Past Events

This talk will feature Zachary Bleemer, Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, who co-authored a new book, "Metrics That Matter: Counting What's Really Important to College Students," that explores popular metrics used by future and current college students, with chapters focusing on colleges’ return on investment, university rankings, average student debt, average wages by college major, and more. Register to attend.

Note the talk scheduled for September 7 has been POSTPONED. You can still register to join us for a future talk by Jedediah Purdy, the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke Law School.

In this talk, Andrej Krickovic, Associate Professor of International Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, in Suzhou, China, will argue that Russia’s assertive and aggressive international behavior is motivated and shaped by its status concerns as a declining power. Russia’s leaders are determined to arrest Russia’s decline and preserve its status as a great power in the international system and are prepared to adopt the most risky, aggressive, and destabilizing foreign policies to achieve this end.

Since Greek antiquity, there have been two fundamentally different conceptualizations of the search for truth. On the one hand, platonic politics proposed to control the city by subjecting political expression to the philosophical concept. On the other hand, the rhetorical tradition opposed the logocratic and universal claim of philosophy, in the name of the diversity […]

Expropriation — the seizing of property by a state for public use — is seeing an upsurge in interest as a possible response to a number of pressing global challenges, including the climate crisis, outdated infrastructure, new technologies, and renewed commitments to economic sovereignty. This panel will bring together experts from diverse regions to discuss the use of expropriation for the common good in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Presented as part of the UC Berkeley Department of Geography's Spring 2023 Colloquia Series, this talk will feature Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, presenting "The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament."

Join us for a lunchtime roundtable conversation with Orlando Patterson focused on "The Paradox of Freedom", an interview focused on Patterson's childhood, education, public service, and books. Ricarda Hammer, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science (political theory), will kick off the conversation, which will be moderated by Caitlin Rosenthal, Associate Professor of History. We encourage graduate students to attend this event.

Please join us on May 1 at 4pm for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. The title of Professor Patterson's lecture will be “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil.” Stephen Best, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, will be the discussant.

This day-long symposium will probe what remains an under-examined topic in the history of World War II and the Holocaust: the multivarious paths through which ordinary men and women resisted the Nazis.

In this talk, Dr. micha cárdenas, Associate Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, will discuss her new book Poetic Operations (Duke 2022), as well as her augmented reality artwork about climate justice and her forthcoming book After Man: Fires, Oceans and Androids.

Changing economic and legal circumstances alongside humanitarian crises are shifting the politics and histories of borders today, and reshaping the interdisciplinary field of border studies. Join us on April 20 for a Matrix on Point panel featuring a group of UC Berkeley PhD candidates sharing their ongoing research on borders and migration.

Join us on April 19 at 12pm for a talk by Abraham Weil, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Kansas and the general co-editor for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. This talk is co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture.