Social Sciences

UC Berkeley study examines the politics of police technology adoption

March 13, 2026

A recently published UC Berkeley study identifies the key factors that lead cities to adopt controversial new police technologies. In an era of rapid technological change and growing concerns over surveillance, these findings help clarify what drives these policy choices.

The study finds that agency size, rather than partisan leaning or local crime conditions, is the strongest predictor of technology adoption. It was conducted by recent UC Berkeley Sociology Ph.D alum Ángel Ross, now a Provostial Fellow at Stanford, alongside UC Berkeley Political...

Traditional Pacific navigators bring the intricate science of wayfinding to the Bay Area

March 10, 2026

Organized by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technologies Coordinator for the Berkeley Center for New Media, a weeklong series of public workshops beginning March 9 will feature master navigators teaching everything from traditional canoe technology to ancient star-mapping.

Sophia Perez thought her 2018 visit to Saipan, in the Pacific Ocean’s Northern Mariana Islands, would only last a few weeks.

She’d graduated from UC Berkeley with a double-major in rhetoric and ethnic studies in 2014, and went on to work in commercial film and media production in Los Angeles and...

Psychology professor explains how youth use Roblox to cope with immigration raids

March 6, 2026

People process immigration raids in so many different ways. For some children and young adults, the online gaming platform Roblox is their way of making sense of these events and participating in the national discourse, according to Psychology Professor Giovanni Ramos.

They do this by role-playing Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducting raids and community members protesting them. Clips of these reenactments appeared on TikTok, prompting a Roblox spokesperson to tell the Associated Press it’s a violation of Roblox’s community...

UC Berkeley Professor Darlène Dubuisson found ‘liberation’ in reading. It led her to study how Black people imagine better futures

March 5, 2026

Darlène Dubuisson is the newest faculty member in UC Berkeley’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. In this first-person narrative, she shares how her unconventional educational path ultimately led her to her current field of study at Berkeley.

My academic story is a strange one.

Before college, I had not been taught by a teacher in a classroom since the first grade. My mother was an immigrant from Haiti, and we were a single-parent, working-...

Law professor says a federal fair share tax would address wealth inequality

March 4, 2026

A new federal “fair share tax” could raise significant revenue from the nation’s wealthiest households while avoiding constitutional barriers that have stymied other proposals to tax extreme wealth, UC Berkeley Law Professor Brian Galle said during a recent James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality lecture at UC Berkeley.

Galle outlined the proposal during a talk titled “How to Tax the Rich,” based on his...

Berkeley Social Sciences Strategic Plan

Following more than a year of consultation, the Social Science Dean’s Office has identified a series of priorities that will guide us over the next five to seven years. On campus, we will engage our diverse student populations, both undergraduate and graduate. We will continue to ensure opportunities for them to develop analytical skills, preparing them to be honest and ethical members of society– while also preparing them for the twenty-first century workplace. We will continue supporting real innovation through social science research. More than ever before, we will seek to share our...

A UC Berkeley professor explains the thorny history of love, sex and marriage

February 26, 2026

On the first day of his seminar on the history of love, sex and marriage in the United States, David Henkin introduces UC Berkeley students to a Frank Sinatra song: “Love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage / This I tell you, brother / You can’t have one without the other,” Sinatra croons.

Then Henkin asks his students to compare the 1955 tune with a very different text: Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in...