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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Research Highlights

Article

Published July 29, 2014

When Companies Manage Cities

UC Berkeley political scientist Alison Post’s new book explores the consequences of privatizing urban infrastructure.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published July 29, 2014

Social Networks from History

A new tool developed by a team at UC Berkeley can help build “prosopographies,” social networks based on names, affiliations, and other historical data.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published July 22, 2014

Do You Trust the Police?

A team of UC Berkeley researchers are helping devise new methods for measuring levels of trust between local communities and the police.

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