While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America's infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a 2023-2024 Research Team at Social Science Matrix. 

Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley's History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina's history of convict labor, and shows how incarcerated labor shaped (and in turn, was shaped by) the state's highway systems, landscapes, and scenic tourism industries in the early decades of the 20th century. 

Xander Lenc is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley's Geography Department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns—and their problems—from other economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. In doing so, he argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography.

An edited transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/prisoner-labor-legacies.

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China.

Ross Doll is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.

Coleman R. Mahler is a PhD Candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is a history of information and truth in postwar China and Taiwan, exploring how governments across the Taiwan Strait gathered and analyzed agricultural data, and how these mass data gathering projects produced new understandings and practices of truth-making. He has published in journals including The PRC History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).

A transscript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/agricultural-modernization.

On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Daniel Lobo, a PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Ryan Brutger, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Professor Brutger obtained his PhD in politics at Princeton University and was previously an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is broadly interested in international relations and foreign policy. His research spans international political economy, international law, international security and political psychology, examining the domestic politics of international negotiations and cooperation.

Lobo spoke with Professor Brutger about his new article, Litigation for Sale: Private Firms and WTO Dispute Escalation, which presents a theory of lobbying by firms for trade liberalization, not through political contributions, but instead through contributions to the litigation process at the World Trade Organization. "In this 'litigation for sale' model, firms signal information about the strength and value of potential cases, and the government selects cases based on firms' signals," Brutger wrote in the paper's abstract. "Firms play a key role in monitoring and seeking enforcement of international trade law, which increases a state's ability to pursue the removal of trade barriers and helps explain the high success rate for WTO complainants. The theory's implications are consistent with interviews with trade experts and are tested against competing theories of direct political lobbying through an analysis of WTO dispute initiation."

An edited transcript of the interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/private-firms-and-wto-dispute-escalation-an-interview-with-ryan-brutger.

Recorded on February 8, 2024, this video features a lecture by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner. The talk was moderated and coordinated by Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/garret-barnwell.

The places we live are inseparably connected to who we are. Our relationship with these spaces we come into being through is somewhat foundational to our knowing and being in the world. They shape who we are, and we, in so many ways, shape them, inscribing them with personal meanings and finding social coordinates in them.

In this talk, Barnwell uses vignettes to describe how this takes place, emphasizing that these bonds are most evidently seen when threatened. Basing his insights on several years of clinical experience and critical psychology theory, he draws attention to how people's psychological relationship to place is threatened through grievous acts of epistemic injustices — violence directed at knowledge and speech. These forms of epistemic injustice include the silencing, misrecognition, threats, and killings of land defenders, as well as systematized land dispossession in the name of capitalist expansion and mining. Decolonial and critical psychologies teach us that the language we come into being, which privileges certain politics, ways of knowing and being in the world in relation to such places, has a bearing on subjectivity — what can be said and what is unsayable, and, thus, unactionable.

He describes how such forms of epistemic violence threaten these psychological bonds and produce psychological trauma. Around the world in these extractive zones, Indigenous and land-based resurgent movements play a critical role in defending against epistemic injustices for the flourishing of life. In conclusion, Barnwell draws attention to how such resurgent groups use different forms of land dialogues and speech as integral parts of community resistance and psychological healing.

Dr. Garret Barnwell is a clinical psychologist working as a psychotherapist and community psychology practitioner. He is most interested in different forms of accompaniment and resistance to extractivism for the flourishing of all life. Barnwell was an expert on the landmark youth-led #cancelcoal climate case launched against the South African government's plans for new coal-fired power. He is also a member of the American Psychological Association's Climate Change Advisory Group. Barnwell's writing includes several expert reports, special issues, and a book, Terrapsychology: Further Inquiry Into Self, Place and Planet (with Prof Craig Chalquist). He is a research associate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

Recorded on January 19, 2024, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Professor Garrett was joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of "Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California." Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel.

The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, Department of Ethnic Studies, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, and Native American Studies.

A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/unnaming-kroeber-hall

ABOUT THE BOOK

In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber's name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values.

In "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall," Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber's work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university's failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber's most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories.

"The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall" offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber's documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.

Recorded on October 17, 2023, this video features a talk by Vincent Bevins, an award-winning journalist and correspondent, focused on his book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The panel was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. This event was co-sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative and Social Science Matrix.

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/vincent-bevins.

About the Book

Vincent Bevins' new book, "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution," tells the story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world – and what comes next. From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Over four years, the acclaimed journalist Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world. The result is a stirring work of history built around one question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for? From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine's Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, If We Burn renders street movements and their consequences in gripping detail. Bevins draws on his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon. Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change has been gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.

About the Speakers

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London. Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and more. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Brazil.

Daniel Aldana Cohen (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal (Verso 2019).

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Yan Long, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley who focuses on the politics of public health in China. She was formerly an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. She obtained her PhD at the University of Michigan and her master's and bachelor's degrees at Beijing University. 

