Matrix Podcast

In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Xavier Buck , Deputy Director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation , a nonprofit that has preserved and promoted the legacy of the Black Panther Party for over 25 years. Buck graduated with a PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021. His work blends organizing and educational pursuits in the service of sustaining movements for Black live...

In this podcast, Julia Sizek interviews Juliana Friend , a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on the intersection of technology, privacy, and culture. Her dissertation, "Don't Click Here! Porn, Privacy, and Digital Dissidence in Senegal," examines how digital dissidents are transforming the idea of sutura (discretion or modesty), a concept used to d...

In this episode, Julia Sizek, a Phd candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, interviews scholars Hannah Zeavin and Valerie Black about teletherapy, which describes all forms of remote therapy, from letter-writing to chatbots. Both of these UC Berkeley researchers study the history and experience of these tools of therapy, which are often assumed to be more impersonal than and infer...

Youjin Chung is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Equity at the University of California Berkeley, with a joint appointment in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Her work encompasses the political economy of development, feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, and African studies. She draws on ethnogra...

In this podcast, Michael Watts interviews Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley. Professor Herman's research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context. Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – through high diplomacy and on-the-ground examination...

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Clancy Wilmott , Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography. Clancy comes to UC Berkeley from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where she received her PhD in Human Geography with a multi-site study on the interaction betw...

In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Leigh Raiford , Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle , finalist for the 2011 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. In  Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare , Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years,...

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Brittany Birberick, an anthropology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. Birberick's dissertation project focuses on urban transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. More broadly, she writes and thinks about economies, migration, temporality, and aesthetics within an urban context. Her dissertation, "Paved with Gold: Urban Tr...

In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Professor Mariane C. Ferme, a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence, and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone.   Ferme's latest book, "Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone," draws on her three decades of ethnographic enga...

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Desiree Fields , an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urba...

Recorded in February 2020, this episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview between Professor Michael Watts , Emeritus "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography and Development Studies at UC Berkeley, and Dacher Keltner , Professor of Psychology and Director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory . Keltner is also the Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center . Professor Kelt...