Berkeley Talks

In Berkeley Talks episode 190, journalist and UC Berkeley alumnus Vincent Bevins discusses mass protests around the world — from Egypt to Hong Kong to Brazil — and how each had a different outcome than what protesters asked for. “From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in mass protests than at any other point in human history,” said Bevins, author of the 2023 book, If We Burn. “These protests were often experienced as a euphoric victory at the moment of the eruption. But then, after a lot of the foreign journalists, like me, have left (the countries), and we look at what actually happened, the outcome was very different than what was originally expected or indeed hoped for.”For his book, Bevins interviewed more than 200 people in 12 countries, all of whom were a part of the uprisings, whether they put the protests together or responded to them as government officials or lived through them. In closing, he said, “When you properly want to restructure the system or make real problems for powerful forces, the counterattack is going to come.”And, according to thinkers from around the world Bevins spoke to, including Berkeley sociology Professor Cihan Tuğal, instead of putting together an organization during an uprising, protesters should build in the off-season.“Build real structures that can allow human beings that want to reshape the world in the same way to act together in the moment of the uprising," said Bevins, "because it’s very difficult to put together an organization in the uprising.”This talk, recorded in October 2023, was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at Berkeley and director of the Socio-Spacial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. The event was co-sponsored by (SC)2 and Social Science Matrix.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 189, Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt discusses how Americans need to do the work of making the U.S. political system more democratic through reforms that ensure that electoral majorities can actually govern.“If you're going to have a first-past-the-post electoral system, as we have in the United States, or one side wins and another side loses, then those with the most votes should prevail over those with fewer votes in determining who holds political office,” said Ziblatt, co-author How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. “No theory of liberal democracy can justify any other outcome. Put differently, office holding should reflect how voters vote.” This Dec. 6, 2023 talk was presented by UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures as part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture series.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Photo by Manny Becerra via Unsplash.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 188, a panel of scholars discusses free speech on university campuses — where things stand today, what obligation campus leaders have to respond to conflicts involving speech and the need for students to feel safe when expressing their own views."Issues of free speech on campus have been there as long as there have been universities," began Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky at a UC Berkeley event on Jan. 10. "There's no doubt that since Oct. 7, universities across the country, including here at Berkeley, face enormously difficult issues with regard to freedom of speech.""Especially in these times where, and especially with this (Israel-Hamas) war, where people are feeling so hurt by words, and arguing that words or phrases mean you're anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, it's really challenging," said Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand. "The temptation when people are so hurt and in so much pain is to run from it."But in fact, I think we should do the exact opposite. … At times, those are the moments where people will actually want to learn, and need to learn, and listen."So I think we should charge toward the conversations in these hard times, precisely because there are opportunities to learn so much. Because … when people make this demand or that demand, they're often expressing a need to be heard and a need to have a voice in what's happening."Panelists in this discussion included:Geeta Anand, dean of Berkeley JournalismEmerson Sykes, senior staff attorney, ACLU; adjunct professor, NYU School of LawHoward Gillman, chancellor and professor of law, UC IrvineErwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law (moderator)This discussion is part of the Berkeley Law Conversations series. Watch a video of the conversation and learn more about the speakers on Berkeley Law’s website.Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Photo by Kefr4000 via Wikimedia Commons.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 187, Bernice Yeung, managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program; public health journalist Isabella Gomes; and gender-based violence expert Holly Joshi discuss how sex trafficking can appear invisible if we don’t know where to look, and how doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators — all of us — can do more to protect victims and survivors. “If we're just looking at sex trafficking as the issue, then it's a bipartisan issue,” said Joshi, director of the GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice in San Francisco, and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence prevention and intervention. “But if we're really looking at the causes and the historical oppression and the ongoing systemic oppression of women and girls and immigrants and failure to create safe cities for immigrants and anti-Blackness, all of those things equal a failure to protect survivors of sex trafficking.“So … yes, it's a bipartisan issue if we're just talking about sex trafficking legislation, specifically. But we're not. We're really talking about American politics and the historic lockout of entire groups of people that is continuing to go on and is creating vulnerable victims in this country.” This Nov. 8 discussion, co-presented by the Pulitzer Center and Berkeley Journalism, was part of a forum focused on gender. It also included a keynote by New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on democracy and authoritarianism in the context of gender, race and identity in the U.S.Learn more about the speakers and watch a video of the conversation on Berkeley Journalism’s website.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A panel of UC Berkeley scholars discusses the transformative potential of AI in academia, highlighting challenges of bias and data curation. They explore AI's impact in fields like psychology, astronomy, and environmentalism. The episode also tackles the consequences of divesting from education and the need for ethical AI and societal restructuring. The panel showcases the excitement in academia to investigate failure points and boundary conditions of AI models.

