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

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.

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. An edited 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.

Kimberly Cecilia Burke, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, researches the relationships between institutional violence and social stratification, utilizing multi-level mixed-methods analysis. Her dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how Black-White interracial couples understand and experience police violence in their relationships. Her current research aims to determine how the dynamics of intimate partnerships can perpetuate and challenge patterns of racial inequality structured by police violence. As a scholar-activist, Kimberly is guided by feminist ethics of love and mutuality and seeks to bring insights from social science to the broader public to advance social equity. For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Matrix Content Curator Julia Sizek interviewed Burke about her research. A transcript can be found at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/structural-determinants-of-police-violence-interview-with-kimberly-cecilia-burke/.

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/. Abstract 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.