Berkeley Voices: Recent Episodes
UC Berkeley
Interviews with people who make UC Berkeley the world-changing place that it is.
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We all know sleep is important. But for those facing mental health challenges, research from UC Berkeley shows how good sleep is also foundational for treatment and recovery.
Early results from a long‑term study at Berkeley’s Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic show that sleep is directly linked with our mental health and, when used alongside standard clinical treatments, can dramatically improve patients’ outcomes.
“The finding keeps replicating: If you treat sleep, you’ll improve mental health symptoms,” says Allison Harvey, a Berkeley professor of psychology and director of the clinic who led the study.
In 2017, Harvey and Daniel Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine expert at the University of Pittsburgh, published a book detailing a sleep tool they developed called the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention, or TSC. It includes a range of do-it-yourself sleep treatments, from regularizing wake-up times to detaching from digital devices before bed, that can help anyone get better rest.
Mental health practitioners in county clinics across California are now using it to treat clients, with remarkable results: Not only has the TSC helped to decrease symptoms of psychosis, nearly two-thirds of people reported drinking less alcohol, and suicide-ideation severity was reduced for almost half of the clients.
Emma Agnew, the clinic’s director for clinical implementation and partnerships at the time, has seen this impact firsthand. She says the data confirm a vital shift in how we approach mental health care: “Sleep treatment is literally something that is life-saving for people.”
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo via Unsplash; design by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley.
Resources:
- Allison Harvey's UC Berkeley faculty profile page
- Emma Agnew's website
- Treating Sleep Problems: A Transdiagnostic Approach (2017) by Allison Harvey and Daniel Buysse
- Research on the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention
- The Berkeley research team's recent webinars on sleep science
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Carol Nekesa doesn’t know if she was ever infected by parasitic worms. But it’s likely, she says, since most kids in her community had them. “It was just a normal part of childhood,” she says.
Carol grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Busia County, Kenya. Like many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, Busia lacked the infrastructure for clean water and modern sanitation, leading to the pervasive spread of infectious diseases.
Parents feared deadly outbreaks like malaria and cholera, often unaware of the slower, hidden damage caused by intestinal worms. The symptoms — fatigue, diarrhea, weight loss, stunted growth — rarely made headlines, yet they shaped children’s futures. At the time, more than a billion people worldwide, most of them children, were living with these infections, making parasitic worms one of the most widespread chronic health conditions on the planet.
In 1998, two researchers — Ted Miguel, who is now an economics professor at UC Berkeley, and future Nobel laureate Michael Kremer — launched the Primary School Deworming Project in Busia. They had no idea that their work would become a global model proving just how much a healthy childhood matters — not just for kids in the study, but for generations to come.
“It's kind of mind-blowing to be a researcher and know that your research is being cited and used as a justification for these large-scale programs,” says Miguel. “It’s amazing to see.”
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of Ted Miguel.
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In the United States, the housing crisis can feel like an unsolvable puzzle. We talk of housing as something we navigate alone — a commodity we rent or buy, subject to the whims of a volatile market.
But in Thailand, they’ve pioneered a different model. A government program called Baan Mankong, or “secure housing,” treats shelter as a collective right — and proves that the U.S.’s individualist framework isn’t the only way.
As a Berkeley Ph.D. student in 2014, Hayden Shelby wanted to know if a similar strategy could work in the U.S. In order to decipher the complex policy, she enrolled in advanced Thai in the Department of Southeast Asian studies.
Now a leading expert on the program in the U.S., Shelby says speaking Thai on the ground with experts and community members was invaluable.
“People open up when they know you’ve made this really deep and difficult investment in learning their language,” she says. “It breaks down that expert/non-expert barrier.”
In this episode of Berkeley Voices, we look at how acquiring a new language can shift our worldview, and what happens when we stop asking what we can do for other countries and start asking what we can learn from them.
This is the fourth episode of our latest season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research — and the people whose lives are changed by it.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of Hayden Shelby.
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At 3 months old, Victoria Gray wouldn’t stop crying. Blood tests brought devastating news: she had sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that blocks blood flow and oxygen delivery to the body. It causes unbearable pain that Victoria describes as “getting struck by lightning and hit by a truck.”
As she got older, Victoria felt increasingly isolated and hopeless. She often spent her kids’ birthdays at the hospital, where she received regular blood transfusions. “I felt like I was cheating my children out of their childhood,” she says. “I didn’t look forward to a long life. I stopped dreaming. I gave up on school or doing anything … I thought that I was close to dying.”
