Berkeley Talks

In this episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, Berkeley professors Denise Herd and Waldo Martin discuss 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, a yearlong initiative that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies."The commemoration of the 400th anniversary of slavery — it's part of a national initiative to recognize this long and really, really important time in our history," says Herd, a professor in the School of Public Health and associate director of the Othering and Belonging Institute who is leading the campus initiative. "... I think a strong impetus for bringing it here was that it resonates with the goals of really understanding social inequality and addressing social inequality."Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Chotiner, a film historian and an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, gave a lecture on Jan. 22, 2019, about film in the past year, from Hollywood blockbusters and indie favorites to the impact of the #MeToo movement, changes in the film academy and the Oscars. The lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI)."The two things that I think are most importantly new are streaming and the #MeToo movement, and that's what I want to focus on," says Chotiner. "In terms of streaming, I would say we're sort of in the middle of the beginning of the streaming revolution. ... Streaming is the biggest threat to movie theaters since television came in in the 1950s. Last year, Netflix spent more money making movies than all the studios combined. That's stunning. That's shocking."As for the #MeToo movement, he says it has created more gender and racial equality and inclusion, as well as safer working environments, in the film industry. But, he adds, there is still work to be done."By any measurable standard, sexual harassment has dropped drastically, and it's not just measurable standards, but impressionistic accounts," he says. "The experience of women working is drastically better. Doesn't mean it's all done and it's all great. It does mean #MeToo has rocked the entire studio system."See Chotiner's list of the best films of 2019. Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"People say, 'Oh no, the institutions in the United States can support anything. We are safe.' No, beware. Nothing is safe. Nothing is forever. Everything can change. We have to be aware of that and be therefore very alert. I wouldn't say vigilant because the word vigilant has a double meaning, but alert."That's Chilean author Isabel Allende in conversation with playwright Caridad Svich, who won a 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her adaptation of Allende's 1982 novel, The House of the Spirits. The play, presented by UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies in spring 2019, tells the story of a family that spans three generations and a century of violent change in an unnamed Latin American country.The conversation, part of Berkeley Arts and Design's public lecture series, was held on April 25, 2019, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). It was moderated by Michael Moran, who directed the Berkeley production.During the talk, Allende discussed how she grew up in Chile, where she and her family lived through the 1973 military coup, then fled to Venezuela as refugees. While living in Venezuela, Allende felt sick with nostalgia for her country and the family she left behind. And she was also in pain knowing that people — her friends and family — were dying in Chile. Writing, she says, helped her process her grief and begin to heal.Read the transcript and listen on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The United States now locks up more people than almost any country in the history of the world, and by virtually any measure, prisons have not worked, said Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University, during a UC Berkeley lecture in October. Instead, Butler advocates abolishing prisons and finding alternative ways to deal with those who cause harm — something that he says would create a safer, more just society."Prison has been a miserable failure," said Butler, also a legal analyst on MSNBC. "It doesn't work. Most young people who come home from prison wind up right back there within two years. Prisons themselves are horrible places. They're violent, they stink, they're dangerous, they're noisy. It's really hard to leave a space like that better than when you came in."Butler, author of the 2017 book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, gave a talk called "Prison Abolition, and a Mule" on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of UC Berkeley's Jefferson Memorial Lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Division. It was also part of the campus's yearlong initiative, 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"The purpose of medicine is to create a bigger, deeper, more thorough experience of our inner functioning, our physical functioning, our emotional functioning, our energetic functioning, our spiritual functioning, our relational functioning, how we are with the land," said author and consciousness guide Françoise Bourzat. "... Mushrooms bring it to your face, like, 'This is your illness.' By knowing your illness, you resolve your illness, you deal with it, you treat it from within yourself. The mushroom helps you see the truth." Bourzat, author of Consciousness Medicine, gave a talk on Nov. 14 at UC Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside an exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which ran from March 15 to Dec. 15. Bourzat, a counselor who is trained in somatic psychology, has been mentored in the Mexican Mazatec tradition of the sacred mushrooms, and has been sharing her approach internationally for 30 years.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Oct. 29, artist Paul Chan delivered the 2019-20 Una's Lecture, a series sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities since 1987. In his talk, called the "Bather's Dilemma," Chan explores the figure of the bather — a visual trope with a rich history, and a prominent theme in his own work — as an embodiment of pleasure that is linked to the act of renewal."The bather in art history has a long and storied pedigree," says Chan. "What I was interested in was how this motif inspired a few artists to experiment with new ways to depict a human form that took into account movement in different ways."Thinking about bathers touched a nerve that was sensitive to a need I didn't realize was in me," he continues. "I needed some way to think about whether pleasure has a place in these punishing times and whether our capacity for pleasing and being pleased has any bearing on how we renew ourselves to better meet what genuine appeals of progress asks of us."Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art. His art is held in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"If rights aren't enforced, do they really exist?" asks Beverly Crawford, a professor emerita of political science and international and area studies at UC Berkeley. "We can say, 'Yes, they exist,' but if they're not enforced, people can be treated as if their rights don't exist ... Once a person steps outside their own borders, let's say they're fleeing persecution, or they're fleeing poverty, or they're fleeing environmental crisis or disaster, they are rightless, as if their rights don't exist."Crawford, former director of Berkeley's Center for European and German Studies, gave a lecture, "Lies about migrants: immigration policy in a time of post-truth politics," on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). During the lecture, she discussed two problems in formulating immigration policy that leads to dehumanization — the absence of migrant rights and rival national identities. For example, in the U.S., there are rival definitions of what it means to be an American for American citizens. But, she says, it happens in other countries, too."What we have seen is the rise of the extreme right wing to dominate the narrative about immigration, both in the United States and in Europe," Crawford continues. "What's happened is, this extreme right, which dominates the narrative, has created a false narrative, and has turned to the weaponization of dehumanizing words and pictures to control the narrative based on people's fear and emotion, and the formulation of an exclusionist immigration policy. We don't have a comprehensive immigration law now."Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At 13, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote an article in her school paper about the importance of the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. But she didn't think about pursuing a career in law because she didn't see any women in the field.When she began college at Cornell, however, she learned about how attorneys were defending people called in for questioning during the wave of Communist accusations led by Senator Joe McCarthy. In reading about their advocacy, "I got the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing," said Ginsburg at an Oct. 21 event at UC Berkeley.Ginsburg, who, at 86, is the oldest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, gave Berkeley Law’s inaugural Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture to a packed house of Berkeley Law students, faculty and staff in Zellberbach Hall.Ginsburg and Kay, who both graduated from law school in 1959, were trailblazers for women in the law and gender equality. They met at a conference on women in the law in 1971, and went on to co-author the first casebook on sex-based discrimination. They were good friends for decades before Kay, who taught for 57 years at Berkeley Law and was its first woman dean, died in 2017.During the lecture, Ginsburg talks about the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field, how "overjoyed" she is that women are now welcomed at the bar and on the bench, how unconscious bias is still a problem — and the "zest for life" she has after having survived several bouts of cancer.Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the 2020 general elections looming, the nominee for the Democratic Party undetermined and a defiant and volatile president at the helm, the impeachment inquiry is heating up. At stake in this topsy-turvy political theater are our democratic institutions, which may be forever altered.In this Nov. 5 talk for UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix event, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, and Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, discuss what the mechanisms are for removing or sanctioning a president of the United States, what are impeachable offenses and how it's no longer about left vs. right, but democracy vs. oligarchy. (whitehouse.gov photo)Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer."Jobrani was recently a guest on the Science of Happiness, a podcast from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant."The reason I called my recent special Immigrant was because “immigrant” under Trump had turned into a bad word. It was a derogatory term. And really, people that that grasped onto that xenophobia, it broke my heart because I look around — first of all, I’m an immigrant. And then I look around and I know a lot of really good people that are immigrants, and then I’m looking at people like the Syrian refugees who are trying to come to America and flee hardship or the people come from Central America and I go, 'These people are leaving a really bad situation.' No one’s in a great situation is going, 'Oh we know the economy is great, there’s no violence in our country — let’s go somewhere where we don’t speak the language and we’re not wanted and see how it will go.’ No.""That’s so true, Maz," says Keltner. "You know, what really strikes me about the immigrants who I am friends with and who I work with is not only their perseverance, but their ability to stay focused on the brighter side of human nature in spite of the rise of white supremacy and xenophobia in our country today."In each episode of the Science of Happiness, a guest chooses a practice from the Science of Happiness free online course that’s been shown to increase happiness, connection and kindness. Jobrani chose a practice that focused on positivity — writing about three good things. When Jobrani got the assignment, he was on vacation with his wife and two kids in Japan, so the whole family participated. Each day, they would take 10 minutes to write down three good things, then they'd read what they wrote aloud to each other. It's something that Jobrani says encouraged them to look for positive things throughout the day.Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.