RSS FeedUpcoming EventsNature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean, April 1https://events.berkeley.edu/ssm/event/243449-nature-made-economy-cod-capital-and-the-great

Please join us on April 1 for a lecture by Tone Huse, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Abstract

We are constantly presented for visions of a new and expansive ocean economy. At a time when the ocean is challenged by climate change, pollution and over-exploitation it is to be drilled, mined, surveyed, grown and harvested to an unprecedented extent and magnitude. Associate Professor Tone Huse 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. The talk is based her recently published book Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT Press, 2023), co-authored with Kristin Asdal. The book engages with how the ocean and its beings are drawn into increasingly more and tighter economic relations – but also how nature acts in and co-modifies both state and capital. What is a good nature economy? How should we go about in studying the economic relations that are being spun around the ocean? And how are we to meet the great economization of the ocean?

Speakers

Tone Huse is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her current research focuses on the geographies and materialities of urban politics, economies, and planning in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland). Her work spans historical as well as contemporary research, is radically interdisciplinary, and committed to experimenting with new means for interacting with broad publics. Huse is the author of three books, including Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014), and the most recent co-authored Nature Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean.

Discussant: Sharad Chari, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography.

Moderator: Berit Kristoffersen, The Arctic University of Norway

https://events.berkeley.edu/ssm/event/243449-nature-made-economy-cod-capital-and-the-great
Has US Antitrust Reached A Turning Point? A Panel Discussion, April 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/239517-has-us-antitrust-reached-a-turning-point-a-panel

The Biden administration has taken some bold moves to rein in big tech and to challenge market concentration more broadly. Who is winning this battle and why? What are the possibilities for and constraints on a fundamental shift in market power in America? This panel will address these questions and more, bringing together scholars who study the history, theory, and practice of antitrust with advocates directly engaged in policy debates today.

Please join us on April 2, 2024 from 4:00pm-6:00pm for a panel featuring Gerald Berk, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Oregon; Stacy Mitchell, Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; AnnaLee Saxenian, Professor in the School of Information, UC Berkeley; Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project; and Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Science and Political Economy, UC Berkeley.

This event will be presented in-person at Social Science Matrix. It will not be streamed online. Register in advance.

 

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The Gender of Capital, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237686-the-gender-of-capital

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? In this lecture, Céline Bessière will discuss her new co-authored book, The Gender of Capital, which reconsiders the effectiveness of legal reforms that legislate formal equality between men and women, while permitting inequality to persist in practice.

Registration is required. This event is in person and on Zoom. Space is limited. Register today

The Annual Stone Lecture is presented by the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley, a research hub for campus and beyond enabling UC Berkeley’s world-leading scholars to deepen our understanding of the inequality in society and formulate new approaches to address the challenge of creating a more equitable society. The Center serves as the primary convening point at UC Berkeley for research, teaching and data development concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of wealth and income inequalities with a special emphasis on the concentration of wealth at the very top. Learn more

About the book: The Gender of Capital, by Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac

Drawing on research spanning twenty years, the authors analyze what they call family wealth arrangements. They break with the common understanding of the family as an emotional haven of peace in a brutal capitalist world. Spouses and partners, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers do not play the same part in family strategies of social reproduction, nor do they reap the same profits from them. The family is an economic institution that plays a central role in the production, circulation, control and evaluation of wealth. The meaning of this economic institution is revealed, in particular, in moments of marital breakdown and inheritance.

From the single mothers of the French “Yellow Vest” movement to the divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, from the legacy of family businesses to the estate of the Trump family, the mechanisms of control and distribution of capital vary according to social class, yet they always result in the dispossession of women. Capital is gendered. This book describes how class society is perpetuated through the masculine appropriation of capital.


About the speaker:
Céline Bessière is a Professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University (PSL University) and a senior member at the Institut Universitaire de France. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of French Studies at New York University. She studies the material, economic and legal dimensions of family, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and marital breakdown. Her new project is about gender and wealth accumulation in Europe. Her research is at the crossroads of several fields: economic sociology, sociology of law and justice, sociology of gender, class and family. Her most recent book, The Gender of Capital, was recently adapted into a graphic novel with Jeanne Puchol. Read more

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Sarah Wolff | Secular Power Europe: insights on decentring international relations, April 9https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/223910-secular-power-europe-insights-on-decentring-internati

Based on her award winning book (European Union Studies Association Best Book award 2023) Secular Power Europe and Islam and through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, Professor Wolff shows will explain how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. She will document how EU’s diplomats are trying to address that issue and to conduct some ‘religious engagement’. She will also discuss the avenues provided by the decentring agenda, which involves provincialising Europe, engaging with the perspective of the others and reconstructing EU’s agency as a global actor.

Sarah Wolff is Professor in International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She holds until January 2024 a Professor position in European Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London where she also leads the Centre for European Research (2017-2023), led the NEXTEUK Jean Monnet Chair of Excellence (2020-2023) on the future of EU-UK relations. She was the Director of the QMUL MA in International Relations in Paris (2021-2023). Her research concentrates on EU-UK foreign and security cooperation, EU migration and asylum policies, EU-Middle East and North Africa, as well as EU’s policies on gender and religion abroad. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Mediterranean Politics. Her book Michigan University Press on ‘Secular Power Europe and Islam: Identity and foreign policy’(summer 2021) was conducted thanks to a Fulbright-Schuman and a Leverhulme research grants. She is Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and on the steering committee of UACES and of ECPR SGEU.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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RWAP: Stephanie Ternullo: Research Workshop in American Politics, April 24https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/239735-rwap-stephanie-ternullo-research-workshop-in

RWAP is pleased to welcome guest speaker, Stephanie Ternullo on 4/24. 

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Authors Meet Critics, “Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex,” Juana María Rodríguez, May 1https://events.berkeley.edu/ssm/event/239503-authors-meet-critics-puta-life-seeing-latinas

Join us on May 1 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Rodriguez will be joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Milena Britto, Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics 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.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

About the Book

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work’s stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

Panelists

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). In 2023, Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ with the prestigious Kessler Award, in recognition of her significant lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.

Clarissa Rojas is a scholar activist, poet, mama, and movement maker. Her mother’s indigenous lineages in the Americas root her in the Arizona/Sonora deserts. Clarissa grew up in Mexicali/Calexico and San Diego/Chula Vista where her family migrated. She lives in Oakland in unceded Huichin and is faculty in Chicanx Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Davis. Clarissa co-founded INCITE! and has authored and co-edited multiple articles, special issues, and books on violence and the transformation of violence, including Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence and most recently her writing appears in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Abolition Feminisms.

Milena Britto is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender, race, literature and strategies of legitimation in the cultural field. She is also a curator, publishing editor, and has worked in several positions of cultural public policy.

Alberto Ledesma (moderator) is Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He grew up in East Oakland and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnic studies in 1996 and is a former faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He has held several staff positions at UC Berkeley, including director of admissions at the School of Optometry, and writing program coordinator at the Student Learning Center. He is the author of the award winning illustrated autobiography, Diary of A Reluctant Dreamer.

https://events.berkeley.edu/ssm/event/239503-authors-meet-critics-puta-life-seeing-latinas