Berkeley Talks

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, British filmmaker and video artist Steven McQueen, best known for his Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave, talks about his first experience at Tate Modern in London as an 8-year-old, how he's never pursued a project for the money and why he thinks experiencing art in the world — and not on a small screen in your hand — is so important.This March 30 talk was part of UC Berkeley's Arts + Design Thursdays, a lecture series on time-based media art that features leading media artists, curators and thinkers. The series was made possible with support from the Kramlich Art Foundation, run by Berkeley alumna Pamela Kramlich.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

California state legislators share their visions of California and the policies needed to achieve that future. The panel discussion, sponsored by UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, includes senators Anna Caballero and Nancy Skinner and assemblymembers David Chiu and James Ramos.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Berkeley Law professor Franklin Zimring, author of the 2017 book When Police Kill, discusses why police kill far more citizens in the United States than in other developed countries."About 1,000 times a year in the United States, civilians are shot and killed by local police, and the authorities say that such killings were either necessary or at least justified," began Zimring. "... That's three killings a day, every day. And that's too many violent deaths in a country which already suffers from an excess of violent death."Zimring's March 29 lecture, "Police Killings: An American Tragedy," was part of the 2021 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture series.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Bess Williamson, associate professor of art history theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Accessible America, explores the history of design and its response to disability rights, from the end of World War II to the present day.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"I think that part of why we are lost is that we've forgotten we have to study where we've come from and what we're doing," said novelist Alice Walker at a UC Berkeley event last month. "And I just can't stress enough how much I want our people — all people, but, you know, our people — to really get a grip on how you have to understand where you've been in order to know where you are or where you're going."Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her novel, The Color Purple, was in conversation on Feb. 15, 2021, with Ra Malika Imhotep, a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley, and Darieck Scott, a professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, as part of the department's spring 2021 Critical Conversations series.Walker's parting advice?"Study, be free, enjoy your life, dance when you feel like dancing, sleep outside under the moon ... Live your life. Live it. I don't care if every time you open your mouth, somebody's ready to throw something at you or trip yo

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, former Google design ethicist and star of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, discusses how fake news spreads faster than factual news — a result of citizens sharing emotionally resonant misinformation or disinformation, often weaponized for profit and propaganda purposes, while tech algorithms amplify the viral spread.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Charles Henry, professor emeritus of African American studies at UC Berkeley and author of Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations, discusses why reparations are gaining mainstream support, why he believes they are a solution and what could enable Black Americans to feel "acknowledged, redressed and with closure."This talk, given in October of 2020, is part of "America's Unfinished Work," a series by Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Center (OLLI).Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.xogfh3JnKgMNkBAztXHY See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, discusses the economic forecast — how the post-pandemic U.S. economy might compare to that of the so-called roaring 1920s."When I studied the 1920s, I was really focused on consumer spending, particularly household spending for durable goods — cars, appliances, furniture, jewelry — and the role of installment credit in making a boom in consumer durables possible," Olney said on UCLA's Forecast Direct in January.But, she said, today, much of the nation's consumer spending is on services — going to restaurants, getting a haircut — which lengthens the time it takes to recover from a recession.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, a former Berkeley Journalism professor and alumnus, discusses his 1989 documentary, Tongues Untied, during a screening of his groundbreaking film at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1990.In Tongues Untied, an experimental and deeply personal film, Riggs combines documentary footage with poetry, dance, music and performance with his own on-camera revelations to explore Black gay love and sexuality in the U.S. At the end of the film, words flash on the screen: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.”Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, we revisit an interview that we first shared in 2019:Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer."In February 2019, Jobrani was a guest on the Science of Happiness, a podcast from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Aria Aber, a poet born to Afghan refugees and raised in Germany, who now lives in Oakland, California, read from her first book of poems, Hard Damage, published in 2019. The early November reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event, Lunch Poems.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, experts discuss the forces that shaped the outcome of the U.S. elections in November and the implications of the elections for the U.S. and the countries of Latin America."Hispanics are the new swing voters," said Maria Escheveste, a senior scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute, who joined Paul Pierson, a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Colombian investigative journalist Daniel Coronell, at the Nov. 20, 2020 campus webinar.It's imperative that Democrats realize that the Latinx community isn't a monolith, she said, and that immigration isn't the only issue every Latinx person cares about. "We are so diverse because we're generationally diverse — linguistically, racially, ethnically," said Escheveste. "Demography is not destiny."Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, a panel of scholars — Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges; Carol Joffe, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC San Francisco; and Jill Adams, co-founder and executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law — discuss how race, class and reproductive rights intersect and how people are choosing and resorting to self-directed and community-directed care to circumnavigate the structural inequalities in health care access.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode of Berkeley Talks is a 2019 interview on KALX's The Graduates with Katie Keliiaa, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies. In this interview, Keliiaa discusses her research on the Bay Area Outing Program, an early 20th century assimilation program that took Native American women out of their tribal lands and brought them to the Bay Area to perform domestic work.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this special Halloween-inspired episode of Berkeley Talks, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ joins Manual Cinema's co-artistic director Drew Dir to discuss the collective's presentation of Frankenstein, a Cal Performances co-commission, in a talk moderated by Cal Performances' executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Salvadoran American journalist and activist Roberto Lovato, discusses his new book Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, with Jess Alvarenga, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker and a graduate of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.In Unforgetting, Lovato exposes how the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was responsible for killing 85% of the 75,000 to 80,000 people killed during the Salvadoran Civil War that was fought from 1979 to 1992."The book is ... a journey through different underworlds — the underworlds of the guerillas, the underworlds of the gangs, the underworlds of our family histories and secrets, the underworld of the secrets of nations, the things that countries don't like for us to know, I mean, which is theoretically how you get a president like Donald Trump, for example," said Lovato.Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out informati

