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When J Finley arrived at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in 2006, she planned on studying reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after a fellowship in South Africa, where she studied the Zulu language and culture, Finley says she realized Black people were never going to get reparations. Switching gears, she started thinking: “How else do Black people make do? Well, we laugh.”
In Berkeley Talks episode 223, Finley, an associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College who earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2008 and 2012, discusses her 2024 book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity. During the talk, Finley shares how Black women have used and continue to use humor and, more specifically, sass, to speak back to power and assert their own humanity.
Black women’s humor, she contends, is “rooted in the racist, patriarchal and, many times, degrading conditions from which it developed” and is “an embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis that has come to be the hallmark of Black women’s humor.”
It’s not that sass is merely for show, she argues, but there’s an internal process that happens first that is then expressed gesturally and vocally. “If you are a Black woman, and you don't understand yourself as empowered, to have the agency to speak back within those relations,” she says, “in what world can you be free?”
This UC Berkeley event, which took place March 18, was sponsored by the Department of African American Studies.
Read more about J Finley, and her research on the use of Black women’s humor as a form of resistance.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In Berkeley Talks podcast episode 222, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Brian Fitzpatrick, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, debate the merits of originalism in constitutional interpretation. Originalism is a theory that argues that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption nearly 250 years ago, rather than evolving with society.
Arguments for originalism in this debate include:
Originalism limits judicial discretion and prevents judges from imposing their own political views under the guise of constitutional interpretation.It promotes certainty, predictability and stability in law by relying on a fixed meaning of constitutional texts.Changes to the Constitution should be left to the formal amendment process, rather than judicial interpretation.Arguments against originalism include:
Originalism is often unworkable in practice because it’s difficult to determine the original meaning or intent of constitutional provisions, and historical context can be challenging to fully understand. The theory ties modern society to the views and values of earlier generations, potentially limiting constitutional rights and guarantees to outdated perspectives.It allows judges to impose their own biases under the guise of historical interpretation.This symposium, which took place on March 17, 2025, was UC Berkeley Law’s inaugural Thomas David and Judith Swope Clark Symposium on Constitutional Interpretation. Watch a video of the debate on UC Berkeley Law’s YouTube page.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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In Berkeley Talks episode 221, American historian Heather Cox Richardson joins Dylan Penningroth, a UC Berkeley professor of law and history, in a conversation about the historical evolution of the Republican Party, and the state of U.S. politics and democracy today.
Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, is the author of the popular nightly newsletter Letters from an American, in which she explains current political developments and relates them to historical events. With more than 3 million daily readers, Richardson says Letters has grown a “community around the world of people who are trying to reestablish a reality-based politics.”
Topics in the conversation include:
The origins of the Republican Party: President Lincoln had a vision of a government serving the common person, including equal access to resources like education and land. After the Civil War, Republicans under Lincoln created a national taxation system, which former Confederates argued was an unfair redistribution of wealth from white people to Black people and from rich people to poor people.The backlash after Lincoln: After Lincoln, there was a rise of robber barons — industrialists whose business practices were considered ruthless and unethical — and a group of people who argued that intervention for ordinary people was a form of socialism. Wealth began to concentrate at the top and led to an inevitable crash. As a consequence, the Republican Party had to repeatedly rethink the way it did business and the way it worked.How Donald Trump changed the Republican Party: Richardson says President Trump took oligarchs' language about government overreach and "stripped away the veneer," appealing directly to racism and sexism. This empowered a new base of supporters and led to a movement encouraging violence and anti-authority sentiment. What gives Richardson hope: Richardson says the current moment in politics reminds her of the 1850s, when it appeared that elite enslavers, who made up 1% of the U.S. population, had completely taken over the country. But over the next decade, the nation went on to elect Lincoln and form a government by the people and for the people. “I believe that all of us coming together in the 21st century can do it again,” she says.The event took place on Feb. 26 in Zellerbach Hall, and was presented by Cal Performances and the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley as part of the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures.
