Berkeley Talks

On Friday, Aug. 30, UC Berkeley held a symposium that marked the start of a yearlong initiative, "400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Oppression," commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies with a daylong symposium. It drew hundreds of attendees who heard from more than a dozen historians and social scientists about the impact and legacy of slavery in society today.In his keynote speech to close the symposium, john powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and professor of law, African American studies and ethnic studies, discussed the link between slavery and white supremacy. Slavery, he said, created anti-black racism, which was necessary for the extraction of capital.“It was never about, ‘I don’t like you because you’re different, because you have more melanin than me.’ It was about capital. It was about the U.S. industrializing … It was about the elites trying to figure out how to extract as much capital as possib

Since the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, reports of hate speech targeting various minority groups have risen dramatically. Although this surge is well-reported, it remains difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem or even properly classify hate speech, let alone identify and measure its effects. Keyword searches and dictionary methods are often imprecise and overly blunt tools for detecting the nuance and complexity of hate speech. Without the tools to identify, quantify, and classify hate speech, we cannot even begin to consider how to address its causes and consequences.Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century, discusses hate speech research being conducted at UC Berkeley through the Social Sciences D-Lab, focusing on corporate responsibility and the importance of preserving free speech.This talk was the keynote lecture for t

Sal Levinson, who works on native propagation at the UC Botanical Garden, led a tour on July 9, 2019, about the plants people have used to heal pain, cause pain, bring pleasure, celebrate the sacred and symbolize faith. From the Cycad, a poisonous plant that the dinosaurs ate and some people have learned how to eat, to California native rye, a type of grass that gets a fungus called ergot that has been used to treat migraine headaches."Ergot is effective for stopping bleeding," Levinson tells a group of 20 on the tour. "The wise women in ancient times would commonly use it after childbirth. Some women would start bleeding out after childbirth, and if they used this drug, they could stop the bleeding and save the women."This walk was hosted in conjunction with the current exhibit on view at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription, Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and

In the "Science of Happiness" podcast episode, "Finding awe in every step," musician and activist Diana Gameros talks about how she moved to the U.S. from Mexico at 13, and the heartbreak that came with it. She spent years writing about longing to go home to Juarez, Mexico, and the experience of undocumented immigrants in America."When I moved to the United States, I found inspiration or I found this motivation to write about the things that I was feeling about being away and I think, you know, I was inspired by folk music to create these songs," Gameros tells host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley."For me, it’s very humbling to know that some of the stories and the messages I give, or that I sing about, are resonating with other people whose stories are similar to mine," Gameros continues. "And I began to notice that they became a source of inspiration and of empowerment to them. And so I also see it as a as a responsibility to use my pla

It is widely held today on grounds of prudence — if not realism — that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let Homo economicus be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Samuel Bowles, a research professor and director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, explains why this is so, using evidence from behavioral experiments mechanism design and other sources, and proposes an alternative paradigm for policy making.Sponsored by UC Berkeley's Graduate Division, Bowles gave this lecture on Feb. 25, 2019, as part of the Barbara Weinstock Lectures on the Morals of Trade.(Santa Fe Institute photo)Read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In his book Rock ’n’ Film: Cinema’s Dance with Popular Music, music historian David James explores how rock’s capacity for cultural empowerment and its usefulness as a driver of commerce and profit have been reproduced in various kinds of cinema: independent documentaries and concert films including Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter; narrative films, such as King Creole and Privilege; and the experimental cinema of artists, like Kenneth Anger.In a June 22, 2019, lecture at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), James explored the rich legacy of cinema’s dance with popular music. Illustrating his talk with clips from classic rock films like Blackboard Jungle, A Hard Day’s Night, and many others, James shared with his BAMPFA audience how rock music was distinctive from other cultural developments of its era because of its multiracial appeal, anticipating and helping to precipitate the utopian ideals of the civil rights era and other left-wing movements.These transformativ