Matrix Social Science Communications Scholar Jennie Barker spoke with Long about her forthcoming book, Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Infectious Disease Politics in China. In the book, she examines how foreign interventions aimed at tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China in the 1990s and 2000s affected the Chinese public health system, government, and society both in ways that the interventions did and did not intend. 

A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/yan-long.

Recorded on December 5, 2023, this Authors Meet Critics panel focused on Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), by Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson was joined by Anat Admati, the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and William H. Janeway, Affiliated Member of the Economics Faculty at Cambridge University.  The panel was moderated by David Singh Grewal, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and the UC Berkeley Department of History, the panel was presented as part of the Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/impunity-and-capitalism.

Recorded on November 28, 2023 as part of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" series, this panel focused on Gramsci at Sea, a book by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor in Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Professor Chari was joined in conversation by Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley, and Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

The panel was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, and the Program in Critical Theory.

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci's writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Professor Chari argues that the imprisoned militant's method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to "storm" us on different shores.

A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/gramsci-at-sea/

Recorded on November 14, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel is focused on Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, by Dylan Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies at Berkeley Law.

Professor Penningroth was joined in conversation by Ula Yvette Taylor, Professor and 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies; and Eric Schickler, Professor, Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Endowed Chair in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Waldo E. Martin Jr., the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at UC Berkeley.

The Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) graduate program, Berkeley School of Law, the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS), the Center for Race and Gender (CRG), and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law—and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overturns this story, demonstrating that Black people had long exercised "the rights of everyday use," and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights. Well-versed in the law, Black people had used it to their advantage for nearly a century to shape how they worked, worshiped, learned, and loved. Based on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses, Before the Movement recovers a vision of Black life allied with, yet distinct from, "the freedom struggle."

A transcript of this conversation can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/penningroth/.

While the last 20 years have marked a significant change in increased acceptance of varied gender expressions and sexual orientations, these changes haven't made the importance of gender and sexuality as concepts disappear. If anything, they've become more relevant for understanding the world today.

Recorded on November 30, 2023, this panel brought together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and political science for a discussion of gender and sexuality through the lens of such topics as medicine, transnational migration, and marriage. The panel featured David Pham, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies; Emily Ruppel, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology; and Soosun You, a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Laura C. Nelson, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley.

The panel was co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender (CRG) and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. This event was part of the Matrix on Point series, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation.

Watch the panel on YouTube.

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/new-directions/.

How did South Africans and Soviets think about how to manage difference--in their home contexts and in decades of conversation with one another? In this episode of the Matrix podcast, Hilary Lynd, a PhD candidate in history, discusses the changing relationship between South Africa and the USSR from the 1960s through the 1980s. In this interview, Julia Sizek, Matrix Postdoctoral Scholar, and Lynd discuss how anti-apartheid activists were initially inspired by a Soviet model for a multinational society before a surprising about-face toward the end of the apartheid and the USSR. 

A transcript of this interview can be found at https://live-ssmatrix.pantheon.berkeley.edu/research-article/hilary-lynd.

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas, who at the time of the interview were Ph.D. candidates in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow.

Jenna Wells is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the clinical science area at the University of California, Berkeley and a clinical psychology intern at the University of California, San Francisco, specializing in neuropsychological assessment of older adults. Her research examines interpersonal emotional phenomena in connection with aging and mental and physical health, with a focus on dementia caregiving relationships. She is interested in identifying factors that are associated with individual differences in caregivers' health and well-being, and ultimately, hopes this work will inform the development of targeted, evidence-based interventions for caregivers of people with dementia.

Felicia Zerwas is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with a team at New York University on the community science initiative, MindHive. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the social-personality psychology area at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on understanding the role that emotions play in the formation and maintenance of close relationships. Since we rarely experience emotions in isolation, she examines how individuals experience and express their emotions in the presence of others, like a friend or romantic partner. Ultimately, she is interested in how those emotion related processes influence measures of relationship quality such as intimacy, perceived support, and conflict.

A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/dyadic-emotions/

During the peak of the most recent tech upswing, downtown San Francisco was booming. Now, after the pandemic and a new round of tech layoffs, commentators fear that the so-called "doom loop" has come to valuable commercial real estate. While boom and bust cycles are not new to The City, what can we learn from the struggles of commercial real estate?

Recorded on October 31, 2023 at UC Berkley's Social Science Matrix, this panel featured a discussion of the current state of commercial real estate in San Francisco — and what lies ahead. Panelists include Ted Egan, Chief Economist of the City and County of San Francisco; Nicholas Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University; and Nancy Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets at Berkeley Haas. Amir Kermani, Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, moderated.

This panel was co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS), Haas School of Business, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics.

A transcript is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/boom-to-doom/

Recorded on October 17, 2023, this video features an "Authors Meet Critics" panel on the book Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity, by Massimo Mazzotti, Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History and the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. Professor Mazzotti was joined in conversation by Matthew L. Jones, the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, and David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Thomas Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, moderated. 

This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society and the UC Berkeley Department of History.

The Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena. The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the "very modern mathematics" of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics.

