Social Science Matrix is pleased to welcome eight new Matrix Research Teams — three faculty-led teams and five graduate student-led teams — for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. The teams convene participants from multiple disciplines and focus on research questions with real-world significance; they are designed to encourage collaboration, provide professional development, and create opportunities for faculty engagement and mentorship.
This year’s funded teams will address a wide spectrum of topics. The faculty-led projects will focus on topics such as understanding the liability of climate risks, developing participatory methods for understanding land and water relations, and contextualizing the legacy of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in today’s world. The graduate student-led teams include a group studying the global politics of declining fertility, a reading group focused on Palestine, and a team examining “digital futures” of governance and development in South Asia. Another team will focus on climate transition and environmental policy, and the fifth student-led team will look at the impacts of wildfires in California and beyond.
Matrix Research Teams are chosen following review by a cross-disciplinary panel of faculty members. Faculty-led teams receive $5000 in funding and hold regular meetings focused on a defined research problem, with a goal to apply for one or more grants for continued research. The student-led teams will receive up to $1500 to explore a new area or question of inquiry, in part to assess whether it has potential for further investigation. In addition to funding, all Matrix Research Teams receive support in coordinating, scheduling, and reserving space for meetings and events. Matrix also provides communications support to help publicize each group’s work, as well as assistance with identifying and applying for further funding.
Below are summaries describing the 2026-2027 Matrix Research Teams, based on summaries provided by the teams in their proposals.
Faculty-led Research Teams
Electricity, Insurance, and Climate Liability Research Team
Team leads: Stephen Collier, Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning; Maxwell Lindquist, PhD Student, Department of Sociology; Isabel Qi, PhD Candidate, Department of City and Regional Planning
The 2017-2018 wildfires in California brought into focus unexpected dynamics in the way that losses and liabilities from the effects of climate change are being managed in social, economic, and political systems. Tens of billions of dollars in losses directly caused by the wildfires were transferred from property insurers to the electricity system. And the wildfires dramatically shifted risk perception in these systems, prompting the expenditure of tens of billions more in “climate liabilities” related to the mitigation of future risk that are similarly being absorbed in the insurance and electric power systems in the state. This Matrix Research Team will bring together scholars conducting research on electricity, insurance, and climate liability in California to examine sectors and scales that are typically researched in siloed academic and policy subfields. The group will focus on questions such as: How are wildfire risk and climate liability being assessed, assigned, and managed across California’s insurance and electricity systems? What consequences do these processes have for the distribution of costs associated with climate change across individuals and communities? In what ways are existing mechanisms of regulation being challenged by the “loading” of climate costs onto the electricity and insurance systems? And what consequences does this process have for patterns of urban and regional change?
Participatory, Land-based, And Critical Ecologies (PLACE) Research Collective
Team lead: Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor, Geography
Launched in Fall 2025, the Participatory, Land-based, And Critical Ecologies (PLACE) Research Collective is a sustained research collective and community of practice at UC Berkeley for graduate students, post-docs, faculty, and affiliated researchers who are critically engaging with participatory methodologies, land relations, and place-making in partnership with community-based practitioners located across the Americas. This collective project began as a result of long-standing relationships that core members of PLACE hold with the water defenders of Kimsakocha (“three lagoons” in Kichwa), which is a sacred site and contested watershed located in the Southern Andes of Ecuador at risk of being exploited by gold mining companies. Starting in 2024, core members of PLACE began utilizing many of the critical participatory approaches that they each employ in their individual research projects, including oral history, archiving, visual methods, and counter-mapping, to collaborate with the Kimsakocha water defenders. The research team will focus its attention on a collective research project that asks: How can critical participatory methods — specifically community archives, collective oral histories, and counter-mapping — shape processes of knowledge production to center relational understandings of land and water?
Return to Gramsci Research Team
Team lead: Diego Pirillo, Professor, Italian and History
In a time of authoritarianism and environmental crisis, this Matrix Research Team will turn to study Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who faced fascism directly and who influenced generations of scholars in the social sciences and beyond, from postcolonialism to subaltern studies, international relations, and critical race theory. Gramsci is the Marxist critic who understood capitalism’s crisis-ridden endurance in relation to the spread of fascism in his time. He is also the militant who asked how popular “common sense” might be galvanized to end the ongoing, devastating counterrevolution, and also how popular consciousness might jolt the Left of his time (communist parties in a time of deepening Stalinism) into action. Despite his influence and the interest that he continues to raise among both faculty and graduate students, there is no Gramsci Research Group on the Berkeley campus today. This group intends to fill this vacuum and create a forum to think across disciplines, with and beyond Gramsci, both by historicizing and contextualizing his work and ideas, and by addressing Gramsci’s relevance in the 21st century.
