Matrix Podcast

What are the economic consequences of starting, but not completing college? On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Sarah Harrington, Program Manager at Social Science Matrix, spoke with Sarah Payne, a sociologist who recently published a paper in Sociology of Education that examined what happens when students begin college but fail to graduate. "Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt," Payne wrote. "However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated." Payne is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. She earned a PhD and an MA in sociology from UC Berkeley and bachelor's degrees from Wellesley College. She studies culture, inequality, and organizations, particularly in contexts of education and precarious work, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research investigates how racial inequality is produced, reproduced, and mitigated, as well as the meaning people make of it. She examines PK-12 schools, higher education, and work in early adulthood as contexts where these processes happen. She is particularly interested in inequality at the intersections of race, gender, and class, and in how subjectivity (selves, emotions, mental health, social psychology, agency), culture, and debt relate to racial inequality in organizations and society. Payne's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, Payne worked in PK-12 public education and college access, state government, and public interest organizing. She has been a middle school teacher and college counselor in Louisiana, and she co-founded College Beyond, a college persistence non-profit serving Pell-eligible undergraduates in the Greater New Orleans region. A full transcript of the recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sarah-payne.

Recorded on December 4, 2025, this video features a Social Science Matrix Distinguished Lecture, "To Know a Place," presented by journalist and author Alexis Madrigal. Madrigal has long explored how technology, culture, and environment shape our lives; from his work co-founding The COVID Tracking Project to his books Powering the Dream and The Pacific Circuit. In this talk, Madrigal turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he explores different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us. About the Speaker Alexis Madrigal is a journalist in Oakland, California. He is the co-host of KQED's current affairs show, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, The Pacific Circuit, came out in March 2025 from MCD x FSG. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. Madrigal authored the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School and UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard. A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/alexis-madrigal.

Recorded on December 2, 2025, this video features a talk by Maximilian Kasy, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, presenting his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits). This talk was 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. The talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Economics. A transcript of this recording can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/max-kasy. About the Book AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate. As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners' wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn't between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us. The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology's owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI's objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls "the means of prediction," or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity's most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power. Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI's capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms. The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology. About the Speaker Maximilian Kasy received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His current research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. Kasy teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. Learn more at his website.

Recorded on November 17, 2025, this recording features a talk by Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who presented a talk reflecting on his experiences with collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland's Fruitvale District. Lunine's courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, which aims to transform how faculty's community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy. In Fall 2024, students in Lunine's Geography 50AC: California collaborated with Canticle Farm and Restorative Media, two nonprofits located in the Oakland Fruitvale District. ACES students developed story maps to represent the spatial histories of the Canticle Farm site. To create these story maps, they analyzed historical newspaper articles, real estate promotions, archeological reports, and city planning documents, revealing legacies of Indigenous stewardship, the Brown Power movement, redlining, and criminalization that has shaped Canticle Farm. Another group of ACES students collaborated with the Executive Director of Restorative Media, an organization led by formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people, to interview Canticle Farm stakeholders about their movement activism and life stories. This event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center, and presented as part of a new event series featuring talks by UC Berkeley lecturers and professors who earn praise from students for their teaching. The speakers are invited to deliver a favorite standalone lecture, reimagined for anyone curious to learn. A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/seth-lunine.

The technical world of insurance is a critical lens through which to understand the escalating crises in climate change and housing. As climate risks intensify, both public and private homeowner insurance markets face unprecedented pressure, revealing the interconnections between housing affordability, wealth inequality, and the broader financialization of our communities. Recorded on November 13, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore the intersection of insurance, housing, and climate. The panel featured Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Meg Mills-Novoa, Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group, moderated. The panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI). A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/financializing-disaster.

Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes. Recorded on November 3, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. The discussion bridged diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments. The panel featured You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, moderated. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Anthropology. A video and transcript of this podcast are available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/spaces-for-thriving

Conspiracy theories are a pervasive and powerful force in contemporary society, shaping public discourse and influencing real-world events. Understanding their origins, spread, and impact is crucial in navigating today's information landscape. Recorded on October 27, 2025, this panel brought together experts to delve into the multifaceted world of conspiracy theories. Drawing on diverse academic perspectives, the discussion explored the nature of conspiracy theories, their societal implications, and how they are understood and addressed. The panel featured Michael M. Cohen, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and Tim Tangherlini, Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Lakshmi Sarah, journalist and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, moderated. Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian, African American Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. A video and transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/conspiracy-theories.

On October 15, 2025, Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, by Patrice Douglass, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Douglass was joined in conversation by Salar Mameni, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Henry Washington, Jr., Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley, moderated. The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies. 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. About the Book In this incisive book, Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence — one of the most prevalent under slavery — continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. "Engendering Blackness" urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history. For a transcript of this panel, please see https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/engendering-blackness.

Recorded on September 22, 2025, this video features a talk by Davon Norris, Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) and Faculty Associate at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan. Professor Norris's research is broadly oriented to understanding how our ways of determining what is valuable informs patterns of inequality with an acute focus on racism and racial inequality. Often, this means he studies the history, construction, and operation of various ratings, scores, and rankings whether that be at the government level (i.e., government credit ratings) or individual level (i.e., consumer credit scores). Other work that comes out of this interest in valuation processes further probes questions related to finance and the role of credit and debt in shaping inequality. His research has been published in outlets such as Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Social Problems, and Sociological Forum, and has received awards from the Future of Privacy Forum and American Sociological Association. His work has been funded by the American Sociological Association. Davon received his Bachelor of Science in Accounting (2014), Master of Arts in Sociology (2018) and Ph.D. (2022) in Sociology all from The Ohio State University. This talk, "Legitimation by (Mis)identification: Credit, Discrimination, and the Racial Epistemology of Algorithmic Expansion," was presented as 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. (Learn more at: https://crels.berkeley.edu/.) The event was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu. A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/davon-norris

Borders reflect the many social, historical, and political forces that shape global movement and identity. While borders often suggest fixed lines of division, the experiences within and around them increasingly influence national and global understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and human rights. Recorded on October 1, 2025, this panel together a group of UC Berkeley graduate students from the fields of history, sociology, and ethnic studies for a discussion on borders and their impact, particularly through the lens of migration, mobility, and resistance across the U.S.-Mexico border. The panel featured Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate in History; Adriana Ramirez, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and Irene Franco Rubio, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies. Hidetaka Hirota, Professor of History, moderated. The Social Science Matrix New Directions event series features research presentations by graduate students from different social science disciplines. This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, Department of Ethnic Studies, and Department of History. For a transcript of this podcast, visit https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/borderlands.