Matrix Podcast

On May 7, 2021, UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix presented a Matrix Book Salon featuring 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 was joined in conversation by Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley.

Recorded on April 19, 2021, this Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel featured the book 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 at the University of California, Berkeley.

In "Redistributing the Poor," Lara-Millán, an ethnographer and historical sociologist, takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and 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 included: 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.

This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS). Learn more about Matrix at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.

Recorded on March 19, 2021, this video features a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.

ABSTRACT

One of Friedrich Hayek's most celebrated essays — "Competition as a Discovery Procedure" (1968) — tells us tantalizing little about the existence of other such procedures. Hayek's insistence that competition is the surest and most reliable technique of eliciting innovation is well reflected in today's digital landscape, dominated as it is by digital platforms, with their stated goal of facilitating market exchange. Yet, beyond Hayek's favorite bugbear of central planning, there surely must be other ways of "discovery" — even if they do not currently "scale" as well as the techniques of competition. This talk will explore the intellectual and political benefits of placing "discovery" at the center of our debate about the future of the digital public sphere and suggest potential directions for adequate policy-making on the issue.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013). He is also the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University.

This lecture is presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by the UC Berkeley D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event was also co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group.

Recorded on April 22, 2021, this "Matrix on Point" discussion — sponsored by UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism — featured a group of distinguished panelists approaching 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.

This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary 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. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu​.

PANELISTS

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)

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," a guide to surviving the technological future; and the host of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast about the many ways the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior.

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.

Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu​.

Recorded on February 19, 2021, this episode features a lecture by Joan Donovan, Research Director for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This event was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab.

Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC), which explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns. Dr. Donovan's research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, effects of disinformation campaigns, and adversarial media movements.

Recorded on February 11, 2021, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel discussion, features Professor Steven Weber, a political scientist and professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information, discussing his book, "Bloc by Bloc: How to Build a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order," together with Vinod K. Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science, and Homa Bahrami, Senior Lecturer in the Haas School of Business. The panel was introduced by Marion Fourcade, Director of Matrix, and moderated by AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.

"Bloc by Bloc" puts forward a compelling model for global organization that integrates modern developments in technology and governance. Weber argues that the global political economy is decomposing into regional systems that are more densely linked internally and much more loosely linked to each other. But the new regions are not defined by familiar physical boundaries like mountains and oceans. They are defined by technology rules and standards, which means we need to re-envision a region as a logical not physical space, with no need for geographic contiguity.

The panel was presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu​) and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (https://cltc.berkeley.edu​).

In this podcast, Michael Watts interviews Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley.

Professor Herman's research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context.

Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – through high diplomacy and on-the-ground examinations of race, labor, sex and law – to reveal the origins and impact of inter-American "security cooperation" on domestic and international politics in the region. She has also authored past and forthcoming articles and book chapters on the global politics of anti-racism, the Cuban literacy campaign, the Brazilian labor justice system, and U.S.-Latin American relations.

She is currently working on a new book project on Antarctica, Latin America, and the World.

Prior to entering academia, she spent several years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil working as a freelance translator, researcher, and documentarian. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she was Assistant Professor of International Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

She received her Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in Literature and History from Duke.

A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-rebecca-herman/

How well can ordinary people do in identifying the veracity of news in real time?  In this lecture, recorded on Feb. 1, 2021, Professor Tucker reported on preliminary findings from a study focused on this important question. Using a unique research design that involved crowdsourcing popular news articles from both mainstream and suspect news sources that have appeared in the past 24 hours to both ordinary citizens and professional fact checkers, Professor Tucker researched the characteristics of those likely to incorrectly identify false news stories as true, the results of interventions to attempt to reduce the prevalence of this behavior, and the prospects for crowdsourcing to serve as a viable means for identifying false news stories in real time.

This lecture was presented as part of the "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic" initiative, funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

Recorded on February 3, 2021, this podcast features a Matrix Distinguished Lecture by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Professor Allen’s lecture focuses on the findings of "Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century," a report by the American Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Allen served as co-chair of the Commission, which convened weekly for two years in support of this project. As detailed in the report, the Commission was established to “consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century, and to ask how all of us might obtain the values, knowledge, and skills to become still better citizens…. Through its recommendations, the Commission has looked to increase citizens’ capacity to engage in their communities, counter rising threats to democratic self-government, and rebuild trust in political institutions.” (To learn more, visit https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose​.)

The lecture was introduced and moderated by Henry Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography.

Clancy comes to UC Berkeley from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where she received her PhD in Human Geography with a multi-site study on the interaction between mobile phone maps, cartographic discourse, and postcolonial landscapes.

At UC Berkeley, Professor Wilmott is teaching graduate-level combined theory/studio courses on locative media, cross listed courses in digital geographies, as well as core curriculum on geographic information systems in the Geography department.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-clancy-wilmott/.