Past Events

Join us on October 20 for a Matrix on Point panel on the implications of the conservative turn in the Supreme Court. With Thomas Biolsi, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies; Khiara Bridges, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law; Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law; and Ronit Stahl, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Join us on October 14 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy," by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Scott will be joined in conversation by Ula Taylor and Scott Bukatman, and Greg Niemeyer will moderate.

Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel will focus on challenges related to public opinion polling — and how they can be addressed. Panelists include Elliott Morris, Data Journalist and Correspondent, The Economist; Mark Di Camillo, Director, IGS Survey, UC Berkeley; Erin Hartman, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley; and Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer, Momentive/SurveyMonkey. The panel will be moderated by Jack Citrin, Professor of the Graduate School, UC Berkeley.

Algorithms can be complex, opaque, and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. This "Authors Meet Critics" panel will focus on the book "Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made," by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Matrix, in conversation by Iason Gabriel and Deirdre Mulligan.

Join us on September 30 for an "Author Meets Critics" panel featuring Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, presenting her book, "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley." Professor Chen will be joined in conversation by Arlie Hochschild, Professor Emerita in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and Morgan Ames, Assistant Professor of Practice in the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. Marion Fourcade will moderate.

In recent years, we have seen presumably new forms of racial bias and discrimination in mainstream politics that challenge existing theories and offer new scholarly directions. This panel, presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, will discuss new perspectives on inter- and intra-racial attitudes, new directions for research, and new ways of theorizing, measuring, and experimenting to understand the politics of race and ethnicity. 

Register for an online Matrix on Point panel discussion on how technology is changing humanitarian interventions, the human rights of recipients, and the broader power relations between donors and recipients. With Daragh Murray, University of Essex Human Rights Centre & School of Law; Fleur Johns, UNSW Sydney; and Wendy H. Wong, Principal’s Research Chair, Professor, Political Science, The University of British Columbia.

Less than a month before Brazil's most important elections since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, Berkeley Geography and Social Science Matrix are hosting the filmmaker Madiano Marcheti, whose first feature-length movie, Madalena, shows a Brazil rarely seen on film. Set in the agroindustrial interior of Mato Grosso do Sul, the film offers a profound reflection on the imbrications of political power, race, masculinity, agroindustry, and anti-LGBTQI violence in contemporary Brazilian society.

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 and Andrew Lakoff. The authors will be joined in conversation by Michael Watts and Cathryn Carson, and Aihwa Ong will moderate.

Join us on September 1st for a talk with Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, focused on his recent book, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century." DeLong will be joined in conversation by Robert Brenner, Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA. Moderated by Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Economy and Co-Director of the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE). This event is co-sponsored with N2PE.

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.

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’). 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.