In Berkeley Talks episode 185, New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn discusses how polling works, the challenges facing pollsters today and where polling stands as we head into the 2024 U.S. presidential election."I don't think it's a coincidence that we have a crisis of polling at the same time we have a crisis of democracy," said Cohn, who gave UC Berkeley’s Citrin Award Lecture on Oct. 19."I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump mobilized a so-called silent majority of voters who felt that they were unrepresented in our political system, and who turned out to be underrepresented in polls by an order of magnitude for decades."Just think about all of the choices that politicians made from the '80s onward. That in each one of those decisions, they were doing it, in part, based on data that underrepresented the number of white working class Americans by tens of millions. I think it added up, and I think I'll start by proving that to you, and I think it offers a nice launching point for where polling is today. Because although it's tempting to think the problems in polling are recent to Trump, I think it's probably fair to say that Trump exposed issues in polling that had existed for a very long time before that."The Citrin Award Lecture is an annual event of Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. Watch a video of Cohn’s lecture on YouTube.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.AP Photo by Steve Helber. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 184, Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, and housing policy expert Leah Rothstein discuss their 2023 book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. The conversation was moderated by Tamika Moss, founder and CEO of the Bay Area organization, All Home. In the book, the father-daughter co-authors describe how unconstitutional government policy on the part of federal, state and local governments created the segregation that we know in this country today, where every metropolitan area has clearly defined areas that either are all white or mostly white, and clearly defined areas that are all Black or mostly Black."We had a myth term that what we had in this country was 'defacto segregation,' something that just happened because of private bigotry or discriminatory actions on the part of private businesses or people just liking to live with each other of the same race ... something that just happened by accident," said Richard Rothstein, author of the 2017 book, The Color of Law, and a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow emeritus of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  "And the reason that that distinction is so important is because if it just happened by accident, then we might not like it, but it's easy to think that the only way it's going to unhappen is by accident. But when we understand that this is the creation of racially explicit written public policy on the part of federal, state and local governments ... (and) if we take our responsibilities as citizens of this country seriously, then we know we have an obligation to fix it, to undo this unconstitutional system."Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 183, Poulomi Saha, an associate professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, discusses how cult culture, once a fringe phenomenon, has moved into the mainstream — and what that tells us about what we long for, what we fear and who we hope to be."In this crisis moment, we have a return to desire for overarching meaning, radical acceptance, transformative experience, transcendence," says Saha. "But unlike in the 1960s, we're not dropping out, we're tuning in ... to a highly regularized representation of cults. If in the 1960s we had the sense that fringe groups and communes might offer us a way out of conformity and regularity, in this current incarnation, when cults appear in our everyday lives, they do so highly regularized."Saha is currently working on a book about America’s long obsession with its own invented visions of Indian spirituality, and why so often those groups and communities come to be called cults.(Editing note: Because of an audio issue, we left out the Q&A portion of this talk.)Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Photo by Jen Siska.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 182, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. "To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need," began Klein, who joined in conversation on Oct. 5 with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab."It's so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it. "And yet, the story of America in the 21st century, more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism, is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are getting far more of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act than blue states?"Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).Photo by Lucas Foglia.Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chinese activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile, and politics. They reflect on wastefulness in American society, discuss experiences in Berkeley, and talk about Wei Wei's unique artwork. They delve into the concept of art as a means of expression and the artist's role in society, and discuss the impact of the refugee crisis. They also discuss Xi Jinping and China's rise, the human rights situation in China and Tibet, and the challenges faced by minority groups.