Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

What’s a good job for formerly incarcerated people?

You often hear this mantra from people in corrections: Get a job, any job. Work will reduce your risk of going back behind bars. As a result, people coming out of prison feel pushed to take jobs that have difficult schedules, low pay, no benefits or poor working conditions.

That’s bad advice. In my research with other scholars, we’ve found that formerly incarcerated people just churn through jobs like that. Indeed,...

UC Berkeley’s African American Studies (AAS) Department launched a groundbreaking project this week with a $100,000 Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Banned Scholars Project is a direct response to increasing restrictions on academic freedom, particularly in the fields of critical race theory, DEI and gender studies. It was spearheaded by AAS professors Michael M. Cohen, Tianna S. Paschel and Ula Taylor; department chair Nikki Jones; and managed by staffer Barbara Montano.

The Mellon Foundation,...

UC Berkeley Anthropology Department Professor and Chair Sabrina Agarwal’s long career has made a big impact in her field of research, teaching and student mentorship. Her research focuses on age and sex-related changes in bone quantity and quality, as well as the application of biocultural and life course approaches to the study of bone health to examine the dynamics of gender and social inequality in the past and...

Focusing her research on the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on the economy, Professor Emi Nakamura brings her distinguished academic background to UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics.

Nakamura is the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal; co-vice chair of the Economics Department; previous co-editor of the American Economic Review; a member of the American Academy of Arts and...