Please join us on May 14 for a "Matrix on Point" panel discussion on racial justice in America. The panelists will discuss the critical momentum of Black-led protests and the Black Lives Matter movement this past year, and situate this within the larger historical context of social movements for racial justice in the United States and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement. Panelists will include: Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; Brandon M. Terry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University; Monica Bell, Associate Professor of Law & Sociology at Yale Law School; and Christopher Muller, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. REGISTER HERE

Please join us on May 7, 2021 for a Social Science Matrix Book Salon focused on the book Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Professor Stephens-Dougan will be joined in conversation by Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. REGISTER HERE

The death of George Floyd, and the many black and brown people who have died at the hands of the police before and since, require careful examination of the long history of race and racism in policing in the United States. Is meaningful reform of policing possible? Is the answer abolition and what would that mean? Some of our leading experts on campus on this topic will discuss these important questions.

This spring, the Berkeley Cannabis Research Center is hosting monthly webinars focused on the intersection of cannabis policy, cannabis producing communities, and the environment. On April 28, the panel will focus on "Cannabis and Equity," and will feature Lanese Martin, Chair, Oakland Cannabis Regulatory Commission and Executive Director/Co-Founder, The Hood Incubator; Ramon Garcia, Founder, Equity Trade Certification; Dominic Corva, Co-Director, Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research & Cannabis Equity Specialist at the California Center for Rural Policy, Humboldt State University; Will Armaline, Director, Human Rights Institute & Associate Professor of Sociology, San Jose State University; and Edith Kinney, Legal Coordinator, Human Rights Institute & Associate Professor, Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University. Moderated by Laura Herrera, Berkeley Cannabis Research Center. Register

Join us for a panel discussion on how President Joe Biden has fared during the first 100 days of his term. Panelists will include: Mark Z. Barabak, National Political Correspondent, Los Angeles Times; Vanessa Tyson, Associate Professor of Politics, Scripps College; Terry Bimes, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley; and George Breslauer, Professor of Politics Emeritus, UC Berkeley. The panel will be moderated by Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance, The Brookings Institution. Presented by the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) and the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. REGISTER

Join us on April 22 for a "Matrix on Point" discussion, as a group of distinguished panelists will approach questions of objectivity, disinformation, and the construction of truth from a media-consumption (rather than media-production) perspective, focusing on how internet users find information, how algorithms play a deterministic role in search results, and how lies propagate and solidify. We also want to take a self-reflexive approach to these issues, looking at the strategies that scholars and journalists have developed to study these phenomena and understand their impact on our society. Panelists will include Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Senior Faculty Researcher, Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life; Sun-ha Hong, Assistant Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and author of Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, 2020); and Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The New York Times, author of three books, including Futureproof: Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, and the host of “Rabbit Hole,” a podcast about the many ways the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior. The panel will be moderated by David Barstow, Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at Berkeley Journalism and a former senior writer for the New York Times. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. REGISTER.

Please join us on April 19, 2021 for an "Authors Meet Critics" book talk featuring Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millán, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have disinvested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. In Redistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Millán takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of "redistributing the poor" draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy. Panelists include: Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University; and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law. Catherine Albiston, Jackson H. Ralston Professorship of Law and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, will moderate. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS). REGISTER

This presentation discusses the importance of digital transformation to adapt to climate change, respond to the impacts of COVID and manage risk to critical assets.  Examples of forward-looking and innovative applied projects will be shared. 

How are the historical experiences of the Black and Jewish communities at once distinct and interconnected? Should we see efforts to combat racism and antisemitism as separate struggles? What are African Americans’ and Jews’ responsibilities to one another in America’s current racial reckoning? In this conversation, Eric K. Ward, a leading expert on the relationship between racism, antisemitism, and authoritarian movements; and Michael Rothberg, an eminent scholar of historical exclusion and its legacies, will tackle these questions and other pressing matters in contemporary Black-Jewish relations. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Tina Sacks of the School of Social Welfare. This event is sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, the Department of African-American Studies, the Othering and Belonging Institute, Berkeley Hillel, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Graduate Theological Union, the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, the College of Letters and Science, American Public Square, The Forward, The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, The Academic Engagement Network, and HaMaqom | The Place. Learn more