Past Events

Understanding and interpreting AI is the new frontier in AI research. While advances in the performance of AI models have seen enormous successes, a profound understanding of how learning happens inside the models remains to be thoroughly explored. Understanding how AI learns has the potential to help us gain novel insights in science, technology, and other fields, as well as to observe novel causal relationships in various types of data. Interpreting the internal workings of AI models can also shed light on how the human mind works and how we are similar to and different from machines. This symposium will focus on immediate challenges in AI interpretability and explore how the humanities, social sciences, and the tech world can join forces in this highly consequential research.

Please join us in-person on Monday, March 4, 2024 from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Terracene, by Professor Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Professor Mameni will be joined by Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz; Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley; and Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Join us on February 22 at 12pm for a talk by Sharad Goel, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.  

Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, large numbers of Black people have made their way into settings previously occupied only by whites. While many whites supported these changes, many others felt that their own rights were being abrogated by Black inclusion. Moreover, Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color—and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement. Join us on February 20, 2024 for a lecture by Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University.

As governments and businesses begin to use more forms of biometric identification – including fingerprints, facial recognition, and voice recognition, among others – it’s easier than ever to recognize a person. What implications do these technologies have on the future of privacy and surveillance? This Matrix on Point panel will feature John Chuang, Professor in the School of Information; Lawrence Cohen, Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies; and Jennifer Urban, Clinical Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. The panel will be moderated by Rebecca Wexler, Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law.

Please join us on Wednesday, February 8 at 2:00pm Pacific for a hybrid (in-person and online) talk, “Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice,” by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner. Basing his insights on several years of clinical experience and critical psychology theory, Barnwell draws attention to how people’s psychological relationship to place is threatened through grievous acts of epistemic injustices — violence directed at knowledge and speech.

Join us on February 6, 2024 at 4:00pm as Professor Beth Rabinowitz will discuss her recent book, "Defensive Nationalism: Explaining the Rise of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century," and the powerful thesis that the irrationalism and hatred that marked the early 20th century has resurged in the 21st. In turn, our response to violent instability and fracture requires a clear-eyed understanding of the explosive politics of both eras.

Please join us on January 19, 2024 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Professor Garrett will be joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California. Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

How do algorithmic surveillance tools piloted by the police function as technology experiments on communities? Join us on Thursday, December 7 at 12pm for a talk entitled "Police Technology Experiements," by Elizabeth Joh, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis.

Register to join us on December 5 for a panel on "Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830," by Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Jackson will be joined by William H. Janeway, David Singh Grewal, and Anat Admati.

Presented by the Program in Critical Theory, the Series in Black / Africana Critical Theory stages a slow sequence of conversations across Africana Studies, Black Study, and Critical Theory. Rather than a form of triangulation that aims at resolution, the series stays with tension across these lines of thought, in provisional forms of critical contemplation that might help us meet our current condition. This seminar centers on Riotous Deathscapes, by Hugo ka Canham, Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa.

While the last 20 years have marked a significant change in increased acceptance of varied gender expressions and sexual orientations, these changes haven’t made the importance of gender and sexuality as concepts disappear. If anything, they’ve become more relevant for understanding the world today. This Matrix on Point panel will bring together scholars from the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and political science for a discussion of gender and sexuality through the lens of such topics as medicine, transnational migration, and marriage.