But at age 34, Victoria got a new chance at life.
In 2019, she became the first person in the world to receive a revolutionary new treatment for the disease — a gene-editing tool called CRISPR discovered in a UC Berkeley lab, which would go on to win a Nobel Prize just one year later.
“It felt like an answered prayer for me,” says Victoria. “CRISPR not only freed me, it freed my children.”
This is the third episode of our latest Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research — and the people whose lives are changed by it.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of Victoria Gray; illustration by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley.
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After Wikipedia made its debut in 2001, some trends quickly emerged. Most editors were male, topics tended to skew toward geek culture interests like computing and gaming, and only a small fraction of biographies were about women.
More than two decades later, biases and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia of all sorts remain, especially for marginalized communities. But a UC Berkeley professor and her students are working to change that.
Since 2016, ethnic studies professor Juana María Rodríguez has partnered with Wiki Education to teach a range of courses in which students create and edit Wikipedia articles about the contributions of LGBTQ people, especially queer and trans people of color.
“Wikipedia is a public-facing project — it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world,” says Rodríguez. “In a political moment where these histories are actively being erased from public view, having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important.”
This is the second episode of a new Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.
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Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California.
“She was a no-nonsense person,” says Lee-Wynant, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in linguistics. “She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.”
For more than 50 years, Guerrero worked with Berkeley linguists to document her language and culture. These recordings are part of the campus’s California Language Archive. In them, she tells stories, describes cultural practices, says vocabulary and conjugates verbs. Whenever Lee-Wynant hears his aunt’s voice, strong and determined, he knows it’s his responsibility to carry on her work.
As a graduate student researcher for the archive, Lee-Wynant is cataloging and analyzing a new collection that includes hours of recordings of his aunt, among other materials. “It's such a trove of information about ... my family's history,” he said. “I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is gonna come up.”
In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Lee-Wynant shares how his aunt's recordings have opened a portal to his family’s history and led him to teach their language to new generations.
And in this UC Berkeley News companion piece, learn more about the linguist who created the archive's newly acquired collection, her lifetime of research with Indigenous communities and how her collection of tapes and notebooks found their way to the archive.
This is the first episode of a new Berkeley Voicesseason, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it. New episodes come out on the first Thursday of every month, from November through April.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.
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There’s so much incredible research and work that happens every day at UC Berkeley, on everything from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to linguistics and the study of social justice. It holds the record for the most Nobel Prize winners among any public university in the world, with two wins just this year.
This work can be highly theoretical and technical, taking decades to fully develop. Yet its impact extends far beyond academia, leading to world-changing results, from the invention of CRISPR gene editing that has saved lives to ethnic studies courses that foster a stronger sense of identity and critical consciousness.
Within these broad impacts are millions of stories of how Berkeley’s research has transformed society. In this season of Berkeley Voices, we hear two sides of a story — from Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research, and from the people who’ve been changed by it.
New episodes will come out on the first Thursday of each month, from November through April. Listen to Berkeley Voices on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley design by Neil Freese.
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Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens.
The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones.
Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz.
“Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.”
It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo via Unsplash+
This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall.
See all episodes of the series.
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When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friends. The next, she couldn’t move or speak.
Up until that moment, she’d been a talkative and outgoing person. She taught math and physical education, and coached volleyball and basketball at a high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’d just had a baby a year earlier with her new husband.
And the thing is, she still was that person. It's just that no one could tell. Because the connection between her brain and her body didn’t work anymore. She would try to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t move.
Eighteen years later, she finally heard her voice again.
It's thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco who are working to restore people’s ability to communicate using a brain-computer interface. The technology, the researchers say, has enormous potential to make the workforce and the world more accessible to people like Ann.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). There, you can also watch a video about Ann and the research team.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Noah Berger, 2023.
This year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
See all episodes of the series.
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When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined.
The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos.
“We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory,” said Wong, a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley. “And in this factory, there would be these painters working in an assembly line fashion: One person would paint the rocks, and one person would paint the trees, and one person would paint the sky.”
But when she arrived in the small gated village, what she saw surprised her. In 2013, she published van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, a bookabout her six years of research in Dafen and how it forever changed the way she thinks about art and authenticity and the nature of creativity.
See more artwork and photos of Dafen from 2015, when Wong and architecture professor Margaret Crawford took a group of graduate students on a 14-day trip to the Pearl River Delta region to study urban art villages.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see more photos on UC Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by José Joaquin Figueroa.
This year on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
See all episodes of the series.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable.
“Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: ‘My darling,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I can't wait to be near you,’” said UC Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride, who in 2022 created the course, Friendship in America, with Berkeley anthropologist Christine Palmer.
Throughout history, with changes in cultural norms and communication technology, the ways we stay connected to each other has also changed, and not always for the better. While social media can make it easier to find people with similar interests, it can also make it easier to forget what it takes to build and keep meaningful relationships.
Gold McBride and Palmer hope their class will inspire students to draw from the past and approach their friendships with the intentionality they require.
This is the fifth episode of our eight-part series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month. See all episodes of the series.
Key takeaways:
- Gender norms, throughout U.S. history to the modern day, influence the kinds of friendships we make and how we express affection for each other.
- As our dominant modes of communication shift, how we conceive of friendship evolves, too.
- By investigating friendship in a deeper way, we can better understand the role of friendship in our lives and become more intentional in how we make and maintain our connections.
Read the transcript, listen to episode and see photos on UC Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Find us on YouTube@BerkeleyNews.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Sarah.rdguezz via Wikimedia Commons.
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Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders. But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response — No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter — and calmly trap them and put them outside.
We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It might be something that is actually dangerous that we really should quickly react to, but it could also be a tiny, non-threatening spider.
Each time, we have to decide what kind of problem it is and then how to respond. She says this task is especially hard today because we're inundated with messages trying to hijack our fear response, from junky online ads to the way politicians speak.
Landau-Wells studies how we make these kinds of decisions, and what influences how we act, especially in situations where there’s a lot on the line.
This is the fourth episode of our eight-part series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month. See all episodes of the series.
Key takeaways:
- We learn what to be afraid of; once we fear something, it’s hard to change our perception.
- We’re bombarded with messaging trying to hijack our quick fear responses.
- Research on how the brain processes fear could help us persuade people to see dangers differently and influence how world leaders make decisions.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Image by Sara Oliveira/Unsplash+
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For UC Berkeley Professor Jack Tseng, the world of paleontology never gets old. With each new discovery, paleontologists like him learn more about the animals that walked the earth millions of years ago.
"If you look at books from 50 years ago, they postured dinosaurs very differently from the way we do it today," Tseng says. "This constant profusion of new scientific knowledge into the popular psyche is recorded in children's books, which is a lovely way to see how this science has progressed."
Fossils also hold valuable clues about our planet's future and our role within it as we experience climate change, he says.
"The questions we ask of them have to do with how different species sometimes survive, when others go extinct. Paleontology is sort of pre-adapted to plug in to understanding the future of Earth because we have billions of years of the fossil record to learn from."
This season on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes will come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May. See all episodes of the series.
Key takeaways:
- Paleontologists can better understand how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals looked and lived by studying living animals.
- New discoveries have reshaped what we thought we knew about dinosaurs and the prehistoric world.
- Fossils hold clues about the role of different species of plants and animals during climate change — and the future of Earth.
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo by Stanley Luo.
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Like millions of other Americans, UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha watched a lot of docuseries about cults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more Saha watched, the more they felt a kind of change within themself. "I was absolutely enthralled," said Saha. “My reaction no longer fit that old script, the script that I had internalized. I wasn’t just having a passing interest. I wasn’t sort of mildly terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, wow, that makes good sense.’” Saha wanted to understand why.
So they started a class, called Cults in Popular Culture, where Saha and their students explore the history of cults, the transformative power of these groups and the conditions that give rise to our collective fascination. After all, Saha says, what better way to make sense of this phenomenon than to ask several hundred Berkeley undergraduates to be test subjects?
This season on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes will come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May. See all episodes of the series.
Key takeaways:
- Nobody joins a cult; they join a good thing. It’s labeled a cult when it goes bad.
- Our fascination with cults rises amid social and global crises. It happened in 1960s America and it’s happening today.
- The IRS decides the difference between a religion and a cult.
- A person who joins a so-called cult undergoes a transformative experience. Instead of calling them "crazy," we should listen.
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo by Jen Siska.
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In a June 2024 study, UC Berkeley psychology professor Keanan Joyner and his colleagues found that by using a combination of methods tailored to the multidimensional nature of psychopathy, we could transform how we identify and understand this personality disorder. "I think that it goes toward having a functional and positive society," Joyner said. "Our collaboration is the substance of what makes humans so wonderful as a species."
This year on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’ll explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes will come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Image via Unsplash+
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the first three years of Justin Davidson's childhood in Chicago, his mom spoke only Spanish to him. Although he never spoke the language as a young child, when Davidson began to learn Spanish in middle school, it came very quickly to him, and over the years, he became bilingual.
