Berkeley Talks

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 transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"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 her most famous song "Little Boxes" — a satire of suburban conformity inspired by the 1960s housing developments in Daly City.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"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 everything good that we want for the world. And that includes getting an actual representative democracy. It's not just about women, but it's also about people of color. It's about anyone who does not fit the dominant identity. And we have to start to reverse engineer those policies, those practices that have been in place forever that are maintaining these obstacles to people getting these opportunities."This discussion was part of the Bay Area Women in Politics Oral History Project, which highlights the work of women leaders in the Bay Area. "We really wanted to think about this project as a way to document the history of our region's political women, from elected officials to activists to campaign staffers to fundraisers," said Amanda Tewes, a historian and interviewer for the Oral History Center who is leading the project. "I think we can all agree that women are often the backbone of America's political work — and we felt it was important to record that."Listen to the discussion and a read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 a vicious and wildly divisive campaign from which we will probably never recover. No, I was actually looking ahead toward a surveillance state, which doesn't have that populist personality demagogue, who's like a clown, a sadistic clown, who's very vicious and funny in an ignorant way, playing to the populous."In my vision, it's more of a surveillance state, where the government is actually impersonal, and you never see a personality. ... It's more like, it's just all around us. We'e in a mesh, a web, of being surveyed and recorded all the time."This conversation was part of Berkeley Book Chats, a series presented by the Townsend Center that features faculty members discussing recently completed publications, performances or recordings.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"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 they think economics could learn from other disciplines. The discussion was moderated by Sandy Darity, a professor of economics, public policy and African and African American studies at Duke University.This talk was sponsored by UC Berkeley's Department of Economics and Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, co-founded by Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman.Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“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 work as a judge.Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 risingthermals via Flickr)Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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."Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.