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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Matrix News

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Published November 7, 2014

UC Berkeley Research Network Graph

Social Science Matrix is building an interactive data visualization tool to highlight collaborations among UC faculty and students.

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Research Highlights

Article

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Published October 16, 2014

The Dragon of Debt

An oral history project about the national debt features interviews with top U.S. policy-makers from the past five decades.

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Workshop/Symposium

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Published October 7, 2014

Behavior Measurement and Change

A Matrix seminar explored how mobile devices and other "sensors" are transforming how social scientists working in different disciplines can measure—and change—human behavior.

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Research Highlights

Article

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Published October 6, 2014

Credit and Class

Economic classification tools such as credit scores directly contribute to stratification and class division, according to Berkeley sociologist Marion Fourcade.

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Research Highlights

Article

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Published October 2, 2014

From Plantation to Corporation

A UC Berkeley historian explores how commonly used modern-day business practices evolved from methods used in the operation of brutal slave plantations.

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Research Highlights

Article

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Published September 30, 2014

Behind the Beef Machine

The origins of the modern U.S. beef industry go farther back than most people realize, says UC Berkeley historian Joshua Specht.

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