For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti's penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/reactionary-mathematics/

The pandemic has rocked higher education. From Zoom classrooms to students leaving higher education, colleges have needed to change modalities to adapt to public health risks and the emergence of new technologies. Enrollment patterns are also shifting in a changing economy: while selective flagship public institutions and not-for-profit private institutions are receiving more applications, enrollments have declined, especially among lower-income students. What are the implications of these changes for economic mobility and racial equality?

On October 5, 2023, Social Science Matrix hosted a panel discussion featuring a group of scholars discussing the current state of higher education — and what lies ahead.  Presented by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix as part of the Matrix on Point event series, and co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), the panel included Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law and Associate Dean, J.D. Curriculum and Teaching at Berkeley Law; Michal Kurlaender, Chancellor's Leadership Professor at the UC Davis School of Education; and Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education at Stanford University. The panel was moderated by Lisa García Bedolla , UC Berkeley's Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the School of Education.

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-on-point-the-future-of-college/

How does international conflict shape immigration bureaucracy? Sherine Ebadi, a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, researches the impact of Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) and employment-based visa programs on Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. military. For Ebadi, visa programs like the SIV are crucial lenses for understanding imperialism as well as social relations within the Afghan diaspora.

In this podcast interview, J.T. Jamieson, a recent PhD graduate from the UC Berkeley Department of History and a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, spoke with Ebadi about the relationships between humanitarianism, foreign intervention, war, and immigration, as well as the lived experiences of Afghans navigating the SIV process, especially those in the diasporic community in Northern California.

An edited transcript of the interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sherine-ebadi.

In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Jennie Barker, a PhD Candidate in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley — and a Matrix Communications Scholar — spoke with Emily Rong Zhang, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Law School, about her research on voter turnout in the United States. 

Voter turnout has been a hot topic in the news. Turnout soared to highs not seen in decades during the 2020 presidential elections and in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections. Yet at the same time, there has been a new wave of restrictions on voting, including voter ID laws that have been introduced in a number of states. This has led to alarm that these laws could significantly suppress voter turnout. 

Emily Rong Zhang holds a PhD in Political Science and a JD from Stanford University and was a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Voting Rights Project. She has also litigated voting rights challenges in Ohio, Kansas, and New York. In the interview, Barker asks Zhang to help us think through the different factors influencing voter turnout and how we should understand this concept today.

A transcript of this episode can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/emily-rong-zhang

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Caroline Tracey, who holds a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, and whose research uses ethnographic, archival, and literary methods to study the American Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border. Tracey's dissertation, "Binational Politics from Intimate Scales: Motherist, Feminist, Queer and Trans Activism by Deportees and Return Migrants in Mexico City," responds to existing scholarship that has focused on deportation as a male phenomenon, and argues that women and trans deportees and returnees carry out fundamental community-building and activism on the ground in Mexico that has improved emplacement over the long term for all return migrants.

As a journalist, Tracey's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other outlets, and in Spanish she is a frequent contributor to Mexico's Nexos. She is currently the Climate Justice reporting fellow at the High Country News and an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. 

The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Social Science Matrix.

A transcript of the interview is available at  https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-binational-politics-of-return-migrant-activism-interview-with-caroline-tracey/

Recorded on May 2, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this video features a roundtable conversation with Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, focused on The Paradox of Freedom, an interview with Patterson by David Scott, originally published in Small Axe in 2013. The interview has recently been published by Wiley as a book.

In their interview, Scott and Patterson discussed the sociologist and novelist's childhood, education, public service, and books. The conversation reflected on Patterson's intellectual biography and his groundbreaking analysis of the political entanglement between slavery and freedom.

Joining Patterson in conversation for this Social Science Matrix Roundtable Discussion were  Ricarda Hammer, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The discussion was moderated by Caitlin Rosenthal, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

A transcript of this presentation can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/roundtable-with-orlando-patterson-the-nature-and-invention-of-freedom/

A transcript of this episode can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/slavery-and-genocide-the-u-s-jamaica-and-the-historical-sociology-of-evil/.

Recorded on May 1, 2023, this episode of the Matrix Podcast features a lecture by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, entitled "Slavery and Genocide: The U.S, Jamaica and the Historical Sociology of Evil."

Presented as the Matrix Distinguished Lecture, the lecture was presented at Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary center at the University of California, Berkeley. Stephen Best, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, was the discussant. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of the West Indies, his alma mater, and the London School of Economics where he received his Ph.D. His academic interests include the culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean and African American youth. He has also written on the cultural sociology of sports, especially the game of cricket.

Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and six major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); The Ordeal of Integration (1997); and The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (2015). A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was a guest columnist for several weeks. His columns have also appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and The Washington Post.

Stephen Best's scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines.

To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – "Redress" (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, "The Way We Read Now" (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and "Description Across Disciplines" (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice. Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018). His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Recorded on February 22, 2023, this podcast features a lecture by Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University.

In this talk, "Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty," Amin discusses a key architect of Modern Sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Amin argues that Hirschfeld's work allows us to track the process by which the bourgeois Western notion of sexuality as a form of innate selfhood subsumed sex as a social and spatial practice. By turning to Hirschfeld's work, Amin's talk argues that the fundamental problem of queer of color critique — that of how sexuality conceals and transacts more salient hierarchies of power — was born with the epistemological invention of sexuality.