More about the speakers:
Richardson has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian, and is the author, most recently, of the best-selling 2023 book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Penningroth is the author of the award-winning 2023 book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. He serves as associate dean of the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley Law; his scholarship focuses on African American and legal history.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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If someone asked you to describe democracy in one word, what would you say? An October 2024 survey by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project, led by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson, asked people just that. Many respondents said, “freedom,” but a lot of others said, “broken.”
In Berkeley Talks episode 220, Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady discusses how we got to a place of growing disillusionment with democracy, where so many mistrust the U.S. government and deride fellow voters’ ability to make informed decisions.
In his Feb. 3 talk, part of the Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures series, Brady says factors include the rise of moral traditionalism and social division; the rise of the religious right; the demise of unions; and concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion and who belongs. There’s also a new division between less-educated elites and elite professionals, “which I think really affects us as university folks,” he says.
Watch Brady’s full lecture on YouTube, which includes slides from his talk.
Brady is the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He served as dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy from 2009-2021 and as director of the University of California’s Survey Research Center from 1998-2009. He is co-author, most recently, of the 2021 book, Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Find us on YouTube @Berkeley News.
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When Luke Messac began his emergency medicine residency at Rhode Island Hospital in 2018, he noticed a lot of his patients came to him concerned about costs. Some worried about his recommendations for them to stay in the hospital overnight. Others questioned his motives when he asked them to undergo a test, like an X-ray or MRI. A few came in way too late in the course of their illnesses out of fear of the cost.
He’d heard about aggressive debt collection practices at hospitals around the country that put people at risk of profound financial and legal consequences. It made him wonder: Was his hospital doing that, too? After a quick trip to the country courthouse to examine the case files, what he found troubled him.
“I was inundated with what I thought were pretty horrific cases,” said Messac, author of the 2023 book, Your Money or Your Life: A History of Medical Debt Collection in the United States. “Low-income single moms, people living on disability, recent immigrants, were facing thousands of dollars of bills and court fees and interest fees. And if they did not pay and if they did not settle their suits quickly, then they could have their wages garnished. They would be charged double-digit interest rates.”
In Berkeley Talks episode 219, Messac, now an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses how the changing role of hospitals, and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, transformed how medical debts are collected in the U.S.
This talk took place on Sept. 17, 2024, and was sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and cosponsored by Berkeley Public Health.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts) or on YouTube @Berkeley News (youtube.com/@BerkeleyNews/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 218, sociology professor Stephanie Canizales discusses her 2024 book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, about the experiences of undocumented immigrant youth as they come of age in the United States without their parents. Over six years, Canizales conducted 75 in-depth interviews with adult immigrants living in Los Angeles who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied children years before.
“Many arrive in the U.S. to find that long-settled relatives who are constrained by their own legal and socioeconomic status are unable to offer material and emotional support, rendering children unaccompanied upon their arrival,” says Canizales, faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), at a December 2024 event on campus. “Young people might feel disoriented as they are thrust into material and emotional independence, and their role as low-wage workers in the U.S.”
Today, about 146,000 unaccompanied children from Central America, Mexico and other countries are apprehended every year at the U.S.-Mexico border, says Canizales. That’s double the number from 2014, when the U.S. declared a humanitarian crisis at the border.
In addition to Canizales, the talk includes a panel of Berkeley professors who share their thoughts about the book, including Kristina Lovato, assistant professor of social welfare; Caitlin Patler, associate professor of public policy; and law professor Sarah Song, who moderates the conversation.
This event took place on Dec. 3, and was part of the Author Meets Critics series by the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix. It was cosponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute and the Latinx Research Center.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 217, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, director and assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, discuss their 2024 book, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World.
During the campus event, the scholars touch on the transformative role of imagination and storytelling, why responding to demagogues with condemnation doesn’t work and how to create a world where everyone feels they truly belong. The October 2024 conversation was moderated by Ashley Gallegos, director of the institute's Places of Belonging program.
powell and Menendian contend that for people to feel a strong sense of belonging in society, they must see their own stories and experiences reflected in the broader social narrative that shapes their everyday lives.