Now an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Davidson is part of a research team that has discovered where in the brain bilinguals process and store language-specific sounds and sound sequences. The research project is ongoing.
This is the final episode of a three-part series with Davidson about language in the U.S. Listen to the first two episodes: "A linguist's quest to legitimize U.S. Spanish" and "A language divided."
Photo courtesy of Justin Davidson.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
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There are countless English varieties in the U.S. There's Boston English and California English and Texas English. There's Black English and Chicano English. There's standard academic, or white, English. They're all the same language, but linguistically, they're different.
"Standard academic English is most represented by affluent white males from the Midwest, specifically Ohio in the mid-20th century," says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. "If you grow up in this country and your English is further away from that variety, then you may encounter instances where the way you speak is judged as less OK, less intelligent, less academically sound."
And this language bias and divide can have devastating consequences, as it did in the trial of George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.
This is the second episode of a three-part series with Davidson about language in the U.S. Listen to the first and third episode: "A linguist's quest to legitimize U.S. Spanish" and "One brain, two languages."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
AP photo by Jacob Langston.
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Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. It’s part of the country's long history of scrutiny of non-monolingual English speakers, he says, dating back to the early 20th century.
"It’s groups in power — its discourses and collective communities — that sort of socially determine what kinds of words and what kinds of language are acceptable and unacceptable," says Davidson, an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
But the U.S. is a Spanish-speaking country, he says, and it’s time for us as a nation to embrace U.S. Spanish as a legitimate language variety.
This is the first episode of a three-part series with Davidson about language in the U.S. Listen to other two episodes: "A language divided" and "One brain, two languages."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says.
To read medieval music, Saagar learned five languages — Latin, German, Italian, Catalan and Occitan — making 10 languages that he knows in total (for now, at least).
In losing the history of pieces of music, Saagar says, we’ve lost languages and cultures that were present and important to the time period.
And today, at a time when linguistic boundaries are crumbling before our eyes, he says, instead of judging someone who speaks differently from you, realize that “it's actually a way of speaking a language and that we should cherish that because it's beautiful in its own way."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.
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Brandon Sánchez Mejia stood at a giant wall in UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery and couldn’t believe his eyes. In front of him were 150 black-and-white photos of men’s bodies in all sorts of poses and from all sorts of angles. It was his senior thesis project, "A Masculine Vulnerability," and it was out for the world to see.
"It came from this idea that as men, we are not allowed to show skin as scars or emotions or weakness," said Sánchez, who will graduate from Berkeley this May with a bachelor’s degree in art practice.
Sánchez’s cohort is part of the Department of Art of Practice’s 100th year, a milestone that department chair Ronald Rael said is cause for celebration.
"There have been moments in art practice’s history when it was unclear that art should be at a university at all," said Rael, a professor of architecture and affiliated faculty in art. "And here we are, at 100 years, and it’s one of the most popular majors on campus."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
This is a companion podcast to a feature story about Sánchez, published earlier this month on Berkeley News. There, you can view more photos and read about about how Sánchez's mom made him stay inside for a year as a teenager in El Salvador out of fear he'd join a gang. And how, against his mom's wishes and without any money of his own, he decided to pursue an education — no matter what it took.
UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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The self-guided Black history tour at UC Berkeley begins at Memorial Stadium, where student Walter Gordon was a star of the football team more than 100 years ago. It then weaves through campus, making stops at 13 more locations, each highlighting an important person or landmark related to Black history.
There's Ida Louise Jackson Graduate House, named in honor of the first African American woman to teach in Oakland public schools. Next is Barbara Christian Hall, named for the first Black woman to be granted tenure at Berkeley. Other stops include Wheeler Hall and Sproul Plaza, where Black visionaries, like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., gave famous speeches.
"Just knowing this history, walking around campus and knowing it, you really feel like you belong," said student Daniella Lake, who's on the Black Lives at Cal team that created the tour. "Black people have been here for the past 100 years, and if they were doing all these amazing things then, I can surely do it now."
You can find the self-guided Black history tour at Berkeley on Black Lives at Cal’s website. And soon, on the site, you’ll also be able to sign up for upcoming in-person walking tours.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Illustration by Heaven Jones.
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Bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest extant relatives to humans — could have the longest-lasting nonhuman memory, a study led by a UC Berkeley researcher found. Extensive social memory had previously been documented only in dolphins and up to 20 years.
"What we're showing here," said Berkeley comparative psychologist Laura Simone Lewis, "is that chimps and bonobos may be able to remember that long — or longer."
