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Welcome to Berkeley Sociology

Berkeley’s Sociology Department is known around the world for its excellence in research and teaching. Our faculty advance cutting edge research and teach in most sociological specialities. Our PhDs are leaders in universities and research centers across the US and in many other countries. And our BAs populate the ranks of innumerable professions, bringing with them the skills and special perspective of Berkeley sociology. 

We are proud to make these contributions from the world’s leading public university. At Berkeley, we combine intellectual rigor with a commitment to public service through our research, teaching, and service on campus and beyond. 

For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.

Faculty Spotlight
Neil Fligstein
Class of 1939 Professor
Economic sociology, political economy, organizational theory
Yan Long
Assistant Professor
Global and transnational sociology, political sociology, health and medicine, organizations, gender and sexualities
Irene Bloemraad
Class of 1951 Professor
Immigration, political sociology, race & ethnicity, social movements, nationalism, research methods, Canada
In Memoriam
Albert Einstein (1941)
Albert Einstein (1941)
EMERITUS PROFESSOR

Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…

Faculty Publishing
[homepage] colloquium

Departmental Colloquium Series

Mira Vale, "Data Values: Digital Behavioral Data and the Transformation of Mental Healthcare"

Wednesday November 20th, 2024 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom

Abstract:

Recent years have seen a surge of efforts to adapt machine learning techniques for healthcare.
These tools have provoked heated debates about privacy, safety, bias, and inequality, but laws
and official guidance lag behind technological advances. This talk investigates how health
researchers develop rules and norms around the use of data-intensive technologies in the absence
of formal regulation, and how these new ideas are poised to change healthcare for clinicians and
patients alike. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research and interviews, I investigate this
transition within digital psychiatry, a field that uses machine learning and other data-intensive
techniques to study mental illness and provide mental healthcare. I analyze how clinician-
researchers settle norms in digital psychiatry as they develop data values, moral sentiments
around digital data’s objectivity, authoritativeness, impartiality, and scalability. I argue data
values have substantive implications for mental health work and care. While psychiatry has
historically emphasized clinical judgment, digital psychiatry hybridizes expertise in psychiatry as
it valorizes data. As digital psychiatrists seek to make psychiatry scientific, they privilege data
modeling and devalue clinical observation and patients’ self-reports about their symptoms and
experiences. Amidst calls to formalize an “ethics of AI,” this talk sheds light on how ethics get
settled in practice as they become standardized as professional norms and internalized as
intuition.