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.

Authors Meet Critics

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Event Date: April 7th, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT

Trevor Jackson: “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World”

Join us for a panel on "The Insatiable Machine," by Professor Trevor Jackson, which traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

ADHD Explosion

UC Berkeley Professors Stephen P. Hinshaw and Richard M. Scheffler argue that ADHD must be understood as a result of both social conditions and biology.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

A Critical Take on Cities

UC Berkeley's Critical Urbanisms Working Group draws upon diverse disciplines to re-examine cities and how they are planned and managed.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Invited Interventions

Research by UC Berkeley Political Scientist Aila Matanock sheds light on why state-building interventions succeed in some nations and not others.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Take No Prisoners

Through overcrowding, lockdowns, and medical neglect, the conditions in U.S. prisons have become unconstitutional, according to UC Berkeley legal scholar Jonathan Simon.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Decline of the City-State

UC Berkeley historian Mark Peterson writes about the prominence—and ultimate decline—of city-states, using 18th- and 19th-century Boston as an example.

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Workshop/Symposium

Published August 4, 2014

Dangerous Knowledge

An interdisciplinary working group at UC Berkeley aims to better understand how breakthrough scientific discoveries have been—and should be—regulated.

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