Matrix Podcast

Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive.

In this panel, recorded on April 4, 2022, a group of experts discussed contemporary social and economic impacts of wildfires in California during another record-breaking fire season. How have fires changed during the last five years, and with what impacts on the economy? How might policy-makers and economists respond to the changing fire season?

The panel featured Bruce Riordan, Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network; Steve Pyne, an urban farmer and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, and author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next; Dave Jones, Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE); and Luiz Oliveira, Senior Associate Economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The panel was moderated by Bruce Riordan, Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network.

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/.

Recorded on March 2, 2022, this "Matrix on Point" panel featured presentations by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the Economics Department at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance; Stefan Eich, Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University; and Christine Parlour, the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. Moderated by Barry Eichengreen, the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

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/

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Eaton reveals in his book, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. 

In this recording, Professor Eaton, who earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, was joined in conversation by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, and Jonathan Glater, Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Letters & Science.

A video of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/tag/watch/.

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/.

Recorded on November 16, 2021, this video presents an “Authors Meet Critics” panel focused on the book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India, by Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment with DCRP and Global Metropolitan Studies. Professor Balakrishnan was joined in conversation by Sharad Chari, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Michael Watts, Class of ‘63 and Chancellor’s Professor of Geography Emeritus, and Co-Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley.

Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India explores new spatial forms of urbanization by focusing on land contestations along infrastructural and economic corridors in liberalizing India. The book explores the production of private mega-enclaves amidst agricultural fields along these corridors. These corridor urbanizations defy our familiar binaries of city and village and our inherited disciplinary silos of agrarian and urban studies. Instead, the book shows how current urban development accretes onto older histories of agrarian capitalism, thus constituting processes of what Balakrishnan calls “recombinant urbanization.”

This panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and Institute for South Asia Studies (https://southasia.berkeley.edu).

Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and the prison abolition movement point to the long histories of police violence and mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere, demanding new approaches to approaching the history and present of policing.

In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on October 25, 2021, UC Berkeley graduate students were joined by outside experts in discussing the impacts of policing on the lives and health of officers and the communities they serve, as well as how contemporary policing practices are related to an unjust past.

Panelists included Kimberly Burke, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a Research Fellow at the Center for Policing Equity; Matthew Guariglia, Policy Analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Brie McLemore, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program; and Eduardo Duran, a PhD student, researcher, and instructor in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program.

The Matrix On Point discussion series promotes 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. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.