"I would say the loudest, boldest, most powerful voices coming out of Washington have been the voices of women," said U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood (IL-14). "The way that we, collectively, have reframed the conversation about where this country is going has really, I think, been jarring for some of those who have been the power class in Washington for decades."Underwood was part of a panel that discussed the history-making women of the 116th Congress, and a recently published New York Times book that features powerful portraits of all but one Congresswoman. Also part of the conversation was Rep. Jackie Speier (CA-14), UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in political science and photojournalist Elizabeth Herman and New York Times photo editor Marisa Schwartz Taylor.Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18, 2020, Berkeley Law professors — Amanda Tyler, Catherine Fisk, Orin Kerr, Bertrall Ross and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky — came together to discuss Ginsburg's legacy, what will be the likely effects of her no longer being in the Supreme Court and what is likely to happen in the nomination and confirmation process of a new justice."Her legacy as an advocate completely changed the face of American society," said Tyler, who clerked for Ginsburg in 1999. "As an advocate, she opened the eyes of the Supreme Court to the lived experiences of both men and women who are held back by gender stereotypes. Because of that, she was able to convince them, to educate them, to teach them as to how gender stereotypes do that, not just to women but to men as well, and how putting women on a pedestal, as Justice Brennan said, and Justice Ginsburg loved this quote, is actually putting them in a cage. It's holding them back."Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.Phot

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Stephen Small, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and interim director for the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, discusses research from his upcoming book, tentatively titled Inside the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana. Since the 1990s, Small has visited more than 200 plantation museum sites in 10 states. Tours of these sites included narratives that privileged white elites and consistently avoided mention of slavery and the experience of enslaved people, says Small."Slavery is typically described in passive, general and abstract ways," said Small. "If mentioned at all, Black people typically appear as an undifferentiated stereotypical mass, with few exceptions."Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As the global pandemic stretches on and massive wildfires rage along the West Coast, many people are finding it hard — if not impossible — to get the restful sleep they need. But Allison Harvey, a professor of clinical psychology and director of the Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic at UC Berkeley, says although anxiety can make it more difficult to sleep well, there are evidence-based treatments that can help. "I think as humans, at this point, we either have too many people in our lives and in our faces, or we're lonely and we're maybe feeling that as we go off to sleep," said Harvey, of life during the pandemic. "We need to go to safe burrows and nests in order to sleep. So, things that are comforting really make a difference to us."On Aug. 7, Harvey gave a talk, sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how changing certain behaviors — when and how we wake up and go to bed, for instance — can allow us to experience the sleep rhythms we naturally have.Listen and read a