Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

UC Berkeley study finds immigrants more likely to earn STEM degrees

July 29, 2025

Immigrants of all racial and ethnic groups are equally or more likely to hold STEM degrees than their U.S.-born white peers, according to a new study from UC Berkeley Visiting Research Professor Byeongdon Oh, who has coined the term “STEM immigration” to describe the growing trend.

Published recently in SageJournals, Oh’s paper — STEM Immigration and U.S. STEM Workforce Development at the Intersections of Race/...

From Cuneiform to Modern Greek: Exploring Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures with Christine Philliou

July 25, 2025

Headshot of Christine Philliou, woman with short curly hair wearing a floral blouseChristine Philliou is currently the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a Professor in the Department of History. Professor Philliou specializes in the region of the Balkans and the Middle East, specifically focused on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states. She has published Biography of Empire...

As chatbots get smarter, humans’ unique language abilities are becoming less special

July 14, 2025

AI platforms like ChatGPT are widely understood to be sophisticated prediction machines. Trained on vast troves of content ranging from news articles and books to film scripts and Reddit posts, they anticipate the next most likely letters and words when prompted. While their responses can give the impression they’re sentient thinkers, that sci-fi scenario hasn’t yet panned out.

But new UC Berkeley research reveals for the first time that AI chatbots can now analyze sentences like a trained linguist. The study...

New poll finds most Californians believe American democracy is in peril

July 14, 2025

An overwhelming number of California voters think American democracy is being threatened or, at the very least, tested, according to a new pollreleased Thursday by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

The poll, conducted for the nonprofit Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, found that concerns cut across the partisan...

Berkeley Talks: Ezra Klein on building the things we need for the future we want (revisiting)

July 14, 2025

Today we are revisiting an October 2023 Berkeley Talks episode in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties liberal governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. He joins in a conversation with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

“To have the...

He pioneered the cellphone. It changed how people around the world talk to one another — and don’t

July 7, 2025

“Dick Tracy” got an atom-powered, two-way wrist radio in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot it.

The Chicago boy became a star engineer who ran Motorola’s research and development arm when the hometown telecommunications titan was locked in a 1970s corporate battle to invent the portable phone. Cooper rejected AT&T’s wager on the car phone, betting that America wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, armed with “a device that was an extension of you, that made you reachable everywhere.”

Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared victory in a call from a Manhattan sidewalk to the head of AT...

When warnings never cease, can we still trust our instincts?

July 7, 2025

UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells first watched the 1990 movie Arachnophobia as a kid. Her mom warned her not to see it: The horror-comedy, about a California town terrorized by a deadly species of spider accidentally imported from a Venezuelan jungle, was PG-13, and Landau-Wells was a lot younger than 13. But some of her friends were going to the theater to see it — at least one of their parents thought it was fine — so she went.

“I now have this deep-seated conviction that all spiders are at least 8 inches in...

The Exam-Free Experiment: What Happened When One University Bet on Group Projects

July 3, 2025

To promote deeper learning and fairer outcomes, many education systems have moved away from traditional in-class exams toward lower-stakes, more flexible forms of assessment. Yet despite the growing popularity of this shift, we still know little about its long-term consequences. What began as a single in-class exam has evolved into a mix of midterms, finals, take-home tests, re-takes, problem sets, and participation-based grading. In some cases, assessments now depend more on whether students complete their work than how well they perform. This trend has extended beyond the classroom: many...

Big Ideas course explores mass incarceration and collective safety

June 24, 2025

While the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, it holds almost 25% of the world’s incarcerated people, according to the U.S. Census and World Prison Population List. Why?

“Prison Abolition,” an interdisciplinary American Cultures course sponsored by the College of Letters & Science Big Ideas program, explores this issue by examining the social impacts of incarceration and its alternatives. During the Spring 2025 term, the course was taught by Ethnic Studies Professor and Former Department Chair Keith Feldman alongside...

New research says framing protests as fights for civil rights ‘backfires.’ So what might work?

June 23, 2025

Millions of people took to the streets last weekend in solidarity against President Donald Trump. Protest signs and public speeches decried his administration’s attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups. Many protesters deemed current policies an affront to civil rights.

But framing modern...