“What we say in the book is that if people don't see themselves in the story, not only will they reject the story, but they will reject it violently,” says Menendian, who supervises many of the institute’s ongoing research projects and leads major initiatives. “People have to have a place for themselves in that future story.”
“We're anxious as a world,” adds powell, a professor of law, ethnic studies and African American studies. “And the root of that anxiety is, will you belong in the next world? Most of us do not feel very secure. … When you have this deep anxiety caused by a rapid change, we make sense of it through stories.”
This event took place on Oct. 28, and was sponsored by the Othering and Belonging Institute. Founded in 2012, the institute conducts research and develops policies aimed at addressing exclusion, marginalization and inequality to create a more just society.
Learn more about powell’s and Menendian’s book on the Othering and Belonging Institute’s website.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 216, celebrated poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins in conversation with UC Berkeley English Professor Cathy Park Hong, a poet and writer whose creative nonfiction book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Together, they discuss the importance of genre fluidity and artistic experimentation, the role of disobedience in their writing and how language can be both a tool of oppression and liberation.
“I personally feel a lot of affinity with you as a writer for many reasons,” began Hong, in front of a packed auditorium at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in April 2024. “But I think one of the key shared experiences is how the English language, once a site of estrangement and inadequacy for you, became this playground for bounty and experimentation. And part of that bounty and experimentation is how you refuse to limit genre by the way you swing from poetry to prose without feeling tethered by either.”
“I think for me, genre was always as fluid as gender, even punctuation,” replied Vuong, author of two poetry collections — Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother — and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a widely acclaimed novel. “The rigor of punctuation, I think, is arbitrary. They're still up for grabs. And then the dialect of standard English, how legitimate is it? The linguists would tell us it's no more efficient or better or capacious than AAVE or other regional dialects. However, standard English is attached to the court system. It's a dialect that is also attached to an army and a navy, and so within that comes great, immense power.
“I'm interested in genre as tendency rather than an ontological position to be. And I think there are tendencies that could be utilized and then left aside or even departed. What is a tendency in us stylistically that is then abandoned? I'm interested in abandon not as a way to cast away or to denounce, but as a restlessness. Like, I will use this mode until I'm done with it. I'll find something else and then return to it later. There's a kind of cyclical relationship. I think maybe if I'm trying to put order to it, I'll say there's a kind of inherent queerness in it — that, for me, my queerness demanded an alternative route, always.”
Vuong was UC Berkeley’s 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, established in 1987 to bring distinguished figures in the arts and humanities to Berkeley for lectures, panel discussions, and meetings with students and faculty. Vuong is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant in 2019, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Read more about Vuong and Hong on the Townsend Center for the Humanities website.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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Photo by Tom Hines/courtesy of Ocean Vuong.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 215, a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices.
Panelists include:
Wes Holliday, professor of philosophy. Holliday studies group decision-making, including the best methods of voting, especially in the democratic context. Marika Landau-Wells, assistant professor of political science. Landau-Wells studies the effect that threat perception has on national security decision-making, and how some decisions we make to protect ourselves can endanger many others.Saul Perlmutter, Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor of Physics and 2011 Nobel laureate. Perlmutter co-teaches a Big Ideas course, called Sense and Sensibility and Science, designed to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers by exploring key aspects of scientific thinking.Linda Wilbrecht, professor of neuroscience and psychology. An adolescent scientist, Wilbrecht studies how adolescent learning and decision-making changes from ages 8 to 18, and how it compares to that of adults and children. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, executive dean of the College of Letters and Science (moderator).The campus event was held on Oct. 9 as part of the College of Letters and Science’s Salon Series, which brings together faculty and students from a swath of disciplines to interrogate and explore universal questions or ideas from disparate perspectives.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 214, former editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dean Baquet and Marty Baron, evaluate how the media covered the 2024 U.S. presidential election and share thoughts on how journalists should effectively cover Donald Trump’s second term.
