Berkeley Talks

In Berkeley Talks episode 193, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson discusses climate change, politics and the need for "angry optimism." Robinson is the author of 22 novels, including his most recent, The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020.  "It's a fighting position — angry optimism — and you need it," he said at a UC Berkeley event in January, in conversation with English professor Katherine Snyder and Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology and director of the Sociospatial Climate Collaborative. "A couple of days ago, somebody talked about The Ministry for the Future being a pedagogy of hope. And I was thinking, 'Oh, that's nice.' Not just, why should you hope? Because you need to — to stay alive and all these other reasons you need hope. But also, it's strategically useful.  "And then, how to hope in the situation that we're in, which is filled with dread and filled with people fighting with wicked strength to wreck the earth

In Berkeley Talks episode 192, Sarah Deer, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, discusses the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law passed in 1978 that aims to keep Native children in their families and communities. She also talks about the recent Supreme Court decision in Brackeen v. Haaland, which upheld ICWA, and explores the future of ICWA. “I want to begin by just talking about why ICWA was passed, and it has to do with a very tragic history in the United States of removing children from Native homes,” said Deer, chief justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals, at a UC Berkeley event in December 2023. “This issue really became a profound harm to Native people during the boarding school era, in which the policy of the federal government was to remove children from their Native homes and send them to boarding schools, sometimes thousands of miles away. At these boarding schools, t

In Berkeley Talks episode 191, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor talks about getting up every morning ready to fight for what she believes in, how she finds ways to work with justices whose views differ wildly from her own and what she looks for in a clerk (hint: It’s not only brilliance).“I’m in my 44th year as a law professor,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinksy, who was in discussion with Sotomayor for UC Berkeley’s annual Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture on Jan. 29. “I’m teaching constitutional law this semester. I have to say that I’ve never seen some of my students as discouraged as they are now about the Supreme Court and about the Constitution. What should I say to them?”“What choice do you have but to fight the good fight?” Sotomayor responded. “You can’t throw up your hands and walk away. That’s not a choice. That’s abdication. That’s giving up.“How can you look at the heroes like Thurgood Marshall, like the freedom fighters, who went to lunch counters and got beat up? To men

In Berkeley Talks episode 190, journalist and UC Berkeley alumnus Vincent Bevins discusses mass protests around the world — from Egypt to Hong Kong to Brazil — and how each had a different outcome than what protesters asked for. “From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in mass protests than at any other point in human history,” said Bevins, author of the 2023 book, If We Burn. “These protests were often experienced as a euphoric victory at the moment of the eruption. But then, after a lot of the foreign journalists, like me, have left (the countries), and we look at what actually happened, the outcome was very different than what was originally expected or indeed hoped for.”For his book, Bevins interviewed more than 200 people in 12 countries, all of whom were a part of the uprisings, whether they put the protests together or responded to them as government officials or lived through them. In closing, he said, “When you properly want to restructure the system or make real problems for powerful f

In Berkeley Talks episode 189, Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt discusses how Americans need to do the work of making the U.S. political system more democratic through reforms that ensure that electoral majorities can actually govern.“If you're going to have a first-past-the-post electoral system, as we have in the United States, or one side wins and another side loses, then those with the most votes should prevail over those with fewer votes in determining who holds political office,” said Ziblatt, co-author How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. “No theory of liberal democracy can justify any other outcome. Put differently, office holding should reflect how voters vote.” This Dec. 6, 2023 talk was presented by UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures as part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture series.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Photo by Manny Becerra via Unsplash.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more info

In Berkeley Talks episode 188, a panel of scholars discusses free speech on university campuses — where things stand today, what obligation campus leaders have to respond to conflicts involving speech and the need for students to feel safe when expressing their own views."Issues of free speech on campus have been there as long as there have been universities," began Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky at a UC Berkeley event on Jan. 10. "There's no doubt that since Oct. 7, universities across the country, including here at Berkeley, face enormously difficult issues with regard to freedom of speech.""Especially in these times where, and especially with this (Israel-Hamas) war, where people are feeling so hurt by words, and arguing that words or phrases mean you're anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, it's really challenging," said Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand. "The temptation when people are so hurt and in so much pain is to run from it."But in fact, I think we should do the exact opposite. … At time

