2018 to 2019

• Community Conversations on Sexual Violence and Harassment: Narratives of Activism, Inclusion, Confidentiality, Accountability, and Healing

  Contacts

  • Sharon Inkelas

  

  Incidents of sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH) have been a focus of national headlines this year as a social and political movement swept the country. SVSH is also a longstanding topic of interest among social science researchers nationally, and UC Berkeley administrators and practitioners are making efforts to improve SVSH support, procedure, and policy on campus.

• Formation of interdisciplinary research group to study the socio-ecological impacts of cannabis production

  Contacts

  • Ted Grantham

  

  The recent legalization and regulation of cannabis production and consumption in California represent an unprecedented change in public policy that may have profound impacts on the environment and communities across the state. At this moment of change, there is a critical need for scholarship on cannabis-producing communities and their relation to the natural environment.

• Gender and Technology

  Contacts

  • Sigrid Luhr

  

  UC Berkeley is an ideal place from which to study the tech industry. The San Francisco Bay Area serves as the headquarters of most large tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, as well as countless startups. UC Berkeley also produces a large number of tech workers.

• I Regret to Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised

  Contacts

  • Naniette Coleman

  

  “Privacy is one of the central issues of importance of our time,” wrote the organizers of this Matrix Prospecting Team in their successful proposal.

• Masculinity and Capitalism

  Contacts

  • Raka Ray

  

  Recent decades have brought about a striking increase in inequality among men across many scales. Within the regime of globalized financialized capitalism, manufacturing has been relocated to low-wage regions, and many of the jobs have simply disappeared because of automation.

• Queer Ecologies: Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Animal Behavior Science

  Contacts

  • Ashton Wesner

  

  The Queer Ecologies Prospecting Team will examine how historically exclusionary and hierarchical ideas of race, sex, and gender are both replicated and disrupted by contemporary laboratory and fieldwork practices, as well as theoretical innovations, in animal behavior sciences.

• Seeing Like a Valley: Locating the Moral Visions of Silicon Valley Culture

  Contacts

  • Morgan Ames

  

  Like modern states, the industrial region known as Silicon Valley has developed through attempts to regularize, rationalize, and codify the world. These ways of knowing have favored emerging technologies and new modes of organization. But what are the effects of this developing view to the world?

2018

• Working, Learning, and Earning in the Age of Intelligent Machines: Considering the Implications of Computation Intensive Automation, Big Data, and Platforms

  Contacts

  • John Zysman

  

  Bringing together scholars from engineering, business, and other domains, this Matrix Prospecting Team will develop a research agenda focused on understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor and the economy.

2017

• Expert Language, Native Language: Toward a Framework for Translation in Clinical (Mis)communication

  Contacts

  • Bonnie Wong

  

  Bringing together experts in linguistics, cognitive and data scientists, medical doctors, bioethicists, and medical anthropologists, this Matrix Prospecting Team aims to generate a theoretical framework to address challenges in medical communication, specifically between doctors and patients.

• The Origin of States

  Contacts

  • David Schonholzer

  

  This Matrix Prospecting Team will apply modern methodologies to tackle a question that has challenged historians, archaeologists, and other scholars for years: why did some human populations transition from living in scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to gathering in cities governed by a centralized state, while others did not