Matrix Podcast

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/

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, a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, will join the Toulouse School of Economics as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023 following a year as Postdoctoral Fellow at the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality in Bonn. 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 and beliefs 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 will join the Yale School of Management as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2022. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Opportunity Insights at Harvard University and a Research Associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. He uses quasi-experimental research designs and longitudinal administrative data to study economic mobility and the determinants of U.S. labor market outcomes. Zach holds a BA in philosophy, economics, and mathematics from Amherst College and a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley.

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/.

Floods are the most destructive natural hazard, both at the national and international scale, and they disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. To understand this uneven exposure to floods requires that we understand the history of land use and institutional structures that have resulted in current exposure and inequitable allocation of resources for flood protection and for post-disaster aid (‘procedural vulnerability’). One of the most critical agencies is the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose cost-benefit analysis approach tends to preclude flood risk management projects in poor communities.

In this presentation, recorded on May 12, 2022, two panelists — Danielle Zoe Rivera, Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and Jessica Ludy, Flood Risk Program Manager and Environmental Justice Coordinator for the San Francisco District US Army Corps of Engineers — drew upon their research on these topics and discuss pathways to improving on the current situation.

This panel was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, Global Metropolitan Studies, and River-Lab, from the University of California, Berkeley.

As we pass the grim milestone of one million deaths in the United States, taking stock of the personal and collective consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic becomes an urgent task for social scientists.

Recorded on May 10, 2022, this panel examined the physical, material and psychological toll of the past two years of rampant disease, on-and-off social distancing, and shifting economic ground. The panelists discussed the unequal distribution of the pandemic’s burden across the population and the long-term scarring that may ensue, and contemplated the (possibly more uplifting) lessons to be drawn for the future.

This event was co-sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center and the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology

Panelists

• Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center
• Tina Sacks, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare; author, Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the American Healthcare System (Oxford, 2019)
• Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology
• Iris Mauss (moderator), Professor, Berkeley Psychology

What can we learn from historical and contemporary cases about building organizations that engage, mobilize, and manage to wield influence on the political process? What kinds of infrastructural choices best support engagement and success in the long run? 

Recorded on May 5, 2022, this panel explored the varied and changing terrain of collective action to reflect on the nature, promises, and pitfalls of associational power in the 21st century.

Panelists included Arisha Hatch, Vice President and Chief of Campaigns at Color Of Change; Liz McKenna from Johns Hopkins University; Michelle Oyakawa, from Muskingum University; Margaret Levi, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University; and Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The panel was moderated by Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley.

This panel was presented as part of the Matrix on Point event series and co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy and Organizing.

Recorded on April 22, 2022, this “Author Meets Critics” panel focused on the book Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation by Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Professor Vaughn was joined in conversation by Stephen Collier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. 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 UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability.

In Engineering Vulnerability, Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources, but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and more broadly, future life on a warming earth.

Recorded on April 27, 2022, this panel discussion brought together members of the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix Research Team on Digital Transformations in Property and Development to discuss how state, corporations, and grassroots actors are employing digital technologies to remake global land, housing, and property.

Panelists included Hilary Faxon, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley; Elizabeth Resor, PhD student in the UC Berkeley School of Information; Julien Migozzi, Research Associate in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford; Luis F. Alvarez León, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Dartmouth College; and Jovanna Rosen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. The panel was moderated by Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley.

The event was co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).

 

How does the shift away from cash economies affect relationships of debt and belonging? Through studying forms of cashless payment, such as mobile money and apps, this panel of scholars explored questions about how the social connections made through money are changing, and what the implications might be for our understanding of money, trust, and social connection. Recorded on April 14, 2022, this panel discussion was presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE). The panel featured Kevin Donovan, Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh; Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; and Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The panel was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix.