CIIS Public Programs

There are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and controversy than immigration. Drawing on his own experience as an Indian-born teenager growing up in New York City, and on years of reporting around the world, author and journalist Suketu Mehta tackles this issue head-on. In this conversation with multicultural counseling expert Jyoti Rao, Suketu talks about his latest book This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto and his belief that immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish.

How can we be more mindful when our world seems broken beyond repair? Tim Desmond—esteemed Buddhist scholar and lecturer on Psychology at Yale Medical School—has fresh, engaging answers to this important question. Join integrative health expert Megan Lipsett for a conversation with Tim about his approach to mindfulness practices designed for surviving the sometimes-miserable world we currently live in. This episode contains explicit language.

Join Bay Area author and organizer Kim Tran for a brash and enlightening conversation with reporter and linguist Amanda Montell about gendered language and the way it shapes us. This episode contains explicit language.

Join equity expert Y-Vonne Hutchinson for this conversation with author, editor, and Baltimore native D. Watkins about the lessons he’s learned navigating two very distinct worlds—the hood and the elite sanctums of prominent black thinkers and public figures.

Gender reconciliation activist and CIIS Professor Alka Arora offers an expansive and deeply ecological vision—inviting us to move beyond critique to focus more on the world we want to co-create.

In this episode, bioethics professor Osagie K. Obasogie talks with author George Estreich about what he has learned as the father of a young woman with Down syndrome exploring the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet.

The Enneagram is a personality typing system with ancient symbolic origins that has a sneaky way of revealing who we are and why we do the things we do. In this episode, wellness coach Kayleigh Martin talks with author Hannah Paasch about the benefits of learning our personality traits and her book Millenneagram—a revamped approach to the Enneagram that gives us permission to be our truest, enough-as-is, bad-ass selves.

In this talk, philosophy professor Jacob Sherman discusses the role that philosophy might play in diagnosing and responding to the our global climate crisis.

As artificial intelligence evolves, so too does human culture. In this conversation, futurist Nicole Sallak Anderson and UC Berkeley professor Edward Lee discuss meeting machines and how technology is changing the humans creating it.

This episode features Bay Area performers and writers including a BART train operator, a recent Pride Parade Grand Marshall, and more. Presented in collaboration with San Francisco’s Porchlight storytelling series and The Contemporary Jewish Museum, each storyteller explores their understanding of self and the fluidity of identity.