Fiat Vox

Bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest extant relatives to humans — could have the longest-lasting nonhuman memory, a study led by a UC Berkeley researcher found. Extensive social memory had previously been documented only in dolphins and for up to 20 years."What we're showing here," said Berkeley comparative psychologist Laura Simone Lewis, "is that chimps and bonobos may be able to remember that long — or longer."Berkeley News writer Jason Pohl first published a story about this study in December 2023. We used his interview with Lewis for this podcast episode.Photo courtesy of Laura Simone Lewis.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. But UC Berkeley history professor Hidetaka Hirota, author of Expelling the Poor, says state immigration laws in the country were created earlier than that — and actually served as models for national immigration policy decades later.This is an episode of Afterthoughts, a series that highlights moments from Berkeley Voices interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Hirota featured in Berkeley Voices episode #115: "They built the railroad. But they were left out of the American story."Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Photo from the Library of Congress.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we're sharing the first episode of the new season of the Berkeley Remix, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Oral History Center. The four-episode season, called "From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration," centers the experiences of descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. It explores themes of activism, contested memory, identity and belonging, and creative expression as a way to process and heal from intergenerational trauma. This first episode is called "It's happening now: Japanese American Activism."Listen to the podcast and read the transcript on Berkeley News.Artwork by Emily Ehlen.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The U.S. transcontinental railroad is considered one of the biggest accomplishments in American history. Completed in 1869, it was the first railroad to connect the East to the West. It cut months off trips across the country and opened up Western trade of goods and ideas throughout the U.S.But building the railroad was treacherous, brutal work. And the companies leading the railroad project had a hard time retaining American workers. So they began to recruit newly arrived immigrants for the job, mainly Chinese and Irish. And these immigrants, who risked their lives to construct the railroad, have largely been left out of the story.In recent years, though, there has been a new emphasis on reframing the narrative to include the perspectives, contributions and struggles of railroad workers, not only in scholarship, but in the arts.On Nov. 17, Cal Performances is presenting American Railroad by Silk Road Ensemble, as part of its 2023-24 season of Illuminations: Individual and Community. It's one of sev

UC Berkeley's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancipation, drives her work today."Trinidadian Carnival, it’s social justice theater in practice. Every moment, it’s all about emancipation, the subverting of the powerful narrative through humor, through performance, through doublespeak. And it just taught me so much about the possibilities of the art form."Photo courtesy of Timmia Hearn DeRoy.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was summertime in the early 1970s in New York City. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht boarded a school bus headed for the Catskill Mountains, home to Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. As the bus approached the camp, he peered out the window at the warm and raucous group below."I wasn't exactly sure who was a camper and who was a counselor," he said. "I think that's really indicative of one of the many things that made that camp special."Over several years, the camp changed him in profound ways."I, for the first time, understood that I didn’t need to be embarrassed about being disabled, that I could have pride in who I was," he said. "And that it was possible to fight back against the system that was keeping us down."Nearly five decades later, in 2020, LeBrecht and filmmaker Nicole Newnham released on Netflix the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, about Camp Jened and the activism it inspired. "What did we used to say, it was like Wet Hot American Summer meets&n

Growing up, Linda Kinstler knew that her Latvian grandfather had mysteriously disappeared after World War II. But she didn't think much about it."That was a very common fate from this part of the world," says Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. "It didn't strike me as totally unusual. It was only later when I began looking into it more that I realized there was probably more to the story."What she discovered was too big for her to walk away.In 2022, she published her first book, Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends. It follows her family's story in Eastern Europe through the war and its aftermath, and queries all the ways we’ve been told that justice was conducted for those responsible for the genocide of European Jews during the war.It then moves into the present, and asks: What position do we find ourselves in now? And how can we truly remember the Holocaust — a systematic murder that some are trying to erase — when the last living witnesses are dying? Is this how the Holoc