Berkeley News writer Jason Pohl first published a story about this study in December 2023. We used his interview with Lewis for this podcast episode.
Photo courtesy of Laura Simone Lewis.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
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Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. But UC Berkeley history professor Hidetaka Hirota, author of Expelling the Poor, says state immigration laws in the country were created earlier than that — and actually served as models for national immigration policy decades later.
This is an episode of Afterthoughts, a series that highlights moments from Berkeley Voices interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Hirota featured in Berkeley Voices episode #115: "They built the railroad. But they were left out of the American story."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo from the Library of Congress.
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Today, we're sharing the first episode of the new season of the Berkeley Remix, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Oral History Center. The four-episode season, called "From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration," centers the experiences of descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. It explores themes of activism, contested memory, identity and belonging, and creative expression as a way to process and heal from intergenerational trauma. This first episode is called "It's happening now: Japanese American Activism."
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
Artwork by Emily Ehlen.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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The U.S. transcontinental railroad is considered one of the biggest accomplishments in American history. Completed in 1869, it was the first railroad to connect the East to the West. It cut months off trips across the country and opened up Western trade of goods and ideas throughout the U.S.
But building the railroad was treacherous, brutal work. And the companies leading the railroad project had a hard time retaining American workers. So they began to recruit newly arrived immigrants for the job, mainly Chinese and Irish. And these immigrants, who risked their lives to construct the railroad, have largely been left out of the story.
In recent years, though, there has been a new emphasis on reframing the narrative to include the perspectives, contributions and struggles of railroad workers, not only in scholarship, but in the arts.
On Nov. 17, Cal Performances is presenting American Railroad by Silk Road Ensemble, as part of its 2023-24 season of Illuminations: Individual and Community. It's one of several notable works in recent years that explores the lives of the immigrants who built the U.S. transcontinental railroad.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).
Music by Silkroad Ensemble and Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of San Francisco Public Library.
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UC Berkeley's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancipation, drives her work today.
"Trinidadian Carnival, it’s social justice theater in practice. Every moment, it’s all about emancipation, the subverting of the powerful narrative through humor, through performance, through doublespeak. And it just taught me so much about the possibilities of the art form."
Photo courtesy of Timmia Hearn DeRoy.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).
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It was the early 1970s in New York. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht took a bus to the Catskill Mountains and got off at Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. Looking around, he couldn't tell who was a camper and who was a counselor.
"I think that's really indicative of one of the many things that made that camp special," said LeBrecht.
Over several years, the camp changed him in profound ways.
"I, for the first time, understood that I didn’t need to be embarrassed about being disabled, that I could have pride in who I was," he said. "And that it was possible to fight back against the system that was keeping us down."
Nearly five decades later, in 2020, LeBrecht and filmmaker Nicole Newnham released on Netflix the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, about Camp Jened and the activism it inspired.
"It’s an activist history story," said Newnham. "It’s the origin story of a political and identity-based community, the disability community. But it’s also a coming-of-age story and a joyous sort of celebration of youth and disability culture coming together."
All incoming UC Berkeley undergraduate students watched Crip Camp, nominated for an Academy Award,over the summer as part of On the Same Page, a program of the College of Letters and Science.
"We had a couple of goals with our film," said LeBrecht. "One of them was to reframe what disability meant to people with and without disabilities. We also wanted to start conversations. I hope that this plants a seed within all of these students that they do talk, they do think differently, and that this is something they hold for the rest of their lives that will make the world a better place."
Photo by Steve Honigsbaum.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).
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Growing up, Linda Kinstler knew that her Latvian grandfather had mysteriously disappeared after World War II. But she didn't think much about it.
"That was a very common fate from this part of the world," says Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. "It didn't strike me as totally unusual. It was only later when I began looking into it more that I realized there was probably more to the story."
What she discovered was too big for her to walk away.
In 2022, she published her first book, Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.It follows her family's story in Eastern Europe through the war and its aftermath, and queries all the ways we’ve been told that justice was conducted for those responsible for the genocide of European Jews during the war.
It then moves into the present, and asks: What position do we find ourselves in now? And how can we truly remember the Holocaust — a systematic murder that some are trying to erase — when the last living witnesses are dying? Is this how the Holocaust ends?
"It's not a prescription, but rather a warning: an effort to call attention to the fact that we are in this moment of endings, where survivors are no longer with us," she says. "Undeniably, we are entering a new period of memory. ... We need to think more seriously about what we do with this memory."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).
