The Chatterbox

War is back. Open military operations in Europe and the Middle East have driven an escalation of geopolitical tensions in those regions. The conduct of warfare is changing, too, fueled by the deployment and sometimes live-testing of new technologies. Meanwhile, a new cold war seems to be settling in. The growth of China's economic power and worldwide influence has triggered proliferating sovereignty disputes and defensive trade and security policies.

In this Matrix on Point panel, UC Berkeley experts discussed these and other transformations, and offered their views on what to expect in the short to medium term.

Recorded on September 30, 2024, the panel featured Michaela Mattes, Associate Professor in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley; Andrew W. Reddie, Associate Research Professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and Founder of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab; and Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and Co-Director for the Institute of International Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute of International Studies, the panel was moderated by Vinod Aggarwal, Distinguished Professor and Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair in Asian Studies, in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at UC Berkeley.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting 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. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.

A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/war-is-back.

This week co-hosts Guy and Francesco sit down with Professor Christos Kassimeris, a leading expert on racism in football. Together, they explore the roots and complexities of racism within the sport. 

Professor Kassimeris provides valuable insights into the nature and definition of racism, shedding light on how it manifests within football. The conversation delves into the role of anti-racism campaigns and racism online, particularly in social media spaces, where football-related abuse is widespread. Professor Kassimeris shares his ongoing research and the efforts being made to address this pressing issue. 

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. In this episode, Robinson and Judith discuss three broad topics. First, they talk about Judith’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). In particular, they touch on the dynamics of sex and gender, as well as their political dimensions. Second, the conversation turns to the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Finally, they broach the topic of Israel and Palestine, with particular attention to the questions of genocide and anti-semitism.

Today I’m joined by Matt McManus lecturer at University of Michigan and author The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics. Matt is an interesting thinker who is know for reading his opposition more carefully than most. I really like this about Matt, and I think we should all be reading works and having conversations with about topics on which we disagree with.

For full shownotes and video

In this third episode, we discuss FinTech apps and how they influence people’s perception & relation to finance. By considering the physical or embodied experience of FinTech apps, we consider their additional effects on individuals. We explore how the glitzy promise of new technology is seen to positively democratise financial wealth for the people; however, this may still result in power inequalities.

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This is Clicks & Capital, a five-part series from the archives recorded in November 2023, exploring the role of digital technologies in individuals’ finances. I spoke with Anna Rohmann about her PhD research on this. 

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Anna Rohmann (she/her) is doing anthropological research at Goldsmiths and works as Associate Lecturer across multiple universities of the University of London. Her PhD project examines financial technology and (digital) financial inclusion through ethnographic and intersectional frameworks. She focuses on the interplay between retail investors, start-ups, content creators, technologies, and wider socio-economic structures. Her broader research interests lie at the intersection of the (digitized) economy with language, queerness, online communities, and social change. Anna is on the editorial board of Anthways Journal, a Research & Marketing Coordinator for the Political Economy Research Center (PERC), and a member of the TikTok Ethnography Collective.

In this special episode, writer Jessica J. Lee joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo, to explore the languages of ‘natural’ history and invasive species through their book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024).

Bringing together memoir, history, and scientific research, writer Jessica J. Lee considers how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they cross borders. Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica often draws on her own lived experiences to observe our world in motion, and close connections between seemingly distant places - sometimes, with shared tastes. Dispersals, their latest book of linked essays, journeys further still, exploring migrations, displacements, and the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the language we use to describe them.

Jessica references Richard Mabey’s Weeds, Mary Douglas, and Scottish plant hunter Robert Fortune, to expose our historic human and anthropocentric understanding of plant life. We discuss the everyday words and phrases concerning diasporas and diasporic identity, naturalisation, and invasive species relate to citizenship and migration law, and how human and more-than-human beings are mis/represented in the media, from giant hogweed in Victorian England, to eucalyptus, wakame kelp, seaweed, and Japanese knotweed. Drawing on their work across the South West of England, Iman Datoo shares their research into soils, potatoes, and tea. Bringing together Iman and Jessica’s works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also delve into the history of botanical illustrations and mapping as tools of colonialism - here reimagined by contemporary artists.

This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024.

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online.

Watch the full video online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173

Find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9hjlxrIcgo

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.

Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity.

By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History (Yale UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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An Australian mining CEO took a top spot at CHOGM's business plenary to talk about how his company is going 'real carbon zero' by 2030…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details