into the struggle to get it right. Presented as part of the "Reimagining Democracy" Town Hall Series. Panelists will include: Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, whose nonprofit, advocacy journalism has changed the way we think about prisons, Facebook, and more; Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who changed our understanding of police brutality against Black civilians through his Washington Post stories and data analysis; and Michael Pollan, Berkeley Journalism professor and pioneering journalist who changed how we think and write about food, making the linkages between farm policy, industrial agriculture, and nutrition. REGISTER HERE.

Please join us on March 9 for a panel discussion on how the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed education and exacerbated inequalities.Panelists will include: Zeus Leonardo, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley; Emily J. Ozer, Professor of Community Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; Prudence L. Carter, the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley; Matt Rafalow,  Sociologist (PhD, University of California-Irvine), a social scientist at Google, and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. REGISTER HERE.

In his book, Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica, Jovan Scott Lewis, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, tells the story of three young and poor men striving to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Scammer’s Yard describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Lewis will discuss the book with Nadia Ellis, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of English; and Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. REGISTER HERE.

Please join us for a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. This lecture is presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event will also be co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group. REGISTER HERE

How are the historical experiences of the Black and Jewish communities at once distinct and interconnected? Should we see efforts to combat racism and antisemitism as separate struggles? What are African Americans’ and Jews’ responsibilities to one another in America’s current racial reckoning? In this conversation, Eric K. Ward, a leading expert on the relationship between racism, antisemitism, and authoritarian movements; and Michael Rothberg, an eminent scholar of historical exclusion and its legacies, will tackle these questions and other pressing matters in contemporary Black-Jewish relations. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Tina Sacks of the School of Social Welfare. This event is sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, the Department of African-American Studies, the Othering and Belonging Institute, Berkeley Hillel, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Graduate Theological Union, and the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.

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Please join us on April 19, 2021 for an "Authors Meet Critics" book talk featuring Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millán, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have disinvested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. In Redistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Millán takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of "redistributing the poor" draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy. Panelists include: Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University; and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law. Catherine Albiston, Jackson H. Ralston Professorship of Law and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, will moderate. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS). REGISTER

Please join us on May 14, 2021 for a Social Science Matrix Book Salon focused on the book Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Professor Stephens-Dougan will be joined in conversation by Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. REGISTER HERE