Photo by Pete Kiehart.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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At 6 months old, Britt H. Young was fitted with her first prosthetic arm.
"The belief was that you would get started on using an adaptive device right away and that would be easiest for you, rather than learning to adapt to your body the way that it is, rather than learning about how to navigate the world with the body you have," said Britt, who is graduating from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in geography on May 15.
Born missing part of her left arm, Britt never went to school without wearing her prosthesis.
"But when I came home, I would take it off immediately," she said. "And in that way, I was spending countless hours practicing being in my body and learning how to do things my own way."
During graduate school, after nearly three decades of wearing a prosthesis every day, Britt decided to stop using it for good.
"The geography department at Berkeley, it sounds cliché to say it was a safe space, but it really felt like a welcoming space, and it really felt like a good space to be myself.
"It has been really interesting now going without a prosthesis and experiencing the world in a totally different way and seeing ... not just frustrating designs and inaccessible designs and hostile designs for disabled people or just for people with my body geometry, but for anybody."
After she graduates, Britt will be working on a book about techno-optimism, the pitfalls of so-called human-centered design, prosthetics and the future of the human body.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
Photo by Gabriela Hasbun.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx woman and refuses to change for anyone.
"Being that queer trans person completely owning herself I hope gives other people permission to be themselves, too," she says.
A master's student in UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice, Gericault explores in her art Philippine mythology and her experience as a trans woman. One time, she dressed up like a manananggal — a kind of monster that detaches from her lower body at night to look for unborn babies to eat — and then slept in an art gallery for six hours.
"I look at the manananggal as kind of a metaphor for how society sees trans women — how this is literally a woman detached from her reproductive organs. And what are you as a woman if you can’t reproduce?"
When Gericault came out to her parents as trans in her early 20s, they disowned her. For her thesis project, Gericault will unravel huge tapestries with images of her parents' stomachs on them.
"It’s about disconnection and severance," she says. "I’m thinking about how much of myself is a part of them and how much of them are a part of me, and it’s kind of this final goodbye."
Gericault's final MFA piece is part of the Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, which opens on May 10 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Listen to the episode, see photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
(UC Berkeley photo by Sofia Liashcheva)
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At sunset yesterday, on March 22, marked the start of Ramadan, the ninth and holiest month of the Islamic calendar. For Ali Bhatti, a Ph.D. candidate in science and math education at UC Berkeley, it’s a time to feel closer to God, to break habits and to remember what he’s thankful for. In this episode, Ali describes, in his own words, what the month means to him. He also talks about how 9/11 shaped his childhood in New Jersey, finding his Muslim community at Berkeley and how Islam guided him through the deepest loss of his life.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
Photo courtesy of Ali Bhatti.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Purvi Shah.
Shah is the founder and executive director of Movement Law Lab and a civil rights litigator, policy advocate and law professor who has spent over a decade working at the intersection of law and grassroots social movements.
During their conversation, they talk about the nuts and bolts of founding a legal nonprofit in response to current events, and the intellectual and philosophical theory behind “movement lawyering,” a type of lawyering that aims to support and foment lasting social change.
"It’s not that we have to have all of this stuff, all of these virtues amassed, before we can engage in the work," Nolan says. "Doing the work actually helps us amass what we need in order to do it better."
"That, to me, is one of the biggest beauties of being in social justice work: If you’re doing it right, all you have to do is show up and be persistent and committed and have your words, like what you say you’re going to do, actually be what you do," says Shah. "But the work over the years will transform you. It will teach you. And that hope and that imagination, that sense of it’s possible, I think that’s such a powerful thing."
Shah and Nolan also talk about when it might be a good thing to loosen your grip on your power, how confidence is a process, and moments that give you chills — in a good way — as a lawyer.
This is the last episode of season two of Be the Change, a collaboration between UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs and Berkeley Law. In the series, Nolan interviews changemakers who embody the transformation they want to see in the world. You can find all episodes on the Berkeley Voices podcast.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).
Photo courtesy of Purvi Shah; UC Berkeley design by Neil Freese.
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In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka.
Menka is a lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. She is Denaakk’e from Alaska and Lumbee from North Carolina. In fall 2021, Menka designed and taught a new undergraduate legal studies course called Decolonizing UC Berkeley, and she taught Indigenous Peoples, Law and the United States at the law school in spring 2022.
During their conversation, they talk about how to bring a decolonial lens to education, and about the joys and challenges of being a trailblazer who is pushing against the inherited wisdom and mythology surrounding UC Berkeley — "a place we love deeply and, therefore, as James Baldwin said, claim the right to criticize and to call to higher levels of intellectual and moral honesty," Nolan says.