The event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the UC Berkeley Department of French. Additional support was provided by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. The event was organized and moderated by Professor Salar Mameni, a Matrix Faculty Fellow.

A transcript of this podcast can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/training-bourgeois-selves-magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-subsumption-of-pederasty/.

Recorded on March 22, 2023, this talk — "The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out" — features Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet.

Boushey is co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she was President and CEO from 2013-2020. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary Clinton's 2016 transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.

This talk was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Society and Economy Initiative (BESI), the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and Social Science Matrix.

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-modern-american-industrial-strategy-building-a-clean-energy-economy-from-the-bottom-up-and-middle-out/.

The Biden-Harris Administration began at a time of intersecting crises, including the pandemic, rising inequality, stagnating economic growth, and the large and growing costs of climate change. The President, in partnership with Congress and state and local governments, took rapid action with policies that have spurred the strongest and most equitable economic and labor market recovery in modern history — including legislation to enhance the resilience of our supply chains, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. These historic measures, together forming the core of the Modern American Industrial Strategy, were designed with an understanding that strategic public investments are essential to achieving the full potential of our nation's economy — one built from the bottom up and middle out, where the gains of economic growth are shared.

For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, J.T. Jamieson, a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Pérez is a historian of the United States who specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research focuses on migrant sugar beet workers in Colorado, and explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post Civil War.

Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, Pérez was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2017-2020, where she taught courses in History and American Studies. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. In 2018, her dissertation won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

A transcript of this interview is availabile at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/bernadette-perez/.

Recorded on March 23, 2023, this talk featured Phil Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, discussing his new book (co-authored with Samuel Perry), The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. The respondent was David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. Carolyn Chen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Ethnic Studies, moderated.

The talk was jointly sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR), the Center for Right-Wing Studies, and Social Science Matrix. The event was part of the BCSR Public Forum on Race, Religion, Democracy and the American Dream.

About the Speaker

Philip S. Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. His other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life.

Among his recent publications are The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003); Max Weber's Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford, 2004); and "The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation," Sociological Methodology, 2004. Gorski is Co-Director (with Julia Adams) of Yale's Center for Comparative Research (CCR), and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center.

About the Book

Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation's Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism.

In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it's headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries—and especially its influence over the last three decades—they show how, throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property."

White Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment. The future of American democracy, Gorski and Perry argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.

A transcript of this talk can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-flag-and-the-cross-white-christian-nationalism-and-the-threat-to-democracy/.

How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices?

Recorded on April 3, 2023, this panel featured experts explaining aspects of the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes.

The panel included Duncan Wigan, Professor with Special Responsibilities in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School; and Gabriel Zucman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley.

The panel was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix.

Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

A transcript of this talk can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-on-point-wealth-and-taxes/.

Recorded on March 8, 2023, this video features a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi's lecture was entitled "Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century."

Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of History, and D-Lab, this talk was presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab.

A transcript of this talk can be found here: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/jo-guldi-towards-a-practice-of-text-mining-to-understand-change-over-historical-time/

A world awash in text requires interpretive tools that traditional quantitative science cannot provide. Text mining is dangerous because analysts trained in quantification often lack a sense of what could go wrong when archives are biased or incomplete. Professor Guldi's talk reviewed a brief catalogue of disasters created by data science experts who voyage into humanistic study. It finds a solution in "hybrid knowledge," or the application of historical methods to algorithm and analysis.

Case studies engage recent work from the philosophy of history (including Koselleck, Erle, Assman, Tanaka, Chakrabarty, Jay, Sewell, and others) and investigate the "fit" of algorithms with each historical frame of reference on the past. This talk profiles recent research into the status of "memory" in British politics. It profiled the persistence of references to previous eras in British history, to historical conditions per se, and to futures hoped for and planned, using NLP analysis. It presented the promise and limits of text-mining strategies such as Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech Analysis for modeling temporal experience as a whole, suggesting how these methods might support students of social science and the humanities, and also revealing how traditional topics in these subjects offer a new research frontier for students of data science and informatics.

About the Speaker

Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include "The Distinctiveness of Different Eras," American Historical Review (August 2022) and "The Official Mind's View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Most nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa experienced some form of "land reform" in the 20th century. But what is land reform? In her book, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Professor Jo Guldi approaches the problem from the point of view of Britain's disintegrating empire. She makes the case that land reform movements originated as an argument about reparations for the experience of colonization, and that they were championed by a set of leading administrators within British empire and in UN agencies at the beginning of the postwar period.

Using methods from the history of technology, she sets out to explain how international governments, national governments, market evangelists, and grassroots movements advanced their own solutions for realizing the redistribution of land. Her conclusions lead her to revisit the question of how states were changing in the twentieth century — and to extend our history of property ownership over the longue durée. 

Recorded on March 8, 2023, this talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

A transcript of this talk can be found here: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/jo-guldi-the-long-land-war-the-global-struggle-for-occupancy-rights/.