As of 2017, there were more than 273 million smartphones in use in the country and 5 billion subscriber connections worldwide.“This is a big, big business,” says Joel Moskowitz, the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health at the School of Public Health. “This is an industry that’s probably been unparalleled by any other industry in the world, in terms of reach.”Moskowitz gave a talk last spring called “Cell Phones, Cell Towers and Wireless Safety” for Be Well at Work, a University Health Services program at UC Berkeley.Moskowitz, who has conducted research on disease prevention programs and policies for more than 30 years, says that with the influx of smartphones has come hundreds of thousands of cell towers. These towers receive and transmit radio frequencies called microwaves — the same waves used in microwave ovens.In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic to humans,

California's agriculture has been impacted by dwindling bee populations. In this episode of Just Food, a podcast from the Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley, experts discuss what farms can do in response — not only to protect honeybees, but also to restore native pollinator species.This episode was originally published in September 2017.This episode features:Colin Muller, a beekeeper at Muller RanchClaire Kremen, professor of environmental science in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC BerkeleyPaul Muller, part owner of Full Belly FarmThis podcast was produced by the Berkeley Food Institute in partnership with the UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute at the Graduate School of Journalism.See photos and listen to more episodes of the Just Food podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Aaminah Norris is an assistant professor at Sacramento State in the College of Education. She has more than 20 years of experience supporting schools and nonprofit organizations in addressing issues of educational equity for low-income students from historically marginalized communities. She researches, teaches and advocates for the use of digital and social media in formal and informal learning environments to address racial and gender inequities.Norris sat down with Abigail De Kosnik, an associate professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, in April 2019 to discuss transmedia storytelling, police brutality against women and girls of color and the essay she co-authored, #Sandra Bland's Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality."“A lot of the work that I do is helping people to understand that they have a responsibility to disrupt media messages and not just consume,” Norris tells De Kosnik. “You can't just be thoughtless consumers of thes

Writer, speaker and activist Virgie Tovar speaks with Savala Trepczynski, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, about the process of divesting from diet and body image culture and investing in rehumanization, community building and a new vision for our lives."I do experience fat phobia in an interpersonal and social sense," Tovar tells Trepczynski. "Meaning that I've had the lifelong effects of, you know, constantly having my body policed by others. Every time I leave my house, I'm deeply aware that someone might say something to me that's really dehumanizing and stultifying. Because we're just in that environment where people feel the right to police and speak out violently against fat women, in particular.""One thing that’s really important to me is to allow yourself to be angry. Anger is a really sacred practice and I think, for women, anger is one of the least feminine behaviors that we can do and so there’s a big taboo around anger. And this goes back to the idea

On Wednesday, June 19, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) celebrated Juneteenth — a national commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States — with a visit by Mildred Howard, a widely acclaimed artist and longtime Berkeley resident whose family has deep roots in the Bay Area’s African American community. Howard appeared at BAMPFA for a screening of the new documentary, Welcome to the Neighborhood, which highlights her own family’s history in South Berkeley and the neighborhood’s transformation over the past 50 years.Following the screening of the 30-minute film, Howard was joined in conversation by Leigh Raiford, UC Berkeley associate professor of African American studies, and Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s director and chief curator. Their discussion touched on a range of topics, from South Berkeley’s ongoing struggles with gentrification, to the role of the university in supporting diverse communities, to Howard’s own work as an artist. Some of her works are on display in

Dean Baquet is the executive editor of the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. In February 2019, he sat down with Edward Wasserman, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, to discuss the 2016 elections and the future of fact-based journalism."I don't want to be a leader of the opposition to Donald Trump," he told Wasserman. "This is perhaps the hardest thing about navigating this era. A big percentage of my readers, and I hear from them a lot, want me to lead the opposition of Donald Trump. They don't quite say it that way, but what they say is, 'Why quote his tweets? Why go to his press conferences? Why not? Why not just call him a liar every day? Why not essentially just take him out and beat him up? What are you waiting for?' I think that would be the road to ruin, for a bunch of reasons. But, to me, the most powerful one is if you become the leader of the opposition, eventually the people who you're aligned with come to power, right?"This conversation is featured on On Mic

"We are here in the middle of the first mass movement against sexual abuse in the history of the world," said Catharine MacKinnon, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, about the progress of the #MeToo movement. "This one sprung from the law of sexual harassment, quickly overtook it, and is shifting law, cultures, and politics everywhere. At the same time, electrifyingly demonstrating what I’m calling butterfly politics in action ... butterfly politics means that the right, small intervention in the structure of an unstable political system can ultimately produce systemic change. ... To ask what made #MeToo possible is to ask what, for the first time, made it harder to keep the sexual abuse inside than to put it out."MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar who pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination in employment and education, spoke at a three-day Berkeley Law conference, "The Worldwide #MeToo Movement: Global Resistance to Sexual Harassment and Violence." The conference