In 2016, the New York Times was shocked that Trump won, because they didn’t understand that the country was “ready to elect a Donald Trump,” said Baquet at a UC Berkeley Journalism event on Nov. 13. But, he said, he thinks the coverage of the most recent election was much better.
“My argument would be that, and people have trouble accepting this, but all of the stuff you know about Donald Trump — his abuse of the tax structure that David Fahrenthold wrote about, his taxes and his tax dodges that the New York Times, including David Barstow, wrote about, the allegations of women, all of the things that became controversies about Donald Trump — were written about in the American press, and the American people voted Donald Trump in anyway. So I actually think the press did a much better job. How do you think the press performed this election?”
“Well, I think there was a lot of good work,” responded Baron. “I would say this: When people asked me, ‘How did we do?’ in 2016, I said that our problem predated 2016. Our problem is that we did not understand America well enough to understand that this country would produce a candidate like Donald Trump.
“We did not understand the level of rancor and grievance against elites, including, and maybe particularly, the press, to understand that they didn’t want Jeb Bush, who was called the front-runner at one point. They wanted exactly the opposite of Jeb Bush. They wanted somebody who was not part of governing the ruling elites, the political families. They wanted somebody who was going to go to Washington, basically be an arsonist, burn everything down, punch people in the face. And that’s what they elected. And we didn’t capture that. We didn’t understand the country well enough. I do think that we suffered from the same problem this time.”
“But this time, people knew that there was a good chance he’d win,” said Baquet.
“There was a good chance he would win, but I don’t think people anticipated that he would win as decisively as he has,” said Baron. “And they didn’t understand that he would win in the voting segments that he won, to the degree that he did, among Black Americans, among Latinos, among even women, among you name it. To win all of the swing states, I don’t think that that was anticipated at all.
“And so, I don’t think we detected that level of desire for a change. And to me, that is, I think we need to work harder at really understanding the country.”
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around the world, and how it can influence belief, for good and for bad.
“Stories give a basis and a justification for people to take real life action,” Tangherlini said at an Alumni and Parents Weekend at Homecoming event on campus in October. “They can be retrospective justification, but they can also be motivating justification.”
A computational folklorist, who’s also a professor in the School of Information and associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Tangherlini works at the intersection of informal culture, storytelling and AI. He uses a combination of methods from the study of folklore and machine learning to describe storytelling networks and classify stories.
“This is where we start to unravel narrative at internet scale,” he said. “One of the things that's kind of interesting, if we start to think about conspiracy theories, is you've all heard little bits of these in different places. But what a conspiracy theory is able to do is to take simple threat narratives and link them together to form complex representations of threatening groups and their interconnections.”
Tangherlini went on to address specific conspiracy theories, from #stopthesteal to Pizzagate, and explored the potential of using storytelling to change the conversation.
“Can we use the structure of the storytelling to … question exclusionary ideas about who belongs and turn them into more inclusive ideas in the storytelling itself?” he asked. “Can we question ideas of what is threatening? Can I develop ways to steer conversations to more inclusive and less destructive strategies?”
This Oct. 18 event was hosted by Berkeley’s Division of Arts and Humanities.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 212, a panel of UC Berkeley experts from former presidential administrations take a critical look at the issues that have led the U.S. to this year’s historic election and reflect on the future of American democracy. The Oct. 29 campus event was sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and Cal Performances, and was part of the Goldman School’s Interrogating Democracy series.
Panelists include:
Janet Napolitano, professor of public policy and director of the new Center for Security in Politics; former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration; former president of the University of California. Robert Reich, emeritus professor of public policy; senior fellow at the Blum Center for Economic Development; former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.Maria Echaveste, policy and program development director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy; former assistant to the president and deputy White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute.Angela Glover Blackwell (moderator), chief vision officer for the Goldman School of Public Policy’s new Democracy Policy Initiative; founder-in-residence of PolicyLink.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 211, Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion, an ex-evangelical minister and the co-host of the politics podcast Straight White American Jesus, discusses Project 2025, Christian nationalism and the November elections.
