Past Events

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.

How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices? In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will explain the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes.

Please register to join us on March 23 at 4pm for a book talk featuring Phil Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, discussing his new book (co-authored with Samuel Perry), "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy." The respondent will be David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. Carolyn Chen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Ethnic Studies, will moderate.

Please join us on March 22 at 12pm for a talk by Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet. The talk will look at President Biden's "Modern American Industrial Strategy," using strategic public investments to achieve the full potential of our nation’s economy — one built from the bottom up and middle out, where the gains of economic growth are shared.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories have become a central feature of modern life, but they have a long history that have served to justify surveillance and prosecution of marginalized groups. In this Matrix on Point panel, a group of scholars who study these histories — including Robert Braun, Timothy R. Tangherlini, and Poulomi Saha — will discuss how misinformation circulates, and the effects of such myths and stories on society.

On March 9, Andreas Wimmer, Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University, will deliver at talk at Social Science Matrix entitled "Consent and Legitimacy: A Revised Bellicose Theory of State-Building with Evidence from around the World, 1500–2000."

Please join us on March 8 at 4pm for a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi's lecture will be entitled "Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century." Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History and D-Lab. Presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab.

Register to join us on March 8 at 12pm for a talk on "The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights," by Professor Jo Guldi, who makes the case that land reform movements originated as an argument about reparations for the experience of colonization, and that they were championed by a set of leading administrators within British empire and in UN agencies at the beginning of the postwar period.

Register to join us on Tuesday, March 7 from 12:30-2pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua," by Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Morris will be joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel and Jovan Scott Lewis, with Lok Siu moderating.

Register for an Authors Meet Critics panel on "Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America," by Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. The panel will also include USF Professor Julio Moreno and UC Davis Professor José Juan Pérez Meléndez. UC Berkeley History Professor Elena Schneider will moderate.

Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, will present a talk entitled “Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty," focused on a key architect of modern sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.