The Imperiled Place of Universities and Democracy in the USA: Interview with Todd Wolfson
Matrix Podcast
Global Democracy Commons Podcast: Episode 2 In the run up to the American election we talked to , the new President of AAUP, about how public disinvestment from higher education and the culture wars have transformed colleges in ways that make them less democratic places — and imperil democracy across the country. A transcript of this episode is available at . About the Series One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the project,...
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Matrix on Point: Voices from the Heartland
Matrix Podcast
Over the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia; Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas, talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie; and Lisa Pruitt has straddled the rural-urban divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of rural legal access. As the nation braced for a decisive election, this conversation — recorded on October 21 — sought to illuminate the frequently overlooked yet politically potent voices emanating from...
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Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era
Matrix Podcast
Recorded on October 9, 2024, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book , by , the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and , the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. The authors were joined in conversation by , the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Didi Kuo, a Center...
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Matrix on Point: War is Back
Matrix Podcast
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...
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Understanding Academic Freedom: Interview with Hank Reichman
Matrix Podcast
One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe. The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to...
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Authors Meet Critics - Juana María Rodríguez, "Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex"
Matrix Podcast
On Sept. 16, 2024, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel focused on the book , by , Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women...
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Prisoner Labor Legacies: An interview with Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc
Matrix Podcast
While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a . is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley's History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her...
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Agricultural Modernization in China: Interview with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler
Matrix Podcast
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China. is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing...
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The Emotions of Dyadic Relationships: An Interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas
Matrix Podcast
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas, who at the time of the interview were Ph.D. candidates in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow. is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the clinical science area at the University of California, Berkeley and a clinical psychology intern at the University of California, San Francisco, specializing in neuropsychological...
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Sugar and the Transformation of the American West: An Interview with Bernadette Pérez
Matrix Podcast
For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, , a 2022-2023 , interviewed , Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Pérez is a historian of the United States who specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research focuses on migrant sugar beet workers in Colorado, and explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post Civil War. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, Pérez was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from...
info_outlineHow does international conflict shape immigration bureaucracy? Sherine Ebadi, a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, researches the impact of Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) and employment-based visa programs on Afghan nationals who worked with the U.S. military. For Ebadi, visa programs like the SIV are crucial lenses for understanding imperialism as well as social relations within the Afghan diaspora.
In this podcast interview, J.T. Jamieson, a recent PhD graduate from the UC Berkeley Department of History and a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, spoke with Ebadi about the relationships between humanitarianism, foreign intervention, war, and immigration, as well as the lived experiences of Afghans navigating the SIV process, especially those in the diasporic community in Northern California.
An edited transcript of the interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sherine-ebadi.