“Project 2025 is a deeply reactionary Catholic vision for the country,” said Onishi, who gave the 2024 Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance on Oct. 1. “It's a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic leaders, and in many cases, reactionary Catholic thought.”
Many see Trump’s vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio, as bolstering Trump’s outsider image, said Onishi. But it has gone mostly unnoticed that Vance is a radical religious politician, even more so than former Vice President Mike Pence.
“Vance's Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, and yet it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency — and a direct link to Project 2025,” he said.
The UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In 2011, mass protests erupted in Syria against the four-decade authoritarian rule of the Assad family. The uprising, which became part of the larger pro-democracy Arab Spring that spread through much of the Arab world, was met with a brutal government crackdown.
Soon after, the country descended into a devastating civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced over 13 million people, more than half of the country’s prewar population.
When the civil war broke out, groups of volunteers formed to provide emergency response to communities across Syria. In 2014, those volunteers voted to form the Syria Civil Defence, a national humanitarian organization widely known as the White Helmets. Since then, the group has expanded to become a nearly 3,000-strong network that has saved more than 128,000 lives in Syria.
In their daring and life-threatening work, the White Helmets provide critical emergency services, including medical care, ambulances and search-and-rescue operations. They also document military attacks and coordinate with NGOs in pursuit of justice and accountability for the Syrian people.
In Berkeley Talks episode 210, we hear from the director of the White Helmets, Raed al-Saleh, and from Farouq Habib, a founding member of the organization who serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. They were part of a panel discussion hosted by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center on Sept. 19, 2024.
“For us, as Syrian people, the most strategic and important work is on justice and accountability, our human rights work,” said al-Saleh, whose remarks were translated by Habib during the event.
The group has become instrumental in exposing human rights violations and atrocities during the war. After they used GoPro cameras to record a double-tap strike in 2015 — when two strikes are launched in quick succession, often targeting civilians or first responders — the White Helmets recognized that the videos could be used to document these war crimes.
“We realized that the footage … is not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but it’s even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.”
When asked later in the discussion how the White Helmets envision the future of Syria, al-Saleh replied that they want to see “a peaceful Syria, where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.”
Habib and al-Saleh were joined on the panel by Andrea Richardson, a senior legal researcher for investigations at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, and emergency physician and medical adviser Rohini Haar, a Berkeley Law lecturer and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center. The discussion was moderated by Andrea Richardson, executive director of the Human Rights Center.
Learn more about Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.
Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of the White Helmets.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 209, renowned legal scholars Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, and Nadine Strossen, professor emerita of the New York School of Law and national president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008, discuss free speech challenges facing universities today. They covered topics including hate speech, First Amendment rights, the Heckler’s Veto, institutional neutrality and what steps universities can take to avoid free speech controversies.
The conversation, which took place on Sept. 11, was held in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in which thousands of students protested successfully for their right to free political speech at UC Berkeley. Instead of having a moderator, the speakers were given a list of questions they posed to each other, and took turns answering them.
At one illuminating moment, Chemerinsky asked Strossen what steps she might take to reduce the harmful effects of polarized political speech on campus.
“I think that punishment is not an effective way to change somebody's attitudes,” Strossen answered, “which is what we are concerned about, especially in an educational environment. Treating somebody like a criminal or even shaming, shunning and ostracizing them is not likely to open their hearts and minds. So I think it is as ineffective as a strategy for dealing with discrimination as it is unjustified and consistent with First Amendment principles.
“But there are a lot of things that universities can and should do — and I know from reading about your campus, that you are doing … It's gotten justified nationwide attention.”
Strossen went on to emphasize the importance of education, not only in free speech principles, but in other civic principles, as well, like the history of discrimination and anti-Semitism.