At 6 months old, Britt H. Young was fitted with her first prosthetic arm. "The belief was that you would get started on using an adaptive device right away and that would be easiest for you, rather than learning to adapt to your body the way that it is, rather than learning about how to navigate the world with the body you have," said Britt, who is graduating from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in geography on May 15.Born missing part of her left arm, Britt never went to school without wearing her prosthesis. "But when I came home, I would take it off immediately," she said. "And in that way, I was spending countless hours practicing being in my body and learning how to do things my own way."During graduate school, after nearly three decades of wearing a prosthesis every day, Britt decided to stop using it for good."The geography department at Berkeley, it sounds cliché to say it was a safe space, but it really felt like a welcoming space, and it really felt like a good space to be myself."It has been rea

Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx woman, and refuses to change for anyone."Being that queer trans person completely owning herself I hope gives other people permission to be themselves, too," she says. A master's student in UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice, Gericault explores in her art Philippine mythology and her experience as a trans woman. One time, she dressed up like a manananggal — a kind of monster that detaches from her lower body at night to look for unborn babies to eat — and then slept in an art gallery for six hours. "I look at the manananggal as kind of a metaphor for how society sees trans women — how this is literally a woman detached from her reproductive organs. And what are you as a woman if you can’t reproduce?"When Gericault came out to her parents as trans in her early 20s, they disowned her. For her thesis project, Gericault will unravel huge tapestries with images of her parents' stomachs on them. "It’s about disconnection and severance," she sa

Yesterday at sunset marked the start of Ramadan, the ninth and holiest month of the Islamic calendar. For Ali Bhatti, a Ph.D. candidate in science and math education at UC Berkeley, it’s a time to feel closer to God, to break habits and to remember what he’s thankful for. In this episode, Ali describes, in his own words, what the month means to him. He also talks about how 9/11 shaped his childhood in New Jersey, finding his Muslim community at Berkeley and how Islam, and the support of his family and Berkeley community, helped him get through the hardest time of his life.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Photo courtesy of Ali Bhatti.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Purvi Shah.Shah is the founder and executive director of Movement Law Lab and a civil rights litigator, policy advocate and law professor who has spent over a decade working at the intersection of law and grassroots social movements.During their conversation, they talk about the nuts and bolts of founding a legal nonprofit in response to current events, and the intellectual and philosophical theory behind “movement lawyering,” a type of lawyering that aims to support and foment lasting social change."It’s not that we have to have all of this stuff, all of these virtues amassed, before we can engage in the work," Nolan says. "Doing the work actually helps us amass what we need in order to do it better.""That, to me, is one of the biggest beauties of being in social justice work: If you’re doing it right, all you have to do is show up and be persistent and committed and have

In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka.Menka is a lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. She is Denaakk’e from Alaska and Lumbee from North Carolina. In fall 2021, Menka designed and taught a new undergraduate legal studies course called Decolonizing UC Berkeley, and she taught Indigenous Peoples, Law and the United States at the law school in spring 2022.During their conversation, they talk about how to bring a decolonial lens to education, and about the joys and challenges of being a trailblazer who is pushing against the inherited wisdom and mythology surrounding UC Berkeley — "a place we love deeply and, therefore, as James Baldwin said, claim the right to criticize and to call to higher levels of intellectual and moral honesty," Nolan says."This can be a unique space, right?" Menka says. "The university — it is a place of power. I know th

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Khiara M. Bridges. Bridges is a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law and a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.During their conversation, they talk about the process of Bridges claiming and using her voice as a prominent Black woman. And they discuss the complexities of presentation and adornment for members of marginalized communities — especially in academia — and about approaching work with a sense of liberation, creativity and hustle."Those things that I do to adorn myself, a lot of folks are going to read them in light of my identity as a Black woman," says Bridges. "So, my nails become read in a particular way and my tattoos will become read in a particular way. And the way that I wear my hair, you know, and my septum piercing, in a particular way. And I'm comfortable with that. I'm happy with that. And I fee