About the Speaker

Jo Guldi, professor of history and practicing data scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include "The Distinctiveness of Different Eras," American Historical Review (August 2022) and "The Official Mind's View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped global geopolitics, trade, and security. How will these changes affect the relationship between the US and China, Europe, and the Global South? How will they impact US firms operating globally, and how might foreign leaders — and notably the Chinese leadership — respond?

Recorded on February 16, 2023, this panel discussion featured a group of distinguished scholars addressing these questions, and the possible implications for the global multilateral order established in the second half of the 20th century. 

The panel included Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; James Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies; Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund (who is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business and Director of the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy; and Laura Tyson, Class of 1939 Professor of Economics and Business Administration and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderaetd by John Zysman, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder/co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.

The panel was held in Spieker Forum at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy (https://clausen.berkeley.edu/).

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/economics-and-geopolitics-in-us-international-relations-china-europe-and-the-global-south/.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories have become a central feature of modern life, but they have a long history that have served to justify surveillance and prosecution of marginalized groups. In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on March 15, 2023, a group of scholars who study these histories discussed how misinformation circulates, and the effects of such myths and stories on society.

The panel featured Timothy R. Tangherlini, Professor in the Scandinavian Department and Director of the Graduate Program in Folklore at UC Berkeley; Robert Braun, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; and Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and affiliated faculty in the Programs for Critical Theory and for Gender and Women's Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, and the Department of Department of South and South East Asian Studies. The panel was moderated by Elena Conis, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. This panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Othering and Belonging Institute. 

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-on-point-myths-and-misinformation/.

Recorded on March 7, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this  Authors Meet Critics panel focused on To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women's Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, by Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Morris was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies. The panel was moderated by Lok Siu, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley.

The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Gender & Women's Studies.

A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/to-defend-this-sunrise-black-womens-activism-and-the-authoritarian-turn-in-nicaragua/.

To Defend this Sunrise examines how Black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation's racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, Black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state's co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, Black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of "multicultural dispossession." This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine Black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

Recorded on March 6, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel focused on Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America, by Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. The recording also features a response by Julio Moreno, Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, and and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Caribbean History at UC Davis, and a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College. Elena Schneider, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History, moderated. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History.

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/cooperating-with-the-colossus-a-social-and-political-history-of-us-military-bases-in-world-war-ii-latin-america/.

About the Book

During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality. "Cooperating with the Colossus" reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites.

Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the "Colossus of the North" as best they could. Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice.

Drawing on archival research in five countries, "Cooperating with the Colossus" is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways.

Learn more about the book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cooperating-with-the-colossus-9780197531877?cc=us&lang=en&

Learn more about Social Science Matrix: https://matrix.berkeley.edu

On February 15, 2023, Social Science Matrix was honored to host Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for a Matrix Distinguished Lecture entitled "Reimagining Global Integration."

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/mariano-florentino-cuellar-reimagining-global-integration/.

Whether they live in vast cities or rural villages, people in virtually every corner of the world have experienced enormous growth in cross-border economic, political, and social connections since World War II. This latest chapter in the story of transnational activity has coincided with enormous changes in the well-being of billions of people. As China gained access to global markets and its share of worldwide trade increased eight-fold in a single generation, for example, the percentage of its population living in extreme poverty plunged from 72 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2010. Global life expectancy has risen from less than 47 years in 1950 to 71 years in 2021, and the male-female gap in primary and secondary schooling globally has almost disappeared.

But increased cross-border trade, migration, flows of information, and political ties have also engendered an intense backlash to "globalization" and related concepts. Today, at a time of major geopolitical upheaval and technological change, policymakers and the public are vigorously debating the merits of domestic policies suitable for an interconnected world. They are exploring new trade and migration rules, reviving strategies for national industrial and technological development, and reflecting on the lessons of 1990s-style globalization for international law and institutions substantially influenced by the United States. Discussions of "reshoring" supply chains and United States-China economic "decoupling" are just two examples of rising concerns in Washington about cross-border ties.

Yet global cooperation remains vital to solving many of humanity's most urgent challenges: mitigating and adapting to climate change, harnessing technology for the benefit of humanity while taming its risks, reducing poverty, and preventing violent conflict. By better understanding the long-simmering conflicts over global cooperation and integration, policymakers and civil society can further develop the ideas, institutions, and coalitions necessary to create a stable foundation for a more reflective version of global integration: one that addresses the connections between economic well-being and security, and better aligns domestic realities with international norms to tackle the pressing issues of our time.

A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies, and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades. Before serving on California's highest court, Justice Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In this capacity, he oversaw programs on international security, governance and development, global health, cyber policy, migration, and climate change and food security. Previously, he co-directed the Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security.

While serving in the Obama White House as the president's special assistant for justice and regulatory policy, he led the Domestic Policy Council teams responsible for civil and criminal justice reform, public health, immigration, transnational regulatory issues, and supporting the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. He then co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, and was a presidential appointee to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States. As a California Supreme Court justice, he oversaw reforms of the California court system's operations to better meet the needs of millions of limited-English speakers.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar is the author of Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies (2013) and has published widely on American institutions, international affairs, and technology's impact on law and government. Cuéllar co-authored the first ever report on the use of artificial intelligence across federal agencies. He has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.

