Matrix Research Teams

Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question of significance in the social sciences. Successful research teams integrate participants from several social-science disciplines and diverse ranks (i.e. faculty and graduate students); address a compelling research question with real-world significance; and deploy or develop appropriate methodologies in creative ways. Matrix teams may address any social science research question, theoretical or empirical, drawing on any of the social sciences. Matrix is especially interested in original and emerging approaches that explore new theoretical and empirical questions, and that combine research at different scales and from different methodologies.

Research Team

Latin American Cities

Year: 2023-2024 Research Team Type: Student-led Organizers: Isabel Peñaranda Currie, PhD Student, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Flavia Leite, PhD Student, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Laura Belik, PhD Candidate, Architecture, UC Berkeley With over 80% of its population living in urban centers, Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world. […]

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Research Team

Black Lives at Cal Initiative

Year: 2023-2024 Research Team Type: Student-led Organizers: Caleb Dawson, PhD candidate, Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender, Berkeley School of Education; Nitoshia Ford, PhD student, Department of African American Studies; Kevin Steward, JD Candidate, Berkeley Law School; Bria Suggs, graduate student, UC Berkeley School of Journalism Black Lives at Cal (BLAC) is a long-awaited […]

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Research Team

Carceral Labor Mapping Project

Organizers: Elizabeth Hargrett, PhD Candidate, Department of History; Xander Lenc, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography The American landscape has been profoundly shaped by the labor and toil of incarcerated workers, but most of us pass by the highways, dams, forests, parks, and other landforms they built without any inkling of their carceral origins. There is no central database for the tens of thousands of infrastructural projects built by prisoners in the United States, and despite a wealth of disparate scholarship on prison and jail labor there is no collaborative platform for historians, geographers, sociologists, and other scholars of the prison to circulate their findings. The Carceral Labor Mapping Project (CLMP, or “Clamp”) aims to foster collaboration between carceral scholars and provide pedagogical tools for educators seeking to demystify the carceral landscape. The team will produce an online GIS platform allowing users to not only learn about the role that carceral labor programs have played in shaping the world around them, but also allowing them to collaborate on carceral research projects.

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Research Team

The Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective

Anticolonial intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon’s influences have inspired the work of liberation movements worldwide and continue to generate robust cross-disciplinary debate by scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and medical fields. The Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective aims to provide an institutional home for graduate scholarship on decolonization, anti-colonialism, and liberation at Berkeley and the broader Bay Area, providing a space to think with Fanon’s work and its afterlives through an interdisciplinary geographic lens. We aim to understand Fanon’s contributions in relation to the realities he faced and, most importantly, fold them in with other intellectuals and activists’ contexts, i.e., trying to understand his work in relation to our realities. Using analytical frameworks from interdisciplinary fields, including Black geographies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology, the Collective grounds our thinking, writing, and practice in concrete historical and geographic contexts where Fanon’s work has been taken up and stretched in new directions. In a world increasingly defined by violent hostility to historically marginalized communities and people, the urgent relevance of Fanon’s work on liberation extends beyond the confines of the academy. To this end, the Collective fosters conversations that cross not only disciplinary boundaries but also the boundaries of the academy itself. The Collective’s goals include four primary programmatic areas: a year-long, bi-weekly graduate student reading group; a one time faculty colloquium guest talk; a second-semester graduate working paper series with the intended goal of an edited volume; and a public-facing film series curated in collaboration with BAMPFA.

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Research Team

Marianas Critical Research Initiative

The Marianas Critical Research Initiative (MCRI) is a diverse coalition of UC Berkeley faculty and graduate students interested in examining the detrimental effects that US military presence has had on environmental and human health in the Marianas from WWII to the present. With heritage and familial ties across the Pacific, the MCRI team is dedicated to achieving and bolstering understanding of this under-studied conflict, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by integrating critical military studies, security studies, political ecology, geography, indigenous studies, public health, veteran studies, and questions of sovereignty and colonialism in US territories.

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Research Team

Digital Harms and Impact

Digital and online harms have recently been brought to the forefront of public discourse given the role of technology companies in facilitating and even causing harm to marginalized and vulnerable populations such as children, teens, people with disabilities, stigmatized identities, and protected groups. This Matrix Research Team will examine the impact of digital harms, violence, and trauma, including how frameworks of justice should inform our approach to addressing different forms and manifestations of interpersonal and structural harms.

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Research Team

Psychological Borderlands: Landscape Transformation and Environmental Ethics on the Margins of Ecological Change

This Matrix Research Team aims to investigate the multidisciplinary nexus of ecological devastation, fossil fuel economies, social health, and place-based relations in the context of rapid environmental transformation. The primary goal is to investigate the intertwined social-technical problems presented by sea level rise and land ownership to wetlands located near industrial or contaminated sites and the psycho-social implications for communities faced with environmental change.

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Research Team

Marx and The City Research Team: Land and Housing

Organized by a group of graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, this Matrix Research Team will provide an inclusive, inter-disciplinary intellectual space for thinking through Marxian political economic theory and engaging with texts focused on the topic "land and housing." The purpose is to bring together interdisciplinary understandings of Marxian political economy, urban theory, and practical urban issues across disciplines.

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Research Team

Local Communities in Context: Case Studies in Early China

The problem of local communities and associations is both understudied and ill-studied in the Early China field. This faculty-led Matrix Research Team will conduct an in-depth study of recently excavated manuscripts, focusing on five sites, where the site reports and transcriptions suffice to sketch the operations of local communities that are part of the administration of the early empires, in regions far from the capital with mixed ethnicities.

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Research Team

Deorienting the Map: Alternative Cartographies for Alternative Futures

Year: 2022-2023 Research Team Type: Faculty-Led Team Organizer: Clancy Wilmott Disciplines: New media, Indigenous geographies, political science, geography, software engineering/design, cartography, development studies, environmental science, geomorphology, geology, traditional ecological knowledges “Deorienting the Map” is a Matrix Research Team that aims to explore the possibilities and limitations of reimagining an open source, user-focused geographic information system […]

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Research Team

Cumulative Radicalization: New Models of Mass Violence

A long-standing observation in scholarship on mass violence across the social sciences is that elite decision-making is processual. This agreement on the processual nature of mass violence notwithstanding, models for how this actually works remain opaque. How and why do policies of mass violence and genocide emerge? This Matrix Research Team seeks to leverage the specialization of social scientists at UC Berkeley to develop fresh answers to this critical question.

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Research Team

Situating Camps and Confinement Sites beyond Humanitarianism, Periodization, and Area Studies Discourses

This working group centers its focus on the space of the camp, in an interdisciplinary context, to explore how its “architectures” — the camps themselves, their spatial layout, infrastructure systems and camp-thinking — have operated to shape, detain and enable particular forms of movement. The goal of this project is to forge space for research and debate the different models of encampments and how they shift between various nation-states and periods of time.

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