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.
Learn More >Podcast
Interview
Published March 30, 2020
Matrix Podcast: Interview with Desiree Fields
In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale.
Learn More >COVID-19
Article and News
Published March 27, 2020
COVID-19: UC Berkeley Social Sciences Portal
A portal for insights about the COVID-19 pandemic from the UC Berkeley social science community
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Recap
Published March 21, 2020
2020 Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics
On January 31 to February 1, Social Science Matrix hosted the Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics, which brought together leading scholars from universities around the world to apply the tools of micro- and macroeconomics to understand and tackle the challenge of climate change.
Learn More >Matrix Lecture
Recap
Published March 20, 2020
Alexandra Gillies, “Crude Intentions”
Recorded on March 4, 2020, this video features a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, an expert on oil-sector corruption and author of the book "Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World."
Learn More >Other Events
Recap
Published March 16, 2020
Immigration and the American Ethos
A panel discussion on the book Immigration and the American Ethos, by Morris Levy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California, and Matthew Wright, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.
Learn More >Postcolonialism
Recap
Published March 10, 2020
Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial
Recorded on February 27, 2020, this “Authors Meet Critics” discussion focused on Professor Laura Eliza Pérez's book Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press). Pérez, Professor of Ethnic Studies and and Chair of the Latinx Research Center, was joined by Natalia Brizuela and Julia Bryan-Wilson.
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