Berkeley Journal of Sociology

The gentrifying force of San Francisco’s tech industry is inextricably linked to the global financial economy. Injections of venture capital are reshaping local legacies of discrimination.

Rethinking the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism with C. Wright Mills.

On November 13, 2013, a public housing apartment complex on Detroit’s East Side was raided by 150 officers from the Detroit Police Department and several other state and federal agencies. A resident tells his side of the story.

Two years after the Big Data hype of 2012, the midterm elections are exposing the flaws of Nate Silver’s statistical approach to politics: Journalism should work to make the world more comprehensible, not more predictable.

In the digital era of so-called Facebook revolutions or hashtag activism, many claim that participation in social movements is individualized and personalized, but building and sustaining a political movement, even an online movement, still requires organization.

Current discussions about prefigurative politics bring back warm and reflective memories for former SNCC organizer Mike Miller. He discusses SNCC’s beloved community and its strategic dilemmas.

Comparing Occupy Wall Street and an outgrowth of the movement in the SF Bay Area called Occupy the Farm, participant-researcher Daniel Murray argues that the movement for radical democracy must do more than create spaces for discourse and dissent. It must be a movement of democratic counter-institutions.

It will take well-designed alternative institutions and robust popular movements to create a better world. Gabriel Hetland explores the complicated relationship between institution- and movement-building that has taken place in Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution”, highlighting the lessons activists and scholars in the US might learn from this. 

As an anthropologist, my research lies at the intersection of gentrification, displacement, evictions and resistance to these processes in New York City and San Francisco. As I carry out my ethnographic fieldwork I feel myself drawn to poetry as a different way of documenting and engaging in what I am observing and experiencing. In particular […]

Just as transparency may protect citizens from a government overreaching its bounds, there is also safety in secrets. A cultural and historical inquiry into a contemporary issue.

Around the world, students, teachers, parents and employees have been protesting against the increasing commercialization and privatization of public education.

Radical social movement unionism among UC academic workers represented by the UAW provides a model for connecting labor struggles with the fight to defend public goods.