He chairs the board of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and is a member of the Harvard Corporation. He currently serves on the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Earlier, he chaired the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, and co-chaired the Obama Biden Presidential Transition Task Force on Immigration.

Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he grew up primarily in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He began his career at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

On February 1, 2023, Social Science Matrix presented an Authors Meet Critics panel on Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present, a book by Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

Professor Riley was joined by two discussants: Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and Donna Jones, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. The panel was moderated by Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and was co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/dylan-riley-microverses-observations-from-a-shattered-present/.

About the Book

Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed 'enforced contemplation'. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump's last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.

Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and Fraser, to weigh sociology's relationship to Marxism and the operations of class, race, and gender, alongside discursions into the workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in a pandemic.

Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the 'present as history.'

Contemporary writers and activists have described the climate crisis as, in part, a crisis of the imagination, of culture, and of storytelling. Recorded on March 11, 2024, this panel featured a group of authors and scholars of different genres — science fiction, journalism, history, literary fiction, and comedy — discussing how the climate crisis has impacted their craft and what practices of storytelling have to offer us at this pivotal moment in human history. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of English, the Department of History, and the Berkeley School of Journalism.

Daniel Gumbiner is a novelist and editor based in Oakland. His first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award. His new novel, Fire in the Canyon, was published by Astra House in 2023. He is the Editor of The Believer.

Annalee Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist. They are the author of nine books including, most recently, the science fiction novel The Terraformers. They are a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, a columnist in the The New Scientist, and the co-host of an award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.

Aaron Sachs is a professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, most recently, Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change (NYU Press, 2023).

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and a graduate of the Berkeley School of Journalism. She has written more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Together with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Solnit edited the 2023 collection Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.

Rebecca Herman (moderator) is associate professor in the History Department at UC Berkeley and author of Cooperating with the Colossus (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a book about the unlikely ban on mining in Antarctica, told through the stories of the military wives and children, artists, writers, activists, soldiers, and scientists who traveled South in growing numbers during the 1970s and 80s.

A video and transcript of this event are available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/storytelling-climate

A transcript of this interview can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/alumni-interview-adriana-kugler-world-bank-executive-director-for-the-us/.

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with  Adriana D. Kugler, the World Bank Group Executive Director for the United States. Dr. Kugler was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate in May 2022. She is the first Latinx person and first Jewish woman to be appointed to this position since the foundation of the World Bank in 1944. She is also a proud UC Berkeley alumna who graduated with a PhD in 1997.

Prior to joining the WBG Board, Dr. Kugler had a long and distinguished career in research and policy as a development and labor economist. Her contributions on the impact of government policies and regulations on labor markets were recognized with the 2007 John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and with the 2010 First Prize for Best Contribution in the area of "Globalization, Regulations and Development" from the Global Development Network. Dr. Kugler has also served in high-level leadership roles in the public and private sectors. She was Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor between 2011-2013.

Dr. Kugler was Professor of Public Policy and Economics (2016-2022), and Vice Provost for Faculty (2013-2016) at Georgetown University. She was Chair and Chair-elect of the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association in 2020 and 2019, respectively; was a member of the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (2019-2022); and served in the Technical Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016-2019). She was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Labor Economists (2003-2009) and of the Executive Committee of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (2015-2019). Dr. Kugler serves on the Audit Committee (AC) and Committee on Development Effectiveness (CODE). Kugler received her Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in 1991, graduating with first class joint honors in economics and political science.

This interview was conducted by Danny Yagan, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, who is on leave as Chief Economist of the Office of Management and Budget. Yagan was a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Associate of the Berkeley Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and Faculty Co-Director of the Taxation and Inequality Initiative of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab.

Learn more about Social Science Matrix at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.

What role did American social and moral reformers play in managing human migrations? J.T. Jamieson, a Phd Candidate in UC Berkeley's Department of History, examines how social reformers in the first half of the 19th century sought to control migration and insert their own understandings of morality, social benevolence, and humanitarianism into the lives and experiences of migrants. In so doing, he argues, their reforms frequently perpetuated racial supremacy, religious supremacy, and Christian expansionism. In other words, they sought to determine who belongs in America — and who doesn't.

Jamieson's dissertation, "A Mere Change of Location: Migration and Reform in America, 1787-1857," integrates the histories of religion, immigration, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and Western expansion to argue that 19th-century social and moral reformers attempted to control the mass migrations of various peoples: African Americans, Indigenous peoples, European immigrants, and American settlers. A forthcoming journal article, "Home Work: Religious Nationalism and the American Home Missionary Society," will appear in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2023.

On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Jamieson about his research.

A transcript is available on the Matrix website at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/migration-and-reform-in-early-america-an-interview-with-j-t-jamieson/

Monica Ellwood-Lowe is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology whose research focuses on differences between outcomes for students of different socioeconomic status, as well as the societal barriers that might hinder student success. Ellwood-Lowe tries to answer such questions as, what skills do children develop when they come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes, even in the face of societal barriers to success? Do children's brains simply adapt to their respective environments?

