Matrix Podcast

Recorded on February 22, 2023, this podcast features a lecture by Professor Kadji Amin, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. In this talk, "Training Bourgeois Selves: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Subsumption of Pederasty," Amin discusses a key architect of Modern Sexuality, the German Jewish homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Amin argues that Hirschfeld's work allows us to track the process by which the bourgeois Western notion of sexuality as a form of innate selfhood subsumed sex as a social and spatial practice. By turning to Hirschfeld's work, Amin's talk argues that the fundamental problem of queer of color critique — that of how sexuality conceals and transacts more salient hierarchies of power — was born with the epistemological invention of sexuality. The event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix and the UC Berkeley Department of French. Additional support was provided by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. The event was organized and moderated by Professor Salar Mameni, a Matrix Faculty Fellow. A transcript of this podcast can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/training-bourgeois-selves-magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-subsumption-of-pederasty/.

Recorded on March 22, 2023, this talk — "The Modern American Industrial Strategy: Building a Clean Energy Economy from the Bottom Up and Middle Out" — features Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist to the Invest in America Cabinet. Boushey is co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she was President and CEO from 2013-2020. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary Clinton's 2016 transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute. This talk was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Society and Economy Initiative (BESI), the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and Social Science Matrix. A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-modern-american-industrial-strategy-building-a-clean-energy-economy-from-the-bottom-up-and-middle-out/. Abstract The Biden-Harris Administration began at a time of intersecting crises, including the pandemic, rising inequality, stagnating economic growth, and the large and growing costs of climate change. The President, in partnership with Congress and state and local governments, took rapid action with policies that have spurred the strongest and most equitable economic and labor market recovery in modern history — including legislation to enhance the resilience of our supply chains, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. These historic measures, together forming the core of the Modern American Industrial Strategy, were designed with an understanding that strategic public investments are essential to achieving the full potential of our nation's economy — one built from the bottom up and middle out, where the gains of economic growth are shared.

Recorded on March 23, 2023, this talk featured Phil Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, discussing his new book (co-authored with Samuel Perry), The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. The respondent was David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley. Carolyn Chen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Ethnic Studies, moderated. The talk was jointly sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR), the Center for Right-Wing Studies, and Social Science Matrix. The event was part of the BCSR Public Forum on Race, Religion, Democracy and the American Dream. About the Speaker Philip S. Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. His other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. Among his recent publications are The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003); Max Weber's Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford, 2004); and "The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation," Sociological Methodology, 2004. Gorski is Co-Director (with Julia Adams) of Yale's Center for Comparative Research (CCR), and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center. About the Book Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation's Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism. In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it's headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries—and especially its influence over the last three decades—they show how, throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property." White Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our current political moment. The future of American democracy, Gorski and Perry argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism. A transcript of this talk can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/the-flag-and-the-cross-white-christian-nationalism-and-the-threat-to-democracy/.

How do the wealthy maintain their wealth through tax havens, and what can we learn about these opaque practices? Recorded on April 3, 2023, this panel featured experts explaining aspects of the global ecosystem of tax avoidance, including how corporations and individuals move across multiple legal jurisdictions to maintain wealth and avoid paying taxes. The panel included Duncan Wigan, Professor with Special Responsibilities in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School; and Gabriel Zucman, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderated by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix. Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE), the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. A transcript of this talk can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-on-point-wealth-and-taxes/.