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.In the last of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, commentators Chris Kutz, a law professor at UC Berkeley who focuses on moral, political and legal philosophy; Oona Hathaway, a professor law at Yale Law School; and Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, provide commentary on Ripstein’s previous two lectures.“What’s puzzling is that Arthur seems to want to link up this principle to the idea of a future peace and internally to the principle of action by the aggressor,” said Kutz in his commentary. “The peace imagined by the aggressor nation isn’t the peace o

In this episode of Who Belongs, a podcast produced by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, we hear from john powell, director of the Haas Institute and a professor of law and African American studies at UC Berkeley.In this interview, powell discusses a brand new primer the Haas Institute just published on the targeted universalism policy approach, a model conceptualized by professor powell. The primer was co-written by professor powell, along with assistant director Stephen Menendian and Wendy Ake, the director of the Just Public Finance program.Targeted universalism is a platform to put into practice social programs that move all groups toward a universal policy goal. It supports the needs of the most marginalized groups, as well as those who are more politically powerful, while reminding everyone that we are all part of the same social fabric.Download a copy of "Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice."Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley Talks. See acast.com/privacy for

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.In the second of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, Ripstein talks about why it's wrong to target civilians and makes a distinction between those who are and are not a part of war. Following the lecture, Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, and Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, provide commentary.The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is presented annually at nine universities: UC Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. This series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, indu

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.In the first of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, Ripstein talks about the rules for wrongdoers. He says, "The thing that's wrong with war is war is the condition in which might makes right. Now, that doesn't mean that no one could every be justified in going to war, but it means that war is always morally problematic. It's morally problematic because who prevails in the war depends on strength and is entirely independent of the merits." Following the lecture, UC Berkeley law professor Christopher Kutz provided a commentary.The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is presented annually at nine u

Climate change is a pressing and urgent global issue and a challenge that needs planet- and human-focused solutions. The state has signed into law numerous policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emission from buildings, industrial processes, vehicles, agricultural and solid waste management, electric power and fossil fuel production and freight transport. Those policies are continuously evolving to reflect change in technology, markets and public opinion. UC Berkeley and the UC system have pledged to be carbon neutral from building and fleet energy use by 2025, and from transportation and other sources by 2050.Kira Stoll, the director of sustainability at UC Berkeley, and David Wooley, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and executive director of the Center for Environmental Public Policy, gave a talk on May 1, 2019, about what is underway in green building, energy efficiency, clean electricity, resource management and behavior-based programs, and how these can help

Drawing from his first-hand experience at Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual, a traditional healing center near Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, Dr. Joe Tafur reviews the role of spiritual and emotional healing in modern healthcare.Tafur gave a talk on April 18, 2019, for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.In this talk, Tafur discusses how emotional trauma contributes to medical illness, and how spiritual healing techniques can lead to improvements in the mind and body. Ayahuasca shamanism and other psychedelic-assisted therapies may be effective, in some cases, because of their ability to induce relevant changes in epigenetic imprints associated with emotional trauma stored in the psychoneuroendocrine immunologic network, which Tafur theorizes is the physiologic manifestation of the emotional body.Dr. Joe Tafur is a Colombian Ame

The last eight years have seen a revolution in approved cancer treatments, based on the development of medicines that arouse our immune systems to attack and eliminate our own cancer cells. These breakthroughs in immunotherapy of cancer were based on a deep understanding of the immune system itself, coupled with the first direct evidence that immune responses that attack human cancers occur naturally, albeit weakly. The treatments amplify natural immune responses against cancer, and are effective in some types of cancer, leading to cures in many patients. They are less effective or not effective in many other types of cancer. The success has galvanized major new efforts by researchers and drug companies alike to develop complementary and more broadly effective medications to treat other types of cancer.David Raulet, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, gave a lecture on April 10, 2019, about the revolution of cancer immunology. In this talk, Raulet describes how these medicines work, t