Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

For more than six decades, the Berkeley Psychology Clinic has trained doctoral students for careers in mental health by supervising them during therapy for the East Bay community at large as well as UC Berkeley students.

Over time, the clinic’s mission has become even more important as treatment costs have risen and access to care has remained uneven. Today, it continues to provide mental health services for adults, children and students at affordable rates, who often lack reliable insurance coverage to seek private therapy.

The...

The term “person of color” has grown increasingly common in American public life. A new Berkeley Political Science paper, “Who Counts as a ‘Person of Color’? The Roles of Ancestry, Phenotype, Self-Identification and Other Factors” seeks to answer what the term actually means to the public, and more specifically, how Americans decide who falls under that label.

UC Berkeley Political Science Ph.D. student William Halm conducted a survey experiment to determine which characteristics matter most in classifying someone as a person of color....

Asked if his new book on the history of capitalism is hopeful, Trevor Jackson outright laughs. The UC Berkeley history professor has spent his career documenting the rise of the economic system that orders the lives of most people on the planet.

The resulting book, The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, is rife with tales of precipitous inequality, bloodshed and environmental...

Should chatbots be protected under the First Amendment? That was the central question at this year’s Ambassador Frank E. Baxter Lecture, where legal scholar and UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh argued that the future of free speech may depend less on who is talking and more on who is listening.

Volokh’s lecture, hosted by the Berkeley Liberty Initiative (BLI) and titled “AI, The Law and Free Speech,” examined whether the outputs of generative AI models...