Student-led Research Teams
Climate Transition and Environmental Policy Reading Group
Team lead: Siena Matsumoto, PhD Student, Haas School of Business
The global transition to a low-carbon economy represents one of the most consequential economic and environmental transformations of the 21st century. Governments, firms, and households are rapidly adjusting to new climate policies, technological changes, and environmental constraints. Yet despite growing consensus about the need for urgent action, substantial uncertainty persists about the distributional consequences of climate policy, the most effective institutional designs for environmental regulation, and the broader economic and social costs of climate change itself. This Matrix Research Team creates an interdisciplinary forum to examine how environmental policy can support an equitable climate transition while maintaining economic efficiency. The group brings together graduate students and faculty working across environmentally focused disciplines, including economics, public policy, environmental science, energy and resources, political science, and related fields. By engaging deeply with foundational and frontier empirical work, participants will identify promising research questions, datasets, and analytical approaches that could contribute to the next generation of climate transition research.
Critical Palestine Geographies Reading Group
Team leads: Estrella Rose Pacheco, PhD Student, Geography; Mariam Aref Mahmoud, PhD Student, Geography; Margot Jeanne Cohen, PhD Student, Geography
Palestine is a shifting space and place in our modern world, where imaginaries from Western universities have direct impact on shaping the ways it transforms. Building on the work of theorists like Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Doreen Massey, this research team’s inquiry is motivated by the desire to contest representations of Palestine as a “dead” or fixed space, condemned by history or geography. Through engagements with live debates in multiple disciplines — including, anthropology, architecture, ecology, and critical theory — they instead posit Palestine as a dynamic space of possibility and life. The group’s methodological approach aims to develop a deep theoretical and historical understanding of Palestine to serve as the basis of their own scholarly practice. They hope to engage in a variety of pedagogical methods, including discursive analysis and film and media studies, to ground their research in the material realities existing within Palestine and its local and global entanglements.
Digital Futures of Governance and Development in South Asia
Shreya Charitra Pabbaraju, PhD Student, Political Science; Sakina Dhorajiwala, PhD Student, Political Science
Over the past decade, India’s Digital India initiative has catalyzed a sweeping transformation of public administration, introducing centralized technological platforms into virtually every domain of governance, from biometric-linked welfare delivery to predictive crime-mapping. These reforms promise greater transparency, efficiency, and accountability. Yet growing evidence from across Indian states suggests that this digital turn has generated a new set of governance pathologies that are poorly understood and undertheorically examined. Inspired by this reform, this Matrix Research Team will investigate the disruptive and transformative implications of digital technology to governance and the citizen state-relations in South Asia more broadly. The group will convene scholars from a variety of disciplines — including political science, metropolitan studies, and the business school — to examine theories of innovation, equity, power, and democratic accountability in light of these rapid digital transformations
Fire Interdisciplinary Research and Exchange in Social Science (FIRESS) Research Team
Team leads: Sol Alvarez-Taubin, PhD Student, Energy & Resources Group; Cello Lockwood, PhD Student, Energy & Resources Group
Catastrophic fire has erupted across the globe with tremendous impact in California: the 25 largest fires in the state’s history occurred in the 21st century, leaving thousands of homes destroyed and communities facing profound disruption and loss of life. Major fire events encompass a complex interplay of ecological processes, technical governance, and socio-political structures. Understanding and addressing wildfire hazards demands an interdisciplinary social science lens attentive to accumulation regimes, governance, and distributional impacts. This Matrix Research Team will situate wildfire risk within a broader political economy framework, orienting fire risk and adaptation scholars to diverse literatures, methodological approaches, and knowledge systems. By critically examining the articulation and governance of fire risk, the group aims to produce insights that are both analytically rigorous and practically relevant, fostering scholarship and interventions that are attentive to justice, equity, and sustainability in fire-prone landscapes.
Global Politics of Declining Fertility Research Team
Team lead: Kirstin Krusell, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Population statistics tell us that fertility rates are declining in nearly every nation worldwide, with over half of countries currently below replacement level. However, the technical and social meanings of these “neutral” measures are hotly contested. This Matrix Research Team will unite faculty and graduate students from across the social sciences, including sociology, demography, legal studies, anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, and science and technology studies, to explore a set of research questions centered on the global politics of declining fertility, using the frameworks of reproductive governance and reproductive justice. Questions include, how has declining fertility come to be understood as a social problem? In what ways is the current debate around declining fertility in keeping with historical population projects (e.g., eugenics) and panics (e.g., the population bomb), and in what ways is it novel? In other words, whose fertility rates are problematized and why? And crucially, how does fertility factor into political imaginaries and social movements across the political spectrum?