Recorded on March 8, 2023, this video features a lecture by Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University. Professor Guldi's lecture was entitled "Towards a Practice of Text-Mining to Understand Change Over Historical Time: The Persistence of Memory in British Parliamentary Debates in the Nineteenth Century." Co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the UC Berkeley Department of History, and D-Lab, this talk was presented as part of the Social Science / Data Science event series, a collaboration between Social Science Matrix and D-Lab. A transcript of this talk can be found here: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/jo-guldi-towards-a-practice-of-text-mining-to-understand-change-over-historical-time/ Abstract A world awash in text requires interpretive tools that traditional quantitative science cannot provide. Text mining is dangerous because analysts trained in quantification often lack a sense of what could go wrong when archives are biased or incomplete. Professor Guldi's talk reviewed a brief catalogue of disasters created by data science experts who voyage into humanistic study. It finds a solution in "hybrid knowledge," or the application of historical methods to algorithm and analysis. Case studies engage recent work from the philosophy of history (including Koselleck, Erle, Assman, Tanaka, Chakrabarty, Jay, Sewell, and others) and investigate the "fit" of algorithms with each historical frame of reference on the past. This talk profiles recent research into the status of "memory" in British politics. It profiled the persistence of references to previous eras in British history, to historical conditions per se, and to futures hoped for and planned, using NLP analysis. It presented the promise and limits of text-mining strategies such as Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech Analysis for modeling temporal experience as a whole, suggesting how these methods might support students of social science and the humanities, and also revealing how traditional topics in these subjects offer a new research frontier for students of data science and informatics. About the Speaker Jo Guldi, Professor of History and Practicing Data Scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include "The Distinctiveness of Different Eras," American Historical Review (August 2022) and "The Official Mind's View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Most nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa experienced some form of "land reform" in the 20th century. But what is land reform? In her book, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Professor Jo Guldi approaches the problem from the point of view of Britain's disintegrating empire. She makes the case that land reform movements originated as an argument about reparations for the experience of colonization, and that they were championed by a set of leading administrators within British empire and in UN agencies at the beginning of the postwar period. Using methods from the history of technology, she sets out to explain how international governments, national governments, market evangelists, and grassroots movements advanced their own solutions for realizing the redistribution of land. Her conclusions lead her to revisit the question of how states were changing in the twentieth century — and to extend our history of property ownership over the longue durée. Recorded on March 8, 2023, this talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE). A transcript of this talk can be found here: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/jo-guldi-the-long-land-war-the-global-struggle-for-occupancy-rights/. About the Speaker Jo Guldi, professor of history and practicing data scientist at Southern Methodist University, is author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. Her publications on digital methods include "The Distinctiveness of Different Eras," American Historical Review (August 2022) and "The Official Mind's View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have reshaped global geopolitics, trade, and security. How will these changes affect the relationship between the US and China, Europe, and the Global South? How will they impact US firms operating globally, and how might foreign leaders — and notably the Chinese leadership — respond? Recorded on February 16, 2023, this panel discussion featured a group of distinguished scholars addressing these questions, and the possible implications for the global multilateral order established in the second half of the 20th century. The panel included Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; James Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies; Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund (who is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business and Director of the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy; and Laura Tyson, Class of 1939 Professor of Economics and Business Administration and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics at UC Berkeley. The panel was moderaetd by John Zysman, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder/co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. The panel was held in Spieker Forum at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix (https://matrix.berkeley.edu) and the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy (https://clausen.berkeley.edu/). A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/economics-and-geopolitics-in-us-international-relations-china-europe-and-the-global-south/.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories have become a central feature of modern life, but they have a long history that have served to justify surveillance and prosecution of marginalized groups. In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on March 15, 2023, a group of scholars who study these histories discussed how misinformation circulates, and the effects of such myths and stories on society. The panel featured Timothy R. Tangherlini, Professor in the Scandinavian Department and Director of the Graduate Program in Folklore at UC Berkeley; Robert Braun, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; and Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and affiliated faculty in the Programs for Critical Theory and for Gender and Women's Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, and the Department of Department of South and South East Asian Studies. The panel was moderated by Elena Conis, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Presented by the University of California, Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. This panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Othering and Belonging Institute. A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-on-point-myths-and-misinformation/.

Recorded on March 7, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this Authors Meet Critics panel focused on To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women's Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, by Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Morris was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies. The panel was moderated by Lok Siu, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Gender & Women's Studies. A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/to-defend-this-sunrise-black-womens-activism-and-the-authoritarian-turn-in-nicaragua/. About the Book To Defend this Sunrise examines how Black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation's racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, Black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state's co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, Black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of "multicultural dispossession." This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine Black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

Recorded on March 6, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel focused on Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America, by Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. The recording also features a response by Julio Moreno, Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, and and José Juan Pérez Meléndez, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Caribbean History at UC Davis, and a Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Hunter College. Elena Schneider, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of History, moderated. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of History. A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/cooperating-with-the-colossus-a-social-and-political-history-of-us-military-bases-in-world-war-ii-latin-america/. About the Book During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality. "Cooperating with the Colossus" reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites. Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the "Colossus of the North" as best they could. Yet conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US-Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: national sovereignty and international cooperation may seem like harmonious concepts in principle, but they are difficult to reconcile in practice. Drawing on archival research in five countries, "Cooperating with the Colossus" is a revealing history told at the local, national, and international levels of how World War II transformed power and politics in the Americas in enduring ways. Learn more about the book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cooperating-with-the-colossus-9780197531877?cc=us&lang=en& Learn more about Social Science Matrix: https://matrix.berkeley.edu