BERKELEY - Key Persons
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- Group Executive Director for the United States
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Associate Professor, Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies
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- Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University
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- Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York School of Labor
Read an interview with Cameron Black, Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. Black, who completed his PhD in history at UC Berkeley in May 2023, studies the history of student-athlete protest movements in the 1960s through the lens of labor and management and the history of capital.
Charles Davenport predated these debates, and has been largely an invisible figure for modern genome-editing scientists. Davenport was a prominent scientist in the early 20th century. He was a eugenicist and racist scientist who served as the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private, non-profit research institution, from 1898-1924. While at CSHL, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office, which published research to support the eugenics movement. I found this photo of Davenport in Blackford Bar, the pub at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I went to the first meeting, titled "Genome Engineering: The CRISPR/Cas Revolution," in 2015. While the scientific community eventually came to reject Davenport, and the eugenics movement fell out of fashion after World War II, this history is important to recognize as we usher in a new technology aimed at eliminating genetic diseases and improving human health. At the conference in 2015, I thought, if Davenport's ghost had been hanging out at the pub, he would have been thrilled.
The scientists I worked with vehemently rejected the idea that what they were doing could be considered eugenics, or what one scientist called it, the "E-word." But people often forget that the eugenics movement in the United States was both mainstream and progressive at the time. Eugenics laws were drafted and passed by Democratic legislators who aimed to address poverty by drawing on the most up-to-date science, medical knowledge, and expert opinion. When this history was brought up at modern conferences and meetings, it was either subtly discredited as fear-mongering or tucked into a panel at the end of the conference to entertain philosophical discussion.
Dan Stone has written, ‘One of the characteristics of traumatic memory is that it cannot be suppressed at will. And societies remain scarred long after its experience.' The prime minister of Jamaica, honorable Andrew Holness, in his 2021 Emancipation Day speech, commemorating the abolition of slavery in the island, noted that it had been 183 years since abolition. And the role that the last great rebellion of the enslaved led by national hero, Samuel Sharpe, played in bringing it about. But then, he added something with which his entire nation would have somberly agreed, quote, ‘The use of violence has followed us from our history.'" End of quote.
Today, you write, "Jamaica remains one of the most violent nations in the world as it was in the 18th century with a homicide rate that places it in the top five of all nations and a rate of femicide, the murder of women, consistently at the very top of the world's nations. The dead yards of the nation's slums bear ghoulish witness to the plantation dead yards of that first half of its existence. For Jamaica-" and I think you're quoting Dan Stone here again. "-the politics of post genocidal memories are matters of life and death."
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, Rhetoric
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- Social Science Finance Analyst
Dolene Miller who is a colleague that I worked with for the last 20 years. Dolene Miller, a longtime Creole land activist and representative in the Bluefields Black Creole Indigenous government, argued that the civic movement has tended to ignore the specific political demands of Black and Indigenous communities on the coast, even though these communities were among the earliest and most vocal critics of the authoritarian turn. And by early, I mean people were telling me in 2009 that Daniel Ortega is a dictator. And I was like, no. And they were right.
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- John William Burgess Professor
- Professor of Political Science at Columbia University
Donald P. Green is the John William Burgess Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Before that, he was a member of the Yale Political Science Department from 1989 to 2011 and served as the Director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies from 1996 to 2011. Professor Green received his B.A. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He is the author of five books: Social Science Experiments: A Hands-on Introduction (2022), Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation (2012), Get Out The Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (2004), Partisan Hearts and Minds, Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters (2002), and Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (1994). He has also published more than 100 articles and essays on a wide array of topics including voting behavior, partisanship, media effects, campaign finance, hate crime, and research methods. He has pioneered the use of field experimentation in political science, and much of his current work uses this method to study the ways political campaigns mobilize and persuade voters. Professor Green was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and was awarded the Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review during 2009. In 2010, he founded the experimental research section of the American Political Science Association and served as its first president.
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- Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute
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- Clinical Psychologist
- South African Clinical Psychologist
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.
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- before the Movement: the Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
Watch a video (or listen to the podcast) of our "Authors Meet Critics" panel 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. This book overturns the conventional wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement by 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.
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- Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present
Watch the video (or listen to the podcast version) of our 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 Professors Colleen Lye and and Donna Jones from the UC Berkeley Department of English.
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- Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship
- Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship Winners Announced
Two UC Berkeley social science graduate students have been selected as the inaugural recipients of the Iris Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship. Joseph Greenbaum, a PhD student in the Department of Political Science; and Gisselle Perez-Leon, a PhD candidate in the Department of History, will each receive a stipend to support their research for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Geography
Jennie Barker: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I'm Jennie Barker, your host, coming to you from the Matrix office on UC Berkeley's campus. Our topic today is public health in China. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, what affects when and how a government responds - or does not respond - to public health crises has been a pressing question for policymakers and beyond. For example, does the regime type of the government, such as whether it is a democracy or autocracy, matter in how it responds? Does the ideology of the government matter? Does it matter what resources the government has?
This big question is one that our guest today, Yan Long, is addressing in 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.
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- Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University
- Professor of History
- towards a Practice of Text Mining to Understand Change over Historical Time
Recorded on March 8, 2023, this video features a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of History, and D-Lab, the talk was presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series.
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- Associate Professor in the Slavic Department at Columbia University
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research of Gender and Women 's Studies
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- Chairman of the Asian - American Research Center
- Moderator
Lok Siu (moderator) is Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. She is also an affiliated faculty in Anthropology, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Berkeley Food Institute. Her books include Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (2005) and co-edited volumes Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (2007), Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (2009), and Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective (2021). Her latest manuscript, Worlding Chino Latino: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, Sociology
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- President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Recorded on February 15, 2023, this Matrix Distinguished Lecture featured Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, presenting a talk entitled "Reimagining Global Integration." A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Justice 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. Watch a video of the lecture - or listen to the recording.