"This can be a unique space, right?" Menka says. "The university — it is a place of power. I know that. It's important that we are able to understand that if you have a voice, if you are in the room, you should use it."
They also get into how instinct can be a particularly powerful gift when you're part of a subordinated community, and storytelling as a portal to individual and communal healing.
Season two of Be the Change is a collaboration between Berkeley Law and Berkeley News. In the series, Nolan interviews three changemakers who have started something that wasn't there before, and that makes the world a better place. New episodes will come out every week on Wednesday as a special series on the Berkeley Voices podcast.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small; UC Berkeley design by Neil Freese.
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In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Khiara M. Bridges. Bridges is a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law and a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.
During their conversation, Bridges talks about the process of claiming and using her voice as a prominent Black woman. They talk about the complexities of presentation and adornment for members of marginalized communities — especially in academia — and about approaching work with a sense of liberation, creativity and hustle.
"Those things that I do to adorn myself, a lot of folks are going to read them in light of my identity as a Black woman," says Bridges. "So, my nails become read in a particular way and my tattoos will become read in a particular way. And the way that I wear my hair, you know, and my septum piercing, in a particular way. And I'm comfortable with that. I'm happy with that. And I feel that that affirms my identity as a Black woman."
Nolan and Bridges also talk about getting comfortable with the Socratic method, and what it feels like to start law school with no idea what's going on or what you've gotten yourself into, but ultimately finding your way.
Season two of Be the Change is a collaboration between Berkeley Law and Berkeley News. In the series, Nolan interviews three changemakers who have started something that wasn't there before, and that makes the world a better place. New episodes will come out every week on Wednesday as a special series on the Berkeley Voices podcast.
Learn more about Be the Change in our intro episode: Be the Change: A podcast that aims 'to remove the mystery of making change.'
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
UC Berkeley photo design by Neil Freese; photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.
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Embodying the change you want to see in the world can feel ... well, intimidating. Impossible, even. But Berkeley Law's Savala Nolan wants to help us all figure it out — one step at a time — in her podcast, Be the Change.
"We're talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts," says Nolan, director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. "But I hope what they see is that big, lofty concepts really contain lots of little, teeny, tiny steps that are repeated and built upon over time."
In season two of Be the Change, a collaboration between Berkeley Law and Berkeley News, Nolan interviews three changemakers who have started something that wasn't there before, and that makes the world a better place.
"I wanted to contribute something to the community that would help folks really be brave," says Nolan, "and think about their lives and their gifts and their work as things that are full of possibility and as things that are potentially really, really expansive and transformative."
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu. (This page will go live late Wednesday morning.)
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
UC Berkeley photo design by Neil Freese; photo courtesy of Savala Nolan.
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We’ve heard the acronym DEIBJ a lot on campus, especially in the past few years. For those who might not know, it stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice. A growing number of people at UC Berkeley have positions dedicated solely to this incredibly important work.
But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what DEIBJ means, what it actually looks like in practice — now, in our day-to-day lives, but also in the future, when initiatives and policies and other on-the-ground work has transformed our institution.
So, we talked with Ty-Ron Douglas. He's the associate athletic director of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice at Cal Athletics. Douglas, who joined Berkeley two years ago, explained the nuts and bolts of DEIBJ in his upbeat and clear-eyed way that he seems to apply to all things he does.
He also talked about growing up in Bermuda, a precocious kid feeling like he didn’t belong; why sport is a legitimate academic discipline; and how justice is the juice of DEIBJ.
"For us, for me, I really see this work as life and death," says Douglas. "Not just of human life or death, but also of potential, of that glow in a person's eyes when they know that they belong. You can see it, you can feel it. Belonging has a feeling, and you can feel the healthy space."
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of Ty-Ron Douglas.
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In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Hoda Katebi discusses how, after she began wearing the hijab as a sixth-grader in Oklahoma, she learned that clothes are inherently political. "It played a huge role in shaping my own personal growth, as well as my relationship to politics," Katebi says.
Since protests broke out in Iran nearly three months ago, sparked by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini by Iran's so-called morality police, Katebi has been an outspoken supporter of the protesters.
"The main demand that we're hearing is, 'Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,' or, 'Woman, Life, Freedom,' which is a Kurdish, anti-imperialist, feminist, anti-capitalist chant," she says. "I think that that's what is really hitting at the core and distinguishes these protests from others before — this is one that's calling for nothing short of the end of dictatorship, which means everything from women's rights to education to class, gender, everything."