Beyond education, Strossen said, “universities have to show support for members of the community who are the targets of hateful speech by raising their own voices, but also by providing psychological and other counseling and material kinds of support.”
The event was sponsored by HxA Berkeley and Voices for Liberty, of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School. It was co-sponsored by Berkeley Law’s Public Law and Policy program, the Berkeley Liberty Initiative and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.
Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 208, three UC Berkeley professors from a wide range of disciplines — psychology, biology and ethnic studies — broach a deep question: What is understanding?
“When I think about it through the lens of being a psychologist, I really think about understanding as a demonstration of, say, knowledge that we have about the world,” begins Arianne Eason, an assistant professor of psychology, in this episode.
“But that knowledge doesn't necessarily have to be through what we say. It doesn't necessarily have to be explicit. It's really about shaping the way that we engage with the world around us, and with those around us, and being very flexible.
“I think, a lot of times, if we’re thinking about the college context, and what is understanding, people's first reaction might be, ‘I'm able to give an answer.’ But that's not really understanding. It's really about being able to apply it to different contexts that you may not have seen before.
“And I think kind of wrapped up in that for me is a recognition of what you don't know. To really understand also means to recognize what you don't understand, and where the limits of your knowledge are.”
The fall 2024 discussion also included Christian Paiz, an associate professor of ethnic studies, and Hernan Garcia, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology and of physics.
It’s part of a video series for Research, Discovery and You, a course for new students offered every fall semester by Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science. In the course, students are introduced to different ways of thinking and approaches to knowledge production as practiced across the college’s 79 majors.
Research, Discovery and You is taught by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, professor of psychology and the college’s associate dean of student outreach and engagement, and Aileen Liu, the college’s director of curricular engagement initiatives.
The video series, part of the course’s recent redesign, was supported by the College of Letters and Science and the Division of Undergraduate Education’s Instructional Technology and Innovation Micro Grant Program.
Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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In Berkeley Talks episode 207, bestselling author and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Pollan discusses how he chooses his subjects, why he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the role of storytelling in shifting our perspective.
“We're wired for story,” he told KQED’s Mina Kim, whom he joined in conversation at a UC Berkeley event in May 2024. “We're a storytelling and consuming people, and we remember better and we're moved more by narrative than we are by information or argument.
“The shorter journalism gets, the more it relies on argument to get any kind of heat. And I just don't think that's how you change minds. I think changing minds has to work at all levels: It has to work at the intellectual level, it has to work at the emotional level, and at even probably subliminal levels, and story does that.
“When you look at great pieces of narrative journalism, people don't even realize their minds have been changed by the time they get to the end of it.”
Pollan has written eight books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2010), about the impact of our various food choices on animal welfare and the environment, and How to Change Your Mind (2018), an exploration of the history of psychedelics and their effects on the human mind. He recently retired from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he taught for many years.
Read the transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo by Marlena Telvick.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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There’s a scene toward the end of the new Pixar film Inside Out 2 where the main character, 13-year-old Riley, is having a panic attack in the penalty box at a hockey match.
She’s just been reprimanded for tripping an opponent in frustration. On the outside, she’s seen sitting in the small space while grasping at her chest and neck, breathing in and out, faster and faster. On the inside, the character Anxiety, one of Riley’s newest emotions, is spinning in a glitchy loop at her brain’s control board.
After a few moments, Riley slowly begins to notice and reconnect with the world around her. Her panic subsides, her breathing steadies and she centers herself.
It’s a gripping illustration of a common (and terrifying) experience, and a reminder for teens and parents alike that there’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to anxiety. For experts who consulted on Inside Out 2, normalizing the emotion was part of the goal.
“You have so much pressure on young people to be perfectionistic and excel in everything,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, who consulted on how to convey and understand emotions in the film. “Panic and anxiety, those are part of our evolutionary design. They have their point. They can get excessive, of course, but just to be there and to have a language, to let the child know they're not alone, that these are common reactions, is such a powerful [message].”
