Social Science Matrix
107 episodes listed below
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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.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Scholarly panels make complex disputes legible by defining their terms, testing claims, and preserving disagreement across disciplines.
Matrix Podcast lets scholarly arguments develop through lectures, book discussions and panels recorded at Social Science Matrix. The conversations connect research to live questions of power: antitrust law and corporate competition, technology and China, Indigenous territorial…
One Berkeley panel can make you see your phone's operating system as a security question.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A black feminist house emerges from memory, struggle, and the shared materials of social justice.
Professor Taylor's lecture frames the making of Francis M. Beale's Black Feminist House as something built from lived encounters, not from a single political awakening.
A layered portrait of Oakland through geology, ports, memory, and dust.
Alexis Madrigal's lecture looks at Oakland as a city shaped by geology, memory, and the Pacific port network that helped make its modern life possible.
A grounded South Carolina study of how New Deal policy became daily practice in one community.
New Deal policy comes into focus at the scale of a South Carolina community, where federal programs become prefabricated homes, seed grants, livestock lists, and instructions for how a family ought to live.
A measured method piece on how parole hearings become readable at scale.
AJ Alvaro treats California parole hearings as a problem of legibility: how institutions show up in language, scale, and procedure. He works from 34,993 usable transcripts and keeps the method grounded, using NLP, manual annotation, and tabular records to show the same process…
Julia Sizek shows how off-road vehicles make land access a recurring legal and ecological problem.
Off-road vehicle use becomes a sharp way into the larger question of how land-use conflict is created, displaced, and governed. In conversation with Matrix director Marion Foucade, Julia Sizek lays out the legal cycle: riders pushed off private land move into fresh disputes with…
A wide election discussion that treats ballots as symptoms of larger democratic and economic strain.
This panel uses elections as a window into wider democratic strain, folding liberal democracy together with capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and slavery.
A careful conversation about how counterinsurgency can reshape incentives around gendered violence.
Counterinsurgency can change the incentives that shape violence against women, and Tara Chandra gives that possibility a political frame. In conversation with Julia Seizik, she pushes against the idea that such violence is inevitable, linking her work to research on sexual…
A thoughtful panel on psychedelics, moving from mental health to public policy.
Matrix treats the resurgence of psychedelics as a serious public debate about mental health, spirituality, and the limits of human consciousness.
Campus radio from the wrong side of reality.
Campus decisions, Northeast news, and Northeast priorities.
How research culture changes in practice.
Conversations from inside the IT channel.
Matrix Podcast’s episode on the state of higher education in Britain features James Vernon, a UC Berkeley history professor, interviewing Lorna Finlayson, a political theorist at the University of Essex and author of The Political is Political and An Introduction to Feminism.
The Matrix Podcast frames the 1875 Page Act as more than an old exclusion law.
The Matrix Podcast presents a UC Berkeley panel on fringe politics.
The Matrix Podcast features a Berkeley event with economist Maximilian Casey discussing his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works and Who Benefits.
Rosalind Shea opens the Berkeley panel.
Social Science Matrix presents an Author Meets Critics panel on Sherry Hundolph's 2024 UC Press book, *Native Lands, Culture, and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims*.
Sarah Harrington opens the Matrix Authors Meet Critics panel around Patrice Douglas's Engendering Blackness: Slavery in the Ontology of Sexual Violence.
The panel opens by placing California agriculture at a critical juncture.
Devon Norris argues that consumer credit scoring became easier to defend as racially inclusive because U.S.
Social Science Matrix opens a California Spotlight panel on higher education under pressure, with the U.C.
Marie Foucault opens the panel by framing conspiracy theory as a central problem of the present.
Matrix stages a serious conversation about the resurgence of psychedelics.
Matrix Podcast's "Matrix on Point: Spaces for Thriving" brings together Yutian Sheng, Sally Augustine, and Karen Nakamura to test how space shapes power, access, and well-being.
Marion Foucault opens the Matrix Teach-In series and introduces Seth Lunine, a UC Berkeley lecturer in geography whose work links undergraduate teaching with community-based research in Oakland.
Sarah Payne, a postdoctoral research associate at the Broad Center at Yale School of Management, discusses her Sociology of Education article "Equalization or Reproduction, Some College and the Social Function of Higher Education," published in April 2023.
Matrix Podcast’s “Matrix on Point: Financializing Disaster” centers on homeowner insurance, climate risk, and housing inequality at UC Berkeley, with Marion Fouquet and Meg Mills-Novoa introducing a panel that includes Dave Jones, Desiree Fields, and Stephen Collier.
Matrix Podcast’s episode "Matrix on Point: The New Gender Gap" centers on a panel at UC Berkeley with Corey Hayden, Kira Hudson, Xiaolin Xu, and Rachel Bernhard.
Matrix Podcast's "New Directions: Borderlands" brings together UC Berkeley graduate students to examine the U.S.-Mexico border through railroad labor, return migration, and Arizona's immigration enforcement regime.
Matrix Podcast's "Matrix on Point: Corruption in America" brings together Marion Fourcade, Sean Gelmard, Ernesto Dalbó, Sarah Anzia, and Erwin Chemerinsky at UC Berkeley to examine corruption from economics, political science, and law.
The Matrix Podcast presents a panel on the shifting world of antitrust policy.
By 2019, people without college were 26 times more likely than college attendees among Black Americans, and 32 times among white Americans, to enter prison.
Cori Hayden introduces a Matrix author-meets-critics panel on *Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order*.
Social Science Matrix convenes a panel on the Los Angeles wildfires.
Alexis Madrigal’s Matrix lecture argues that “the real world is alive” and that Oakland can only be understood through place, water, labor, and history.
AJ Alvaro lays out a computational sociology study of parole hearing transcripts.
Morgan Vickers traces how New Deal agencies in South Carolina used the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Rural Rehabilitation Program to relocate families, build prefabricated homes, and enforce quotas, school attendance, and health surveillance.
Julia Sizek traces California desert off-road conflict to WEMO, the West Mojave Plan, and a 1980 trail baseline that the Bureau of Land Management must keep using even though the original map does not exist.
This episode of the Matrix Podcast features a panel discussion analyzing the 2024 elections in South Africa, Mexico, Europe, India, and the U.S., exploring themes like incumbent revolts, democracy crises, and economic factors.
This episode features an interview with Tara Chandra, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, discussing her research on gendered violence in insurgencies.