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.
March 30, 2026
This project looks at how AI is being developed and adopted within religious organizations. This is a project that spans disciplinary boundaries, bringing digital sociology and the sociology of culture into conversation with theology and religious studies.
March 30, 2026
An increasingly important and overlooked dimension of digital content quality for kids is the level of visual stimulation. This project uses computer vision to quantify these overstimulating visual features that are linked to adverse cognitive and behavioral outcomes.
March 30, 2026
This project revisits the net neutrality debate in light of contemporary technological realities. Distributed caching infrastructure is no longer incidental; it is functionally necessary for high-performance internet service. The authors propose democratizing caching by requiring that first-hop ISPs offer standardized caching services as a component of baseline broadband access.
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.
July 1, 2025
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.
June 10, 2025
Mobile home parks are critical because they provide affordable housing in a market where affordability is otherwise scarce, but they’re also double burdened, vulnerable to both climate risks and financial exploitation. This research focuses on insurance in mobile home parks (MHPs) as an extreme case to explore the overlap of the climate and home affordability crisis in California.
June 10, 2025
Geoengineering raises questions both about how to govern research and also how to govern future deployment. this BESI Tech Collaborative Grant project brings multiple teams focusing on the technologies, ethics, and governance of geoengineering.
June 10, 2025
The digital economy has penetrated nearly every aspect of society. This research project seeks to examine the effects of this prolific phenomenon on our social and personal development, our ability to access basic needs and social services, and our political and legal institutions and culture.
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.
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.
