Past Events

California Spotlight

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Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness

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.

Panel

Storytelling and the Climate Crisis

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.

Lecture

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Traumatic Repercussions: Black Women and Obstetric Racism

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.

Symposium

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Understanding AI: Humanities x Social Sciences x Technology 

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.

Authors Meet Critics

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Authors Meet Critics: “Terracene,” by Salar Mameni

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.

Lecture

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Included-Variable Bias and Everything but the Kitchen Sink

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.  

Lecture

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Elijah Anderson: Black Success, White Backlash, and the “N-Word Moment”

Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, large numbers of Black people have made their way into settings previously occupied only by whites. While many whites supported these changes, many others felt that their own rights were being abrogated by Black inclusion. Moreover, Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color—and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement. Join us on February 20, 2024 for a lecture by Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University.

Matrix On Point

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Matrix on Point: Surveillance and Privacy in a Biometric World

As governments and businesses begin to use more forms of biometric identification – including fingerprints, facial recognition, and voice recognition, among others – it’s easier than ever to recognize a person. What implications do these technologies have on the future of privacy and surveillance? This Matrix on Point panel will feature John Chuang, Professor in the School of Information; Lawrence Cohen, Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies; and Jennifer Urban, Clinical Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. The panel will be moderated by Rebecca Wexler, Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law.

Lecture

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Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice

Please join us on Wednesday, February 8 at 2:00pm Pacific for a hybrid (in-person and online) talk, “Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice,” by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner. Basing his insights on several years of clinical experience and critical psychology theory, Barnwell draws attention to how people’s psychological relationship to place is threatened through grievous acts of epistemic injustices — violence directed at knowledge and speech.

Lecture

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Defensive Nationalism: Explaining The Rise Of Populism And Fascism In The 21st Century

Join us on February 6, 2024 at 4:00pm as Professor Beth Rabinowitz will discuss her recent book, "Defensive Nationalism: Explaining the Rise of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century," and the powerful thesis that the irrationalism and hatred that marked the early 20th century has resurged in the 21st. In turn, our response to violent instability and fracture requires a clear-eyed understanding of the explosive politics of both eras.

Authors Meet Critics

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Author Meets Critics: Andrew Garrett, “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall”

Please join us on January 19, 2024 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Professor Garrett will be joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California. Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Lecture

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Elizabeth Joh: “Police Technology Experiments”

How do algorithmic surveillance tools piloted by the police function as technology experiments on communities? Join us on Thursday, December 7 at 12pm for a talk entitled "Police Technology Experiements," by Elizabeth Joh, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis.