Berkeley Talks

"Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same. There’s a pink one, and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.And the people in the houses all went to the university, where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same. And there's doctors and lawyers and business executives, and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same."That's the first part of the song "Little Boxes," written by Berkeley alumna and political activist Malvina Reynolds in 1962. In the first episode of a new campus podcast — the Berkeley Podcast for Music — professor Nicholas Mathew talks with Reynolds' daughter, Nancy Schimmel, as well as Berkeley professors Margaret Crawford from architecture, Timothy Hampton from French and comparative literature and Maria Sonevytsky from music. They discuss Reynolds' life, music, activism and the contested politics of he

"I don't know anybody who can honestly say there hasn't been somebody in their life that helped them along," said Louise Renne, a lawyer who served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as San Francisco City Attorney. "And I try to pay it back by working with young people in public housing here in San Francisco."Renne took part in a panel discussion — "Bay Area Women in Politics" — hosted by the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center in July 2020. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Shanelle Scales-Preston, who sits on the Pittsburg City Council, also spoke on the panel."I think all of us will say we have to be optimists to survive in these careers," said Schaaf. "It's what gets you out of bed in the morning because we also have to hold tremendous suffering and tragedy in our communities. That is also part of our jobs. But I want to see a world that is equitable and where everyone thrives. And when I talk about equity, I believe that structural racism is one of the biggest barriers to everythin

Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 70 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, joined Poet Laureate and Berkeley English professor Robert Hass in March 2019 to discuss her 2018 book Hazards of Time Travel. Set in a dystopian America in 2039, the novel tells the story of a 17-year-old who, after her subversive valedictorian speech, is exiled to rural Wisconsin in 1959."It seems like dystopian novels are mostly about extrapolating scary political trends in the present into the future," said Hass. "1984. The Handmaid's Tale. It felt like you found yourself more interested in exploring 1959.""Or the sort of foundation for the present," replied Oates, a professor emerita of humanities at Princeton University who has taught as a visiting professor of English at Berkeley. "... Because when I wrote the novel — I was working on it in 2011 — I had no idea at all, as none of us did, that we would have a different kind of political situation today."... My novel was written before the campaign of 2016, which was

"Economists begin with this notion of the free market invisible hand, and we need to be clear that the hand has a color — it's a white hand, let me say, a white male hand," said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University. ... I was a major in sociology and economics... I ended up choosing sociology, in part because of the foundation of economics is assumptions about the rational actor making decisions on a cost-benefit basis in something called efficient market. And we all know that the Homo sapiens — they're a complex animal shaped by multiple social forces and group divisions."Bonilla-Silva joined a panel of scholars — Daina Ramey Berry, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Arjumand Siddiqi, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Toronto; and Mario Small, a sociology professor at Harvard University — for a discussion on July 13, 2020, about how the conceptual approaches of economics discount Black and Latinx perspectives, and what the

“I’ve seen a huge capacity for redemption from people… if given a chance.” That’s Thelton Henderson, a renowned civil rights lawyer who spent 37 years as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in conversation with Savala Trepczynski in a 2017 podcast series, Be the Change.Be the Change was created and hosted by Trepczynski, the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law. The series highlights people who Trepcyznski says “embody, and therefore model, a progressive and subversively compassionate way of being a human being.”Henderson, who graduated from Berkeley Law in 1962, was the first African American lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the early 1960s. In the interview, he shares what it was like working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in the South, investigating local law enforcement and human rights abuses, and how the bravery he saw at the time inspired his

This Berkeley Talks episode features an interview on Who Belongs?, a podcast by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Host Marc Abizeid, joined by co-host Erfan Moradi, talk with Erin Kerrison, an assistant professor of social welfare at Berkeley, about why she thinks the U.S. needs to dismantle capitalism and police, and build a new system free of crime and punishment."What is deemed illegal is not necessarily harmful — there's a whole lot of stuff that wreaks havoc in people's lives that is not illegal, that is not criminal," said Kerrison. "So, that sort of construction, that needs to be thrown out immediately ... when I say there's a possibility that we don't have to have crime, it's so true. It's so true because it's a construct. If we didn't have crime as such, because communities were stronger, then yeah, we wouldn't need police because police respond to crime, which is, in large part, a symptom of much, much bigger and deeper social and structural ills."(Photo by risingth

The switch to remote learning, triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, is realigning several education fundamentals. In this talk, top leaders at UC Berkeley — Chancellor Carol Christ; Bob Jacobsen, dean of undergraduate studies; and Rich Lyons, chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer — discuss how Berkeley is challenging convention in its new approach to instruction and learning, and consider what the implications for higher education are likely to be.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"Now, some would like us to believe that racism can be cured pharmacologically," said Amani Allen, executive associate dean at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "One major problem with this argument is that it suggests that racism is primarily facilitated through individual actors, and if we can just fix those bad people, everything will be fine. Well, racism, I would argue, won’t be cured by a pill. And that’s because what we’re talking about is systemic."On June 9, 2020, Allen joined epidemiologist and civil rights activist Camara Jones, a 2019-20 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, in the first of a webinar series by the American Public Health Association that examines racism and its historic present-day impact on health and well-being.In their talk, "Racism: The ultimate underlying condition," Jones began by defining racism as a two-sided open/closed sign, and how those on the open side might not recognize that the other side says "closed."Li

"One myth I think that increasingly people are realizing, and I think Trump has accelerated this, is that national security is really about military and crime," said Politico reporter Nahal Toosi at a UC Berkeley event in March. ...I think what we're learning increasingly is that it's about the economy. It's about cyber issues. It's about climate. It's about migration. It's about the coronavirus."...I'm having to work with our health reporters because we're realizing these things are all coming together. So, it's not just about war and it's not just about the FBI or whatever. It's all these other things that have to work together."Toosi joined professor Mark Danner at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism on March 2, 2020, to discuss what it's been like working as a foreign affairs correspondent during the Trump administration.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In adopting a different diet or driving less, a person has an effect on the planet, says Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University. But not for the reason they might think."If you don't do it, the world will be the same as if you do it," said Frank, who spoke at UC Berkeley in January. "But the effect you have through your own actions are only a small fraction of the total effect you have because when you do something, other people see you do it, and they do it, too."Frank, author of the 2020 book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, joined Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at Berkeley, at the campus's Goldman School of Public Policy on Jan. 28, 2020, to discuss how he sees peer pressure as a powerful tool to fight climate change.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian, in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020."Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continues, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the American narrative, and the inability of gun control advocates to develop a counter-narrative. ... When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force and power, a broad atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than narrower rational arguments to contain it."Listen to the lecture and read a transcript on Berkeley News.Detail of a mural by Kyle Holbrook and local youth in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Terence Faircloth via Flickr) See acast.com/privacy for privacy

For the first week of quarantine during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Vitali-DeCola's 82-year-old dad, Joe DeCola, seemed upbeat."He was like, 'I got my dinner and I have this beautiful bouquet of flowers.' He just sounded, like, tucked-in and content."DeCola has stage 4 lung cancer. He's become accustomed to isolating himself from time to time, especially during flu season. But after a few months sheltering in place this time around, his daughter said it started to get harder for him. "...He said, 'I’m feeling so lonely. I’m just really, really lonely.'”That's why Vitali-DeCola, a teacher who has been staying at home with her husband and son in Brooklyn, while her dad is all by himself in Manhattan, decided to do a happiness practice by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center called "36 Questions for Increasing Closeness." She recently joined host Dacher Keltner on the Science of Happiness podcast to discuss her experience.Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See a

"All waste is global," said Kate O'Neill, a professor in the the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, at a campus event in February. "What we throw away has value. What we throw away often travels the globe. And that's not just the things we know about like electronic wastes, but also plastics... and things like cars, used cars, secondhand cars, clothes, bikes — even discarded food — will actually travel to some other countries, someplace where it may or may not be used..."O'Neill, author of the 2019 book Waste, gave a Feb. 5 lecture, sponsored by Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how the things we throw away go through entire lifecycles after we toss them. And she discusses how China's 2017 decision to stop importing paper and plastic scrap in the condition it had been has disrupted the global waste economy and changed how communities around the world recycle.Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy an

Robert Hass, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of English and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, read from Summer Snow — his first poetry collection since 2010 — on Feb. 6, 2020, at the Morrison Library's monthly event, Lunch Poems.Geoffrey O'Brien, a Berkeley English professor and poet, introduced Hass: "He has a remarkable way of making a language that's tensile and full of prosodies, and yet still feels like down-home conversation that cats and dogs can understand," he said.Hass read five poems — "The Grandfather's Tale," "Dancing," "First Poem," "Nature Notes in the Morning" and "Cymbeline."Listen to full readings from Summer Snow and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, a family-run newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa, joined Berkeley Journalism professor and author Michael Pollan on Jan. 29, 2020, to discuss journalism in rural America, Trump and the farm vote, immigration, regenerative agriculture and the potential for farmers to sequester carbon to help curb climate change. In 2017, Cullen won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on polluted water, fertilizer runoff and powerful corporate agricultural interests.The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1968, following a wave of urban uprisings, politicians worked to end the practice of redlining by passing the Housing and Urban Development Act. While the act was meant to encourage mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat black homebuyers equally, the disaster that came after revealed that racist exclusion hadn’t been eradicated, but rather transformed into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.On Jan. 24, 2020, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, discussed her new book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, as part of the Matrix Lecture series at UC Berkeley. Her book, which covers the time period from the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act to the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, exposes how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See a

"...At this very moment in our history, the men rising to the highest office in country after country... are full-fledged planetary arsonists," said Naomi Klein at a Berkeley Journalism event on Oct. 24, 2019."They are pouring fuels on these fires with defiance. We have Trump rolling back every environmental law conceivable, cracking open public lands to unrestricted drilling and fracking, trolling Greta [Thunberg] on Twitter, ogling Greenland for the fossil fuels now available under the melting ice. But this is not just about Trump, this is a global phenomenon..."Klein, author of the book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal and the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, discussed with journalism lecturer Mark Schapiro the need for a fundamental transformation of our economy and politics as climate disruptions accelerate.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On Feb. 21, 2020, Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Nebraska, was on campus to discuss her work tracing the origins of medical racism back to its roots. In her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the origins of American Gynecology, Cooper Owens reveals the ways the field of gynecology, pioneered by 19th century medical men, was deeply intertwined with the institution of slavery.This talk was part of 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, a yearlong initiative at Berkeley that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.Read a Q&A with Cooper Owens on Berkeley News.Read a transcript of this podcast episode on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"During global climate crisis, we need more writing in and through water," read poet Indira Allegra at UC Berkeley earlier this month. "This is the perspective through which we must contextualize ourselves. The downward squint into saltwater mysteries or the movement of light across the surface of freshwater above. Emergency is not separate from us. We have to partner it. We must find ways in our mythologies and in our language to partner disaster."Allegra, whose work has been featured in exhibitions at the Arts Incubator in Chicago and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, joined Chiyuma Elliott, an assistant professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and Lyn Hejinian, who teaches in the Department of English, in reading their poems on Feb. 4, 2020, as part of Poetry and the Senses, a two-year initiative by Berkeley's Arts Research Center that will explore the "relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act

On Jan. 23, 2020, Jemele Hill, a staff writer for the Atlantic and host of the podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered, spoke at UC Berkeley's Cal Performances about her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. In conversation with with KALW's radio host and reporter, Hana Baba, Hill touched on the NFL and Colin Kaepernick, what it's like reporting on sports as a black woman and how her life changed after President Trump tweeted about her."I mean, the NFL owners are spineless," Hill told Baba. "And I knew Colin Kaepernick would never play in the NFL the moment Donald Trump said his name... One of the few things that a lot of people unfortunately agree with the president about is that Colin Kaepernick should not be taking a knee. So, he [Trump] knows every time he says his [Kaepernick's] name, that it is giving him a level of universal support ... that he's doesn't experience usually."And so, what does that say about people in this country? I'm also old enough to remember that we just