In Berkeley Talks episode 206, Keltner joins a panel of others who worked on Inside Out 2 — clinical psychologist Lisa Damour, who served as a scientific consultant on the film with Keltner, and the film’s lead editor, Maurissa Horwitz. Together, they discuss the unique pressures that teenagers face, the science behind emotions, and how all of them, even the most uncomfortable, have a purpose.
“I felt like I was learning more about my adolescent self as I worked on this movie,” said Horwitz. “I think being able to really name those emotions that come up during this period … and knowing that there's that amount of growth and reworking going on physically inside [your brain], it's just a great thing to be aware of as a touchstone.”
“I'm hearing that conversations are happening in families, whether it's around anxiety or self-talk,” she continued, “and that parents and families are feeling seen by this movie and relate to it so much. It's really incredible to be a part of that.”
This July 2024 conversation was moderated by Allison Briscoe-Smith, a child clinical psychologist and a senior fellow at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, where Keltner is the faculty director.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Screenshot from Inside Out 2.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 205, sports journalist Jemele Hill discusses her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. at a UC Berkeley event in January 2020.
"Sports journalism," began KALW radio journalist Hana Baba, with whom Hill joined in conversation as part of a Cal Performances speaker series. "So you’re growing up, you’re watching TV, you’re reading the papers ... When did you realize that this is a male journalist's space?
"I knew that, but I didn’t know it," replied Hill, author of the 2022 memoir Uphill and host of the podcast Jemele Hill Is Unbothered. "And this is why — whenever I talk about mentorship, I preach this to both mentees and mentors: The first thing you can give a mentee and the first responsibility as a mentor, you need to give them a sense of belonging."
She went on to describe how, when she was in an apprenticeship program for the Detroit Free Press, two women journalists — feature writer Johnette Howard and sports writer Rachel Jones — were assigned to be her mentors.
"So I never knew that it was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing because the very first person I knew that did it was a woman. ... And so because I got that early confidence at the beginning of my career, I just never went through a period of self-doubt, which is totally normal for any woman in a male-dominated space, especially a Black woman. So I was very lucky that I got that sense of belonging early."
Later on, Hill discussed when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem throughout the San Francisco 49ers’ season in 2016 to protest racial injustice, effectively ending his football career.
“I mean, the NFL owners are spineless,” said Hill, who worked for ESPN for more than a decade and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2018.
“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 [former] 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 doesn’t experience usually.
“And so what does that say about people in this country? … We just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, commemorated him. And the same people I saw talking about how great Dr. King was for his nonviolent protest are also the same people who think Colin Kaepernick doesn’t deserve to play in the NFL? … But the NFL, I think, as we have seen in the case with Muhammad Ali, as we have seen is the case with a lot of history, 20 years from now they’ll be telling a different story. They’ll act like all of this never happened.”
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Daniel Stark/ESPN.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In Berkeley Talks episode 204, Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, discusses the history of the Supreme Court and how its recent decisions will impact generations to come.
“When you think of the topics for the first two years of this supermajority — guns, abortion, affirmative action, the interest of the fossil fuel industry — that doesn't sound like a court,” Waldman said to UC Berkeley Law Professor Maria Echaveste, whom he joined in conversation in April 2024. “That sounds like a political caucus.
“And so, I think disentangling our reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law, which is vital to the country and deeply embedded in who we are, with the specific role of the Supreme Court, and especially this Supreme Court, is a challenge. But I think we have to find a way to do it.”
The Supreme Court issued decisions in June and July that may have historic impacts on American society, but because Waldman's talk took place before these decisions were issued, he doesn’t discuss them in this conversation.
This event was hosted by Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy as part of its new Interrogating Democracy series.
The Brennan Center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving systems of democracy and justice. Waldman is a constitutional lawyer and author of the 2023 book, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America. He served as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021 and worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton alongside Echaveste.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks/).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Screenshot of the cover of Waldman's book, The Supermajority.
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- Visa fler