Embodying the change you want to see in the world can feel ... well, intimidating. Impossible, even. But Berkeley Law's Savala Nolan wants to help us all figure it out — one step at a time — in her podcast, Be the Change. "We're talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts," says Nolan, director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. "But I hope what they see is that big, lofty concepts really contain lots of little, teeny, tiny steps that are repeated and built upon over time."In season two of Be the Change, a collaboration between Berkeley Law and Berkeley News, Nolan interviews three changemakers who have started something that wasn't there before, and that makes the world a better place. "I wanted to contribute something to the community that would help folks really be brave," says Nolan, "and think about their lives and their gifts and their work as things that are full of possibility and as things that are potentially really, really ex

We’ve heard the acronym DEIBJ a lot on campus, especially in the past few years. For those who might not know, it stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice. A growing number of people at UC Berkeley have positions dedicated solely to this incredibly important work.But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what DEIBJ means, what it actually looks like in practice — now, in our day-to-day lives, but also in the future, when initiatives and policies and other on-the-ground work has transformed our institution.So, we talked with Ty-Ron Douglas. He's the associate athletic director of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice at Cal Athletics. Douglas, who joined Berkeley two years ago, explained the nuts and bolts of DEIBJ in his upbeat and clear-eyed way that he seems to apply to all things he does.He also talked about growing up in Bermuda, a precocious kid feeling like he didn’t belong; why sport is a legitimate academic discipline; and how "justice is the juice" of DEIBJ."For us,

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Hoda Katebi discusses how, after she began wearing the hijab as a sixth-grader in Oklahoma, she learned that clothes are inherently political. "It played a huge role in shaping my own personal growth, as well as my relationship to politics," Katebi says.Since protests broke out in Iran nearly three months ago, sparked by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini by Iran's so-called morality police, Katebi has been an outspoken supporter of the protesters. "The main demand that we're hearing is, 'Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,' or, 'Woman, Life, Freedom,' which is a Kurdish, anti-imperialist, feminist, anti-capitalist chant," she says. "I think that that's what is really hitting at the core and distinguishes these protests from others before — this is one that's calling for nothing short of the end of dictatorship, which means everything from women's rights to education to class, gender, everything."Although a senior official in the Iranian government confirme

On Nov. 20, 1969, a group of Indigenous Americans that called itself Indians of All Tribes, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, took boats in the early morning hours to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They bypassed a Coast Guard blockade and took control of the island. The 19-month occupation that followed would be regarded as one of the greatest acts of political resistance in American Indian history.Everardo Reyes is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at Berkeley. After taking several classes with John-Carlos Perea, who last year was a visiting associate professor in Berkeley’s Department of Music, Reyes was inspired to research how radio and music were used during the Alcatraz takeover to capture mass attention and amplify the Red Power movement.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.Follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Charles Yu discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science."This is really a book about roles and how we play them," Yu said. "Sometimes they are fundamental to who we are, but they can also be very limiting or reductive. I hope that people can see that, in one way or another, all the characters in this book are wearing a mask and a costume, to some extent, and it doesn't fit them perfectly. And we, hopefully, see the ways in which the person underneath peeks out and can't be fully covered by what's there. In those moments, when the mask slips and you talk out of character, real connection can come about."Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.Follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Music by Blue Dot

When Roe v. Wade was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion, “it changed everything,” says Kristin Luker, a professor emerita of law and of sociology at UC Berkeley. “It was so revolutionary — I argue it was on a par with the American Revolution or the French Revolution.”Last Friday, the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe, giving states broad power to curtail or end abortion. As of today, abortion is now banned in at least seven states, and about half of states across the country are expected to ban or severely restrict the procedure in the coming days.In this Berkeley Voices episode, Luker talks about why doctors began writing anti-abortion laws in the 19th century, the experiences women had ending unwanted pregnancies in the decades before Roe v. Wade and how she doesn’t see us returning to the normative sexuality and reproduction of the 1950s.Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on news.berkeley.edu.Follow Berkeley Voices and review

In episode 99 of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Indi Garcia, who is graduating on May 13 with pro bono honors for her work on the Post-Conviction Advocacy Project, talks about how meeting with incarcerated men as a college student inspired her anti-prison and criminal justice work. "These men were just brilliant," said Garcia. "They were so much more than the crimes that led them there."Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.Follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.