UC Berkeley’s flagship institute for social science research

Our purpose is captured in our name: we provide an organizational framework—a “matrix”—that supports cross-disciplinary research pursued by social scientists across the University of California, Berkeley campus and beyond.

New Directions

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Event Date: March 10th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

New Directions: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Perspectives

Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel — part of the Social Science Matrix New Directions series — will bring together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.

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Solidarity and Strife

Recap

Published February 28, 2021

The True Costs of Misinformation: Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Recorded on February 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

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Authors Meet Critics

Recap

Published February 19, 2021

Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order

Joined by a panel of scholars, CLTC Faculty Director Steve Weber discussed his book, which outlines a framework for how firms should position themselves for the new economic geography.

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Podcast

Interview

Published February 13, 2021

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Clancy Wilmott

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography. Professor Wilmott comes to UC Berkeley from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where she received her PhD in Human Geography with a multi-site study on the interaction between mobile phone maps, cartographic discourse, and postcolonial landscapes.

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Matrix Lecture

Recap

Published February 5, 2021

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century

Recorded on February 3, 2021, this video features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

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Solidarity and Strife

Recap

Published February 5, 2021

Measuring Belief in Fake News Online

Recorded on January 29, 2021, this video features Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics at New York University. Tucker discussed his recent research, which focused on understanding how well can ordinary people do in identifying the veracity of news in real time.

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Podcast

Interview

Published January 30, 2021

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Mariane Ferme

In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Mariane C. Ferme, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the author of "Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone" and "The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone."

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