Matrix Podcast

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/

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/.

In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, finalist for the 2011 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years, activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Offering readings of the use of photography in the anti-lynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life. A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-leigh-raiford/.

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Brittany Birberick, an anthropology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. Birberick's dissertation project focuses on urban transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. More broadly, she writes and thinks about economies, migration, temporality, and aesthetics within an urban context. Her dissertation, "Paved with Gold: Urban Transformation in Johannesburg," situates the city of Johannesburg historically, considering the extractive economy of gold that initiated its development to understand the city's contemporary tensions: a dilapidated post-apartheid city aiming to be a world-class global city. Her research takes place in Jeppestown, a neighborhood in Johannesburg, and focuses on the inhabitants and built environment of a single street. Today, Jeppestown is portrayed as either on its way to becoming a site of redevelopment by the Johannesburg Development Agency, artists, and private developers, or, if left unattended, a crime ridden area and hotbed of xenophobic violence. The dissertation posits that rather than transformation and development projects leading to an inherently new city or inherently new object, Jeppestown, like many urban areas around the world, is caught in a back and forth between being a successful or failed urban space—a "good" or "bad" city. Birberick received the Association for Africanist Anthropology's 2019 Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Essay Award for her essay, "Dreaming Numbers," which is an analysis of fafi, a street-based lottery game played by residents in Jeppestown. The piece investigates the ways in which dreams, gambling, and interpreting patterns become meaningful strategies for choosing the next winning number and reducing uncertainty in the city. A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-brittany-birberick/.

In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Professor Mariane C. Ferme, a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence, and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. Ferme's latest book, "Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone," draws on her three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, after studying Political Science at the University of Milano, Italy, and majoring in anthropology at Wellesley College. Her research has long focused on Sierra Leone, and West Africa more generally. It encompasses gendered approaches to everyday practices and materiality in agrarian West African societies, and work on the political imagination in times of violence, particularly in relation to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. She has also done research on the ways in which international humanitarian legal institutions and jurisprudence shape that status in our collective imaginaries of figures of victimhood, criminality, and witnessing in times of war. The empirical focus of this work has been the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the developing jurisprudence in that setting about the forced conscription of child soldiers and the crime of "forced marriage." Her most recent fieldwork in Sierra Leone—carried out in 2015-16, with funding from the National Science Foundation—was an interdisciplinary research project on changing agrarian institutions and access to land in the country. The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea has made the contribution of anthropologists crucial to developing socio-culturally sensitive and acceptable strategies for public health interventions, and to understanding pathways of disease transmission. She has written on the ways in which understanding rural mobility, as well as healing and burial practices, in Sierra Leone and the neighboring countries sheds light on the patterns of EVD infection, and can help inform public health interventions to stem the spread of this disease. A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-mariane-ferme/.

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale. At the heart of her work is an interest in how economic and transformations unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, with a particular concern for how urban struggles for justice coalesce around these changes. Within this broadly defined area, she examines two transformations as they relate to housing, a crucial vector of urban inequality and terrain of grassroots political contestation. First, the shift to a finance-oriented political economy; second, the growing global reach and power of digital platforms. She is currently studying how platform business models are being developed for rental housing markets in San Francisco, London, and Berlin, and how activists are developing counter-platforms in pursuit of housing justice. A recent project investigated the emergence of corporate landlords in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, their development of new financial assets backed by rent checks, and how the tools of the post-2008 tech boom aided this process. Fields has published widely on the relationships among housing financialization, movements for justice, and digital platforms in journals like Economic Geography; Housing, Theory, and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and; Urban Studies. She also regularly publishes reports, working papers, and essays with community groups like Right to the City and Greater Manchester Housing Action, and in venues ranging from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to Public Books. The National Science Foundation, British Academy, and Independent Social Research Foundation have supported her work. A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-desiree-fields/

In this captivating interview, Dacher Keltner, a prominent psychology professor and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, shares his insights into the biological roots of emotion. He discusses the profound healing effects of nature, particularly for veterans coping with PTSD, highlighting the significance of shared experiences. Keltner also explores the everyday encounters of awe and their impact on well-being. Plus, he examines how social class influences emotional expression and ethical behavior, revealing the intricate connections between privilege and civility.