In Berkeley Talks episode 187, Bernice Yeung, managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program; public health journalist Isabella Gomes; and gender-based violence expert Holly Joshi discuss how sex trafficking can appear invisible if we don’t know where to look, and how doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators — all of us — can do more to protect victims and survivors. “If we're just looking at sex trafficking as the issue, then it's a bipartisan issue,” said Joshi, director of the GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice in San Francisco, and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence prevention and intervention. “But if we're really looking at the causes and the historical oppression and the ongoing systemic oppression of women and girls and immigrants and failure to create safe cities for immigrants and anti-Blackness, all of those things equal a failure to protect survivors of sex trafficking.“So … yes, it's a bipartisan issue if we're just talking about se

In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront. "When it comes to human-specific problems, we often want fair, equitable, unbiased answers," said Keanan Joyner, an assistant professor of psychology. "But the data that we feed into the training set often is not that. And so, we are asking AI to produce something that it was never trained on, and that can be very problematic. We have to think very carefully about how we're training our AI models and whether they'll be useful or not. I think there's so many awesome uses of AI, and I'm going to use it in my own work, and it's going to definitely infuse psychological science and social sciences more broadly." Panelists of the October 2023 Berkeley event included:Alex Saum-Pascual, associate professor of contempor

In Berkeley Talks episode 185, New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn discusses how polling works, the challenges facing pollsters today and where polling stands as we head into the 2024 U.S. presidential election."I don't think it's a coincidence that we have a crisis of polling at the same time we have a crisis of democracy," said Cohn, who gave UC Berkeley’s Citrin Award Lecture on Oct. 19."I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump mobilized a so-called silent majority of voters who felt that they were unrepresented in our political system, and who turned out to be underrepresented in polls by an order of magnitude for decades."Just think about all of the choices that politicians made from the '80s onward. That in each one of those decisions, they were doing it, in part, based on data that underrepresented the number of white working class Americans by tens of millions. I think it added up, and I think I'll start by proving that to you, and I think it offers a nice launching poin

In Berkeley Talks episode 184, Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, and housing policy expert Leah Rothstein discuss their 2023 book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. The conversation was moderated by Tamika Moss, founder and CEO of the Bay Area organization, All Home. In the book, the father-daughter co-authors describe how unconstitutional government policy on the part of federal, state and local governments created the segregation that we know in this country today, where every metropolitan area has clearly defined areas that either are all white or mostly white, and clearly defined areas that are all Black or mostly Black."We had a myth term that what we had in this country was 'defacto segregation,' something that just happened because of private bigotry or discriminatory actions on the part of private businesses or people just liking to live with each other of the same race ... something th

In Berkeley Talks episode 183, Poulomi Saha, an associate professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, discusses how cult culture, once a fringe phenomenon, has moved into the mainstream — and what that tells us about what we long for, what we fear and who we hope to be."In this crisis moment, we have a return to desire for overarching meaning, radical acceptance, transformative experience, transcendence," says Saha. "But unlike in the 1960s, we're not dropping out, we're tuning in ... to a highly regularized representation of cults. If in the 1960s we had the sense that fringe groups and communes might offer us a way out of conformity and regularity, in this current incarnation, when cults appear in our everyday lives, they do so highly regularized."Saha is currently working on a book about America’s long obsession with its own invented visions of Indian spirituality, and why so often those groups and communities come to be

In Berkeley Talks episode 182, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. "To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need," began Klein, who joined in conversation on Oct. 5 with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab."It's so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it. "And yet, the story of America in the 21st century, more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism, is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are

In Berkeley Talks episode 181, renowned artist and human rights activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile and politics in a conversation with noted theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.Ai, who grew up in northwest China under harsh conditions because of his poet father's exile, is openly critical of the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights. He is well-known for his provocative works, including his 2014-15 installation on San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz Island, @Large, that the LA Times called, "an always-poignant, often-powerful meditation on soul-deadening repressions of human thought and feeling.""Normally, people call me an artist or activist, and I am often forced into one condition," he says. "It's not that I intentionally try to create something or to crystallize something, but rather I've been put in

In Berkeley Talks episode 180, Dania Matos and Fabrizio Mejia, vice chancellor and associate vice chancellor, respectively, for UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, join Berkeley student Angelica Garcia to discuss the campus’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives (LTI) and how these efforts are supporting Berkeley’s goal of not only becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), but also of transforming Berkeley into a Latinx Thriving Institution.“There's a practical standpoint of this that's about becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution,” begins Matos. “That's why you'll hear HSIs a lot, and it's important in that naming and framing. Dr. Gina Garcia is a sort of national expert who talks about this, but for us, it's really taking it beyond that. Because becoming an HSI is about 25% enrollment of undergraduate students, which, by the way, the federal government does not count graduate students, and we care about graduate students here, too.“For us, we're thinking about (how to) build this ecosyste

