Matrix Podcast

The Matrix Podcast features interviews with social scientists from across the University of California, Berkeley campus (and beyond). It also features recordings of events, including panels and lectures. The Matrix Podcast is produced by Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Matrix on Point: Mainstreaming Psychedelics 04/10/2025

Matrix on Point: Mainstreaming Psychedelics Psychedelics are steadily moving from the fringes of counterculture to the heart of mainstream society, driven by a growing body of research and shifting public perception. Once relegated to underground movements, substances like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are now being explored for their potential in treating mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety. High-profile studies at institutions like Johns Hopkins and Stanford have highlighted their therapeutic benefits, while cities like Denver and Oakland have decriminalized their use. In addition, psychedelic retreats, wellness practices, and even art and tech industries are embracing these substances as tools for creativity, self-discovery, and healing. As psychedelics shed their stigma, they are catalyzing a broader conversation about mental health, spirituality, and the boundaries of human consciousness. Recorded on March 6, 2025, this panel featured Diana Negrin, Lecturer of Geography at UC Berkeley; David Presti, Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley; Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; and Graham Pechenik, a patent attorney and founder of Calyx Law. Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, moderated. 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. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Program in Critical Theory, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Center for Research on Social Change, the UC Berkeley Department of English, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. A transcript of this panel is available at /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/36078210

The State of Higher Education: Interview with Lorna Finlayson 03/24/2025

Los Angeles Wildfires: Risk, Resilience, and Collective Action 03/12/2025

Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order 03/12/2025

Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order Recorded on February 10, 2025, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book by Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. Professor Barrera de la Torre was joined in-person to introduce the book, and Professor Ince presented remotely. The authors were joined in conversation by Dylan John Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Anna Stilz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, moderated. The Social Science Matrix book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. About the Book The logic of the state has come to define social and spatial relations, embedding itself into our understandings of the world and our place in it. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre challenge this logic as the central pivot around which knowledge and life orbit, by exposing its vulnerabilities, contradictions and, crucially, alternatives. "Society Despite the State" disrupts the dominance of state-centred ways of thinking by presenting a radical political geography approach inspired by anarchist thought and practice. The book draws on a broad range of voices that have affinities with Western anarchism but also exceed it. This book challenges radicals and scholars to confront and understand the state through a way of seeing and a set of intellectual tools that the authors call ‘post-statism’ In de-centring the state’s logics and ways of operating, the authors incorporate a variety of threads to identify alternative ways to understand and challenge statism’s effects on our political imaginations. Transcript A transcript of this recording is available at . /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/35660770

Interview with Julia Sizek: Regulating Off-Roading in the California Desert 02/26/2025

New Directions in the Study of Fringe Politics 02/19/2025

The Future of California Agriculture 02/19/2025

Making Sense of the Elections of 2024 12/17/2024

Gendered Violence in Insurgencies: Interview with Tara Chandra 12/16/2024

New Directions in the Study of Labor 12/16/2024

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States 12/16/2024

Authors Meet Critics: "Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China" 12/12/2024

Authors Meet Critics: "Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China" Recorded on November 13, 2024, this Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book , by , Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Professor Long was joined in conversation by Matthew Kohrman, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law, and the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. The panel was moderated by Tom Gold, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley. The panel was presented as part of the Social Science Matrix book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. About the Book portrays the rebuilding of China’s pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state’s inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state’s domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China’s AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience. Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China’s subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems. A transcript of this podcast is available at /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/34417235

Emotion, Race, and Gender: Interview with Gold Okafor 12/04/2024

Matrix on Point: Shifting Alignments in the 2024 Election 11/26/2024

The Imperiled Place of Universities and Democracy in the USA: Interview with Todd Wolfson 11/19/2024

Matrix on Point: Voices from the Heartland 11/11/2024

Matrix on Point: Voices from the Heartland 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 America’s rural heartlands and small towns. The panel was moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies. About the Speakers is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, details rise of the right. Her latest book, ‘Stolen Pride: loss, shame and the rise of the right’ is based on six years of field work in eastern Kentucky and focuses on the politics of pride and shame. In particular, it focuses on the distress caused by “structural shaming” in an era of post-70s economic decline, a shame which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement. is Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis. Pruitt’s work reveals how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales, (e.g., material spatiality, lack of anonymity) profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory. is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie. (moderator) studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Tuğal is currently working on a book that will incorporate these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy. Watch the panel above or on . Listen to the panel as a podcast below or on . A transcript of this podcast is available at . /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/33872097

Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era 11/10/2024

Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era 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 Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Mark Danner, Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, moderated. The Social Science Matrix event series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. About Partisan Nation The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying. Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. Watch the video on . A transcript of this event is available at . /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/33871517

Matrix on Point: War is Back 11/08/2024

Matrix on Point: War is Back 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 . A transcript of this episode is available at . /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/33852187

Understanding Academic Freedom: Interview with Hank Reichman 11/01/2024

Authors Meet Critics - Juana María Rodríguez, "Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex" 10/24/2024

Prisoner Labor Legacies: An interview with Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc 09/27/2024

Agricultural Modernization in China: Interview with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler 09/11/2024

The Emotions of Dyadic Relationships: An Interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas 05/31/2024

Sugar and the Transformation of the American West: An Interview with Bernadette Pérez 05/30/2024

Storytelling and the Climate Crisis 04/14/2024

Storytelling and the Climate Crisis Contemporary writers and activists have described the climate crisis as, in part, a crisis of the imagination, of culture, and of storytelling. Recorded on March 11, 2024, this panel featured a group of authors and scholars of different genres — science fiction, journalism, history, literary fiction, and comedy — discussing how the climate crisis has impacted their craft and what practices of storytelling have to offer us at this pivotal moment in human history. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley the and the . Panelists Daniel Gumbiner is a novelist and editor based in Oakland. His first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award. His new novel, Fire in the Canyon, was published by Astra House in 2023. He is the Editor of The Believer. Annalee Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist. They are the author of nine books including, most recently, the science fiction novel The Terraformers. They are a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, a columnist in the The New Scientist, and the co-host of an award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct. Aaron Sachs is a professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, most recently, Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change (NYU Press, 2023). Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and a graduate of the Berkeley School of Journalism. She has written more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Together with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Solnit edited the 2023 collection Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Rebecca Herman (moderator) is associate professor in the History Department at UC Berkeley and author of Cooperating with the Colossus (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a book about the unlikely ban on mining in Antarctica, told through the stories of the military wives and children, artists, writers, activists, soldiers, and scientists who traveled South in growing numbers during the 1970s and 80s. A video and transcript of this event are available at /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/30815983

New Directions in Greening Infrastructure 04/14/2024

Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness 04/05/2024

Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness Recorded on March 18, 2024, this panel focused on Professor Alex V. Barnard’s book, . The book analyzes conservatorship, a legal system used to take legal guardianship over individuals deemed unable to meet their own basic needs. This controversial system, which has come under fire from civil liberties and disability rights groups, is at the center of state policies for mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Through interviews with policy makers, professionals, families, and conservatees, Barnard shows how the system operates, and its many shortcomings. At this event — part of the Social Science Matrix series — Professor Barnard was joined by Lauren Rettagliata, whose comments on her lived experience of the system complement Barnard's discussion of his research. The discussion was moderated by Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law at Berkeley Law. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley (ISSI), , and the . A transcript of this event is available at . About the Speakers is an assistant professor of sociology at NYU, holding a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. His work examines cross-national differences in the trajectory of people with severe mental illness between different institutions of care and control. His book, Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. He is currently working on another book, tentatively titled, Mental States: Ordering Psychiatric Disorder in France. is the mom of four sons, the oldest has Autism, the youngest has Schizophrenia. Almost five decades ago, she worked on committees that formulated federal legislation that ensconced into federal law protection for a free appropriate education for all children. Lauren found herself back home in California at the time her youngest son was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. The world changed for her. She had to search the streets and delta for her son who spent many years homeless and fell into drug addiction. Her son has been conserved. Lauren’s advocacy now centers around . Moderator joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2003 as part of the J.D., JSP, and Legal Studies programs. He teaches in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, criminology, legal studies and the sociology of law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His published works include over seventy articles and book chapters, and three single authored monographs, including: Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass (University of Chicago 1993, winner of the American Sociological Association’s sociology of law book prize, 1994), Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press 2007, winner of the American Society of Criminology, Hindelang Award 2010) and Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New Press 2014). /episode/index/show/socialsciencematrix/id/30701553

Authors Meet Critics: “Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics,” Salar Mameni 04/05/2024

Structural Determinants of Police Violence: Interview with Kimberly Cecilia Burke 03/19/2024

The Scandal of Access: An Interview with Zahra Hayat 03/19/2024

Matrix Podcast

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