Matrix On Point
Recap
Published April 10, 2025
Mainstreaming Psychedelics
Psychedelics are steadily moving from the fringes of counterculture to the heart of mainstream society, driven by a growing body of research and shifting public perception. As psychedelics shed their stigma, they are catalyzing a broader conversation about mental health, spirituality, and the boundaries of human consciousness. Recorded on March 6, 2025, this panel featured Diana Negrin, David Presti, Charles Hirschkind, and Graham Pechenik, with Poulomi Saha moderating.
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Research Teams
Published August 30, 2023
Matrix Announces 2023-2024 Research Teams
Social Science Matrix is welcoming five new Matrix Research Teams for the 2023-2024 academic year. Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. This year’s funded teams — one faculty-led team and four graduate student-led teams — will address a diverse range of social science questions.
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Interview
Published August 21, 2023
Language Revitalization in Oakland: A Visual Interview with Tessa Scott
Mam, a Mayan language spoken both in the highlands of Guatemala as well as in diaspora communities in Mexico and the US, is rapidly becoming one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the San Francisco East Bay region. Mam-speaking migrants are part of a broader trend of Central American migrants in the United […]
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Interview
Published August 14, 2023
How Medical Expertise Shapes Gender-Affirming Health Care: An Interview with Tara Gonsalves
Read an interview with Tara Gonsalves, a recent PhD graduate of UC Berkeley and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, about the challenges of the categories of sex, gender, and transgender, and how these categories are used in gender-affirming health care in the United States today.
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Interview
Published August 7, 2023
Listening to Rwandan Popular Music with Victoria Netanus Grubbs
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Victoria Netanus Grubbs, a Black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator who is a Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her current book project examines how popular Rwandan music worked in the aftermath of genocide to produce a collective social body.
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Recap
Published August 1, 2023
DEEPFAKE: A Rhetorical and Economic Alternative to Address the So-Called “Post-Truth Era”
Recorded on May 10, 2023 at Social Science Matrix, this symposium aimed to develop a critique of the current debates about Post-Truth and fakeness, and specifically of Big Tech’s effort to frame the political expression of the demos as it solidifies its control over the digital economy.
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Interview
Published August 1, 2023
Advancing Computational Psychology: A Visual Interview with Bill Thompson
Read an interview with UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Bill Thompson, who uses computational methods and large-scale experiments to understand problems like knowledge transmission, the universality of language categories, and the social aspects of human problem-solving.
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