Ellwood-Lowe is co-mentored by Professors Mahesh Srinivasan and Silvia Bunge. She earned her bachelor's degree from Stanford University. Her work is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship, and the Greater Good Science Center.

For this episode of the Matrix podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek spoke with Ellwood-Lowe about her recent research on the topic of children's cognitive performance, and how we might think about removing barriers to children's success. 

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/reconsidering-the-achievement-gap-an-interview-with-monica-ellwood-lowe/.

On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two scholars whose work focuses on explaining how mass incarceration has changed over the last 30 years.

Alex Roehrkasse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Butler University. He studies the production of racial class and gender inequality in the United States through violence and social control. He was previously a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University.

Christopher Muller is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. He is particularly interested in how agricultural labor markets, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected incarceration and racial and class inequality in incarceration. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, and Science. 

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-rise-of-mass-incarceration-interview-with-chris-muller-and-alex-roehrkasse/

Why do people choose to go to college (or not)? What impact do race-based or financial aid policies have on higher education and the broader economy? In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley-trained economists whose research focuses on higher education and its impact on the broader economy.

Maximilian Müller completed his PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley this year and is now starting a position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality in Bonn. In Fall 2023 he will join the Toulouse School of Economics as an Assistant Professor. Maximilian is a behavioral economist studying questions in fields such as education, development, and family economics. In his research, he examines social influences on individual behavior around big life decisions, such as career choices, and their potential consequences for society-wide outcomes, such as social mobility. Prior to his PhD, he obtained an M.Phil. in Economics from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Zach Bleemer is an Assistant Professor of economics at the Yale School of Management and a research associate at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education. His current research uses natural experiments to examine the net efficiency and equity ramifications of educational meritocracy, with recent studies on race-based affirmative action, race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, and university policies that restrict access to high-demand college majors. Zach holds a BA in philosophy, economics, and mathematics from Amherst College and a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/economic-benefits-of-higher-education-zach-bleemer-and-maximilian-muller/

In countries around the world, the "Green Revolution" has changed the scale and economy of growing crops, as pesticides, fertilizers, and new kinds of hybrid seeds have transformed the agricultural production process. In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek spoke with two UC Berkeley scholars who study agrarian life in India, where farmers have been forced to adapt in the face of new technologies, as well as environmental and social change.

Tanya Matthan is a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Berkeley's Department of Geography. An economic anthropologist and political ecologist, she finished her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA in 2021. Her current book project, tentatively titled, The Monsoon and the Market: Economies of Risk in Rural India, examines experiences of and responses to agrarian uncertainty among farmers in central India. 

Aarti Sethi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her book manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/a-changing-landscape-for-farmers-in-india-an-interview-with-aarti-sethi-and-tanya-matthan/

How do American child welfare and obstetric healthcare converge? Matty Lichtenstein, a recent PhD from Berkeley's Sociology Department, studies how state and professional organizations shape social and health inequalities in maternal and child welfare. Her current book project focuses on evolving conceptions of risk in social work and medicine, illustrated by a study of the intertwined development of American child and perinatal protective policies. She is working on several collaborations related to this theme, including studies of maltreatment-related fatality rates, the racialization of medical reporting of substance exposed infants, and risk assessment in child welfare. In another stream of research, she has written on social policy change, with a focus on educational regulation and political advocacy, and she has conducted research on culture, religion, and politics. Dr. Lichtenstein's work has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Methods, and Sociological Methods and Research. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In this interview, Matrix content curator Julia Sizek asks Lichtenstein about her research on the transformation of American child welfare and the impact of that transformation on contemporary maternal and infant health practices.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/institutionalizing-child-welfare-an-interview-with-matty-lichtenstein/

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was insulted on the Capitol steps in July 2020, it was a brief media sensation. But what does being called an "effing bitch" mean for how we think about political speech? 

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Gabriella Licata, a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, who discusses how the standard language ideologies of political speech come to shape perceptions of language and people in Congress. Gabriella utilizes mixed methodologies to assess language behavior and linguistic bias in sociolinguistic experiments, social media, and political discourse. She tells us about her paper, recently published in Journal of Language and Discrimination, which discusses the aftermath of an insult on the Capitol steps, and how it reveals the norms of American political speech.

A transcript of this is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/race-gender-and-political-speech-an-interview-with-gabriella-licata/.

This episode features an interview with Victoria Netanus Grubbs, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Black Studies Collaboratory.

Grubbs is a black feminist abolitionist educator committed to developing radical leadership in underserved communities in the U.S. and abroad. She completed her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in May 2021. Her current book project, Kumva Meze Neza: Sounding Blackness in Rwanda, examines how popular Rwandan music works in the aftermath of genocide to produce a collective social body. Drawing on five years of participant observation amongst Rwandan music industry professionals and their audiences, her work demonstrates how shared investments in the sensory experience of blackness produce formations of togetherness that defy traditional organizing categories.

Grubbs was interviewed by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/listening-to-rwandan-popular-music-with-victoria-netanus-grubbs/.

