From its strategic location in the Bay Area, BESI is uniquely positioned to leverage UC Berkeley’s established expertise in the political economy of emerging technologies to inform our collective understanding of digital systems, biotechnology innovation, and climate-related technological development.
The BESI Technology cluster serves as a central hub, connecting dynamic research across campus on the political, economic, and social dimensions of technology. By bridging scholarship and policy, we address urgent questions about how technological change shapes democracy, sustainability, and human rights in contemporary society.
The rise of digital platforms has already revolutionized the way people work, pay for goods and services, and contract with each other. Big data and predictive analytics have transformed how corporations make money and how states govern.
“Disruptions” associated with biotechnological innovation have unsettled long-standing legal protections and collective norms across numerous sectors of the economy, extending even to the governance of the body.
Technology is implicated on both sides of the green transition as a potential source of solutions, but also out-of-control electricity consumption.
The erosion of protected markets (e.g., the taxi industry), licensed occupations (e.g., real estate), knowledge monopolies (e.g., news media, higher education), and shared expectations (e.g., the right to repair one’s own devices, appliances, and vehicles) under the influence of large technology firms is not inevitable, but the product of political and legal choices. These market reorganizations can, in some respects, be desirable: They may enhance efficiency, broaden inclusion, and reflect genuine commitments to fairness.
Yet, they have also concentrated economic power and wealth on an unprecedented scale, deepened social divisions, and eroded privacy and solidarity.
Research Lead, Technology
Distinguished Professor and Alann P. Bedford Chair in Asian Studies, Political Science
Assistant Professor of Practice, School of Information
Department Chair and Associate Professor, Geography
Associate Professor, Sociology
Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law
BESI welcomes inquiries from UC Berkeley faculty and graduate-level scholars working in political economy. To learn more about our research programs and how to get involved in BESI, please use our contact form.
September 17, 2025
In a September 2025 article for the journal Politics and Society, Isabella Mariani advocates for antitrust legislation that centers the autonomy of the user as part of a solution to the problems of the attention economy.
September 21, 2024
Legal scholar and BESI Technology Network affiliate Tejas N. Narachania makes the case for an antimonopoly approach to governing AI in this article for Yale Law & Policy Review, co-authored by Ganesh Sitaraman, the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law at Vanderbilt University.
July 1, 2024
Today’s critiques about geography in a world influenced by AI shadow debates from two decades ago, argues geographer and BESI Technology Network affiliate Clancy Wilmott in an article for the journal Dialogues in Human Geography. By returning to these debates, as well as critique by Black, queer, and Indigenous computing seen in other disciplines, geographers have the opportunity to deeply influence the future of computation via a situated, critical geographical thought and action.
May 29, 2024
In this article for the journal Policy and Society, BESI Technology Network affiliate Brian Judge and his co-authors at the Center for Human-Compatible AI examine the challenges of regulating AI and propose an adapted model of regulation suitable for AI’s novel features.
April 26, 2024
Berkeley EECS associate professor and BESI Technology Network affiliate Aditya Parameswaran recently co-led a series of ethnographic engineers with machine learning engineers on how they manage the staggering challenge of operationalizing the deployment of these models. In this article, Parameswaran and his co-authors report on their results.
December 9, 2023
In an article for the journal Social Problems, BESI participating faculty member Armando Lara-Millán and San Francisco State associate professor Melissa Guzman Garcia explore how neighborhood digital platforms may increase solidarity and exclusionary impulses.
November 1, 2023
In an essay for Vanderbilt Law Review, Berkeley Law professor and BESI Technology Network affiliate Andrea Roth shows how critical gaps in evidence law arise from an overemphasis on cross-examination and the danger of insincerity. She suggests changes to evidence rules and constitutional evidence doctrines that would better achieve accuracy — especially as proof becomes exceedingly technologically complex over the next fifty years.