MARION FOURCADE] Hello, everybody. It is wonderful to see so many of you here in Matrix. And I know that we have also a very big online audience. My name is Marion Fourcade. I am a professor of sociology and the director of Social Science Matrix here at Berkeley.
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- Reactionary Mathematics: a Genealogy of Purity
Watch the video (or listen to a podcast) of our "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, with 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.
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Emeritus Professor, Geography
- Professor of Geography
Michael Watts is the Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for over twenty-five years. He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies from 1994-2004. His research has addressed a number of development issues especially food security, rural development, and land reform in Africa, South Asia, and Vietnam. He is currently serving as acting director of Social Science Matrix.
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- Assistant Professor of Economics at UC
For this "visual interview," we spoke with Nano Barahona, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, who recently examined how a food labeling policy has changed the approaches of both consumers and food producers in Chile. Learn More >
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- Professor of Sociology at Harvard University
Orlando Patterson is a John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of the West Indies, his Alma mater, and at the London School of Economics, where he also received his PhD. But maybe you do not know that he started out as a novelist and a quite extraordinary one at that. In fact, a critic dubbed him "The Caribbean Zola" after the publication of his first novel of Three Children of Sisyphus.
In academia, he is, of course, a scholarly giant who has written on the culture and practices of freedom, the comparative study of slavery and ethnoracial relations, the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean and African-American youth, and the sociology of sports, especially the game of cricket.
At Harvard, he is a beloved teacher and charismatic teacher who just finished lecture this past week to 450 undergraduates about the sociology of human trafficking. Let's ponder that. He's a public intellectual who publishes widely in journals of opinion and the National press too many to count.
And last but not least, he has played a major role as a policy figure in Jamaica. For 8 years, he was special advisor for social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley. And then in 2021, he completed a major report on the future of public education in Jamaica.
Professor Patterson is the author of countless academic papers and six major academic books, including his classic Slavery and Social Death, published in 1982, which won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association; Freedom in the Making of Western Culture published in 1991, and that one won the National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Ordeal of Integration published in 1997; and The Cultural Matrix- Understanding Black Youth published in 2015. And that's among others.
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor and Haas Distinguished Chair of Bioethics in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor and John Gross Endowed Chair, Political Science
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- Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley 's Department of Economics
Read an interview with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Economics, about his research on how reforming property taxes can reduce inequality among school districts in the United States. Learn More >
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies
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- Director of the Townsend Center
- Professor of English at UC
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, City and Regional Planning
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor and Oxfam Chair in Environmental and Resource Economics, Economics Faculty Director, Center for Effective Global Action ( CEGA )
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- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, City and Regional Planning
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- Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies
Tianna Paschel is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America. Her work can be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies and various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor - along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones - of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and blackness in the Americas. Professor Paschel is a Ford Fellow, member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, the Council of the Law Section of ASA, and the Steering Committee of the Network of Anti-Racist Action and Research (RAIAR).
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist and assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies here at Berkeley. She's also the vice chair of research in the Department of Women and Gender Studies as well. She teaches courses on critical race study, feminist theory, Black social movements in the Americas, women's social movements in Latin America and Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African diaspora.
She is a social anthropologist and the author of the book we'll be discussing today In Defense Of This Sunrise- Black women's activism and the geography of race in Nicaragua, which examines how Black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, historical dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present.
And I'll just say that I had the immense honor to have sat on the dissertation when Courtney was at UT Austin. And I will say that her book is just as stunning as her dissertation then. But it is incredibly- I mean, the update of what she brought in is just incredible. And I so appreciate this work.
I think this is one of the few books, if not the only book, on looking at the intersections of race and gender and focusing on Black women feminist struggles in Nicaragua. So thank you for this important work. And we'll look forward to hearing more in just a bit.
I'm just going to turn around- turn ahead, turn to Tianna Paschel and introduce her as well. She is the commentator for this panel. And she is the associate professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Berkeley here. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America.
She's also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from the ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for Black populations by Latin American states.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, Comparative Literature
Tino Cuellar is an extraordinary scholar and public servant. We can actually start with an inspiring life story, born on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, Justice Cuellar went to public schools in Texas and California and then on to Harvard College and Yale Law School. In 2000, he completed a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
He served for two US presidents at the White House and in federal agencies and was on the California Supreme Court from 2015 to 2021. Before that appointment, Justice Cuellar was 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. Just among a few other things. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Justice Cuellar has published widely on American institutions and public law, international affairs, political economy, and technology's impact on law and government.
He is the author of the 2001 book, Governing Security- The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies. And he's now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And it is from this vantage point that he will speak to us on reimagining global integration. And also, I want you to note, please that in addition to today's lecture Tino Cuellar will participate in the joint Matrix Clausen Center panel on economics and geopolitics in US international relations tomorrow at noon at the Spieker Forum at the Haas Business School, alongside four other distinguished panelists.
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- Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT the Arctic University of Norway
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- Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690 - 1830
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.
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- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC
Yan Long is an Assistant Professor in the sociology department here at UC Berkeley. She is coming to us from Indiana University, where she was an Assistant Professor, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She holds a joint PhD in Sociology and Women's Studies from the University of Michigan, and a master's and bachelor's degree from Beijing University. Welcome, and thank you for coming to our podcast.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor and Pamela P. Fong Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies, Geography