In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews David M. Henkin, the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at UC Berkeley, about his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Make Us Who We Are. Henkin's primary field of research is US history, and his interests include 19-century urban history, the history of reading and writing, and popular culture. He lives in San Francisco, California, and Bozeman, Montana.

A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/what-happened-to-the-week-an-interview-with-david-henkin/

As the effects of climate change become more obvious, moving away from fossil fuels has only become more urgent. But to do so, new energy sources – and new infrastructure – are desperately needed.

Recoreded on March 20, 2024, this panel features three early-career scholars from UC Berkeley presenting their research on the greening infrastructure and the green energy transition. The panel included Johnathan Guy, PhD Candidate in Political Science; Caylee Hong, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, and Andrew Jaeger, PhD Candidate in Sociology. The panel was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Co-Sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, the Berkeley Climate Change Network, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

Presented by Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

A video and transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/greening-infrastructure/

In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Biz Herman, a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research's Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, and a Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Lab. Her dissertation, Individual Trauma, Collective Security: The Consequences of Conflict and Forced Migration on Social Stability, investigates the psychological effects of living through conflict and forced displacement, and how these individual traumas shape social life. 

In the podcast, we talk about Biz's research on mental health and social stability at the Za'atri Refugee Camp in Jordan. 

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/individual-trauma-social-outcomes-an-interview-with-biz-herman/.

About Biz Herman

Biz Herman is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley, a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research's Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, and a Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Lab. Her research examines the ways in which experiencing trauma and violence — both at the individual level (personal traumas) and collective level (national tragedies) — shape sociopolitical outcomes relevant to peace and security.

Her book project, Individual Trauma, Collective Security: The Consequences of Conflict and Forced Migration on Social Stability, investigates how the psychological consequences of living through conflict and forced displacement shape intergroup dynamics, prosocial behavior, and support for peace and reconciliation efforts.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the University of California Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation (IGCC) Dissertation Fellowship, the Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship in International & Comparative Studies, the Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies, and the Georg Eckert Institute Research Fellowship. Along with collaborators Justine M. Davis & Cecilia H. Mo, she received the IGCC Academic Conference Grant to convene the inaugural Human Security, Violence, and Trauma Conference in May 2021. This multidisciplinary meeting brought together over 170 policymakers, practitioners, and researchers from political science, behavioral economics, psychology, and public health for a two-day seminar on the implications of conflict and forced migration. She has served as an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict's Innovation Lab, which applies research findings from cognitive and behavioral science to the study of social conflict and belief formation.

In addition to her academic work, Biz is an Emmy-nominated photojournalist and a regular contributor to The New York Times. In 2019, she pitched and co-photographed The Women of the 116th Congress, which included portraits of 130 out of 131 women members of Congress, shot in the style of historical portrait paintings. The story ran as a special section featuring 27 different covers, and was subsequently published as a book, with a foreword by Roxane Gay.

In this episode of the Matrix podcast, Julia Sizek (a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley) interviews Clare Ibarra, a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley, and Naomi Schoenfeld, a public health nurse practitioner and recent PhD from the joint UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley medical anthropology program.

Both Ibarra and Schoenfeld study the history and present of socialist science and medicine in Cuba. Ibarra examines the scientific exchange between Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, whereas Shoenfeld researches the Cuban cancer vaccine and its history.

On the podcast, Sizek, Ibarra, and Schoenfeld discuss the history of science and medicine in Cuba and its relationship to the socialist project, as well as how Cuba has developed vaccines during the current pandemic.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/science-and-socialism-in-cuba/.

In this episode, Julia Sizek, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, interviews Dr. Victoria Massie, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Faculty Affiliate for the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), the Medical Humanities Program and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (CSWGS) at Rice University in Houston. 

A recent alumna of the Ph.D. program in Sociocultural Anthropology and the Designated Emphasis in Science & Technology Studies programs at UC Berkeley, Massie's work draws on black feminist kinship studies at the intersection of racial capitalism and biocapitalism to understand the centrality of emerging biotechnologies for mobility for people of African descent, with a focus on Cameroon. Outside of her work as anthropologist, Massie is a creative non-fiction writer.

On the podcast, Sizek interviews Massie about her research tracking diasporic connections between the US and Cameroon, and the wider world of genetic ancestry testing.

Produced by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. Listen to other episodes here. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

A transcript is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/genetic-ancestry-testing-and-reconnection-an-interview-with-dr-victoria-massie/.

In this episode of the Matrix podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Hector Callejas, a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies and a 2021-2022 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion fellow. Callejas specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies and Latin American studies. He researches and teaches on the relationship between Indigeneity, race, space, and power in the Americas. His dissertation theorizes the territorial turn in Latin America from a settler colonial perspective. It draws on extensive ethnographic and archival research on transnational Indigenous politics in contemporary El Salvador.

In the podcast, we discuss his research and how Indigeneity is understood in El Salvador, as well as contemporary Indigenous movements in El Salvador.

Produced by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus.

A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/politics-of-indigeneity-in-el-salvador/.