Past Events

Please join us on Wednesday, April 17 at 12:00pm for an in-person lecture by Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. Presented as part of the CRELS Symposium Series.

Join the Department of African American Studies for a talk from the first scholar in residence of the Banned Scholars Program: Dr. Alisha Gaines. In “Children of the Plantationocene,” Alisha Gaines considers two interrelated questions: MacArthur Genius Tiya Miles’s 2020 query in The Boston Globe, “What should we do with plantations?;” and Christina Sharpe’s question in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, “how do we defend the dead?”

Join us on April 8 for an Author Meets Critics panel on the book, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures, by Professor Youjin Chung, Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. 

Why do women in different social classes accumulate less wealth than men? Why do marital separations impoverish women while they do not prevent men from maintaining or increasing their wealth? Join us on April 4, 2024 at 12pm for "The Gender of Capital," a lecture by Céline Bessière, professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University and a senior member at the Institut Universitaire de France. The lecture is presented by the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality.

Join us for a lecture by Tone Huse, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, who will discuss her book, which presents an analysis of how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation. She discusses how living nature is wrested into the economy, but also shows how nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy.

Register to join us for a panel featuring three early-career scholars from UC Berkeley presenting their research on the greening infrastructure and the green energy transition. The panel will feature Johnathan Guy, PhD Candidate in Political Science; Caylee Hong, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, and Andrew Jaeger, PhD Candidate in Sociology. The panel will be moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

Register to join us on March 18 for a discussion of Professor Alex V. Barnard’s book, "Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness," which analyzes conservatorship, a legal system used to take legal guardianship over individuals deemed unable to meet their own basic needs. Barnard will be joined by advocate Lauren Rettagliata and Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law at Berkeley Law.

Please join us on Monday, March 11 at 4:00pm for a panel discussion entitled "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. In this panel, we’ll hear from writers and scholars of different genres — science fiction, journalism, history, literary fiction, and comedy — about how the climate crisis has impacted their craft and what practices of storytelling have to offer us at this pivotal moment in human history.

Join us on March 7, 2024 at 2pm for an in-person lecture by Dána-Ain Davis, Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. This talk will chart the way two Black reproducing bodies are shaped by obstetric racism. Davis will share the birthing experiences of two women and think through their medical encounters by considering how Black bodies are degraded, ushering them toward mistreatment. Here, Davis argues that obstetric racism produces traumatic repercussions  weighed down by disposability, neglect, and medical abuse.

Understanding and interpreting AI is the new frontier in AI research. While advances in the performance of AI models have seen enormous successes, a profound understanding of how learning happens inside the models remains to be thoroughly explored. Understanding how AI learns has the potential to help us gain novel insights in science, technology, and other fields, as well as to observe novel causal relationships in various types of data. Interpreting the internal workings of AI models can also shed light on how the human mind works and how we are similar to and different from machines. This symposium will focus on immediate challenges in AI interpretability and explore how the humanities, social sciences, and the tech world can join forces in this highly consequential research.

Please join us in-person on Monday, March 4, 2024 from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Terracene, by Professor Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Professor Mameni will be joined by Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz; Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley; and Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Join us on February 22 at 12pm for a talk by Sharad Goel, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.