In Berkeley Talks episode 179, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reads several poems, including "The Mud Sermon," "The Bicycle Eclogue" and "After the Hurricane." His April reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event Lunch Poems."I take this voyage into poetry very seriously," begins Hutchinson, "and take none of it for granted, because of the weight of history, both growing up in Jamaica and knowing the violent history that comes with that. But also the violence, too, of canon, and seeing that my work as a poet, in part, is to figure out what sort of emancipatory forces I should summon. Luckily, I stand in great shoulders within the Caribbean tradition of many poets and writers that I admire, and envy, and wish they hadn't been born. Don't tell them that. This isn't recorded, of course."Here’s “A Mud Sermon,” one of the poems Hutchinson read during the event:They shovelled the long trenches day and night.Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.Venereal mud. Ma

In Berkeley Talks episode 178, Rashad Arman Timmons, a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, joins in conversation with the family of Michael Brown Jr., whose 2014 killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited a wave of protests across the country.During the March 8, 2023, discussion, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., his stepmother, Cal Brown, and Timmons consider the enduring significance of Ferguson in the nation’s racial landscape and ponder Black grief as a resource for social transformation.“A note on grief,” begins Timmons. “We grieve because we care. We grieve because we love. And we grieve because we remember. I feel a responsibility to say this, to acknowledge grief for what it truly is: an ethical act of care, a radical act of love and a persistent triumph of memory.“When we grieve the Black dead and dying, we enact an urgent care for them. We profess a vigilant love over them and nurture a commitment to remember them. Christina Sharpe in her beautiful theorizing c

In Berkeley Talks episode 177, a panel of scholars discusses theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and how his years at UC Berkeley shaped him, and how he shaped the university.Oppenheimer, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s summer 2023 film Oppenheimer, came to Berkeley in 1929 as an assistant professor and over the next dozen years established one of the greatest schools of theoretical physics. He went on to direct the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, during which the first nuclear weapons were developed. He’s often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb.”“Exceptional students and postdocs flocked here to Berkeley to work with him,” began Cathryn Carson, a Berkeley professor of history and a specialist in the history of 20th century physics, who moderated the July 28 discussion at Berkeley.“As we’ll hear today,” she continued, “the style of work that Oppenheimer unfolded at Berkeley was collaborative, pointed, directed at hard problems, not always success

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Jessica Morse, the deputy secretary for forest and wildland resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency, discusses the current wildfire crisis in California and how we got here, strategies the state is implementing, and lessons they've learned in order to decrease catastrophic wildfires and create more resilient forests.Morse began her Nov. 4, 2022, lecture with a story about the Camp Fire, the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century that killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in Northern California. "The story for me starts Nov. 8, 2018, almost four years ago to the day the campfire broke out in Paradise," began Morse. "I think all of us have some story of knowing where we were that day. It was a game-changer in terms of the deadliest, most devastating fire we've seen in California history. I went up there a couple days later to go help out and volunteer with the relief efforts. And what I saw was striking: We had 54,000 people displaced in

Siri creator Adam Cheyer talks about the long road to launching the virtual assistant, how to take an entrepreneurial idea from conception to impact and why he doesn't see anything as a failure."An entrepreneur and a magician are exactly the same," begins Cheyer, who also founded the startups Change.org, Viv Labs, Sentient and Bixby. "An entrepreneur needs to imagine an impossible future. Think about Siri: 20 years ago, if I told you that you could pull a device out of your pocket, it would know who you are and where you are and you could just talk to it using your words and it would not only talk back to you, but do things for you, book that reservation, buy a movie ticket, you would've thought that were magic."An entrepreneur has to imagine an impossible future that's desirable, that doesn't exist ... So, you have to reach far as an entrepreneur, dream big, dream magical. But you have to be very clear (and answer) 'Why would we want such a thing?'"This Feb. 9, 2021, talk was part of UC Berkeley's Sutar

In this episode, three leading legal scholars — john a. powell, director of UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI); Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; and Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown Law School — discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public and private universities cannot use race as a factor in admitting students. The court, with its conservative justices in the majority, ruled that such affirmative action violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, reversing decades of legal precedent.In California, UC Berkeley and other public colleges and universities have been prohibited from considering race in admissions since 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209.“The Supreme Court ignores the tremendous difference between using race to harm minorities as opposed to using race to remedy past discrimination and enhance diversity,” said Chemerinsky at the July 3 event, moderated by OBI Assistant Director Stephen Menendian. “When John Roberts tries to in