Although a senior official in the Iranian government confirmed on Monday, Dec. 5, that the morality police had been shut down — the first concession by the government since the protests began — the mandatory dress code remains in place. It’s unclear how the government plans to enforce the laws moving forward.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Aubrey Trinnaman for the New York Times.
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On Nov. 20, 1969, a group of Indigenous Americans that called itself Indians of All Tribes, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, took boats in the early morning hours to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They bypassed a Coast Guard blockade and took control of the island. The 19-month occupation that followed would be regarded as one of the greatest acts of political resistance in American Indian history.
Everardo Reyes is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at Berkeley. After taking several classes with John-Carlos Perea, who last year was a visiting associate professor in Berkeley’s Department of Music, Reyes was inspired to research how radio and music were used during the Alcatraz takeover to capture mass attention and amplify the Red Power movement.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Charles Yu, discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science.
"This is really a book about roles and how we play them," Yu said. "Sometimes they are fundamental to who we are, but they can also be very limiting or reductive. I hope that people can see that, in one way or another, all the characters in this book are wearing a mask and a costume, to some extent, and it doesn't fit them perfectly. And we, hopefully, see the ways in which the person underneath peeks out and can't be fully covered by what's there. In those moments, when the mask slips and you talk out of character, those moments of real connection can come about."
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Tina Chiou.
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Charles Yu, discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science.
"This is really a book about roles and how we play them," Yu said. "Sometimes they are fundamental to who we are, but they can also be very limiting or reductive. I hope that people can see that, in one way or another, all the characters in this book are wearing a mask and a costume, to some extent, and it doesn't fit them perfectly. And we, hopefully, see the ways in which the person underneath peeks out and can't be fully covered by what's there. In those moments, when the mask slips and you talk out of character, those moments of real connection can come about."
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.
Follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Tina Chiou.
Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Roe v. Wade was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion, “it changed everything,” says Kristin Luker, a professor emerita of law and of sociology at UC Berkeley. “It was so revolutionary — I argue it was on a par with the American Revolution or the French Revolution.”
Last Friday, the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe, giving states broad power to curtail or end abortion. As of today, abortion is now banned in at least seven states, and about half of states across the country are expected to ban or severely restrict the procedure in the coming days.
In this Berkeley Voices episode, Luker talks about why doctors began writing anti-abortion laws in the 19th century, the experiences women had ending unwanted pregnancies in the decades before Roe v. Wade and how she doesn’t see us returning to the normative sexuality and reproduction of the 1950s.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on news.berkeley.edu.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by the Associated Press.
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In episode 99 of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Indi Garcia, who is graduating on May 13 with pro bono honors for her work on the Post-Conviction Advocacy Project, talks about how meeting with incarcerated men as a college student inspired her anti-prison and criminal justice work. "These men were just brilliant," said Garcia. "They were so much more than the crimes that led them there."
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.
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In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Hope Gale-Hendry, a fourth-year student in ecosystem management and forestry at UC Berkeley, shares in her own words how she discovered her deep interconnectedness with all living things, and why she decided to study the American pika. "We have a shared history on this planet," said Hope. "That is the lesson that I have been able to use to foster my passion for conservation and foster this love and admiration that I have for my cousins on this planet. Not just humans, but moss and squirrels and horses and farm animals and lichen and every beautiful and unique species that has been on their own journey."
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo courtesy of Hope Gale-Hendry.
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In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet. "We are in such an individual and collective squeeze point," she said. "Do we want humanity to mean what it has meant in the past, or do we want to create a new meaning for our species and our purpose?"
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Today, we are sharing an episode from The Edge, a podcast by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association: "Should we bring back woolly mammoths?" Hosts Laura Smith and Leah Worthington sat down with a genetic engineer and an ecologist to understand how de-extinction works and to explore its unintended consequences. This episode was originally released in June 2021.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
(Photo by Timothy Neesam via Flickr)
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Berkeley Law professor and anthropologist Khiara Bridges discusses the history of reproductive rights in the U.S., what’s at stake when Roe v. Wade is overturned and why we should expand our fight for reproductive justice. "Roe v. Wade didn't fall out of the sky," says Bridges. "In 1973, the justices weren’t like, 'You know what we should make up? A right to an abortion.' Roe v. Wade was actually part of a long line of cases dating back to the 1920s." And it likely won’t stop at abortion rights, says Bridges. By saying that Roe v. Wade isn’t good law, it suggests that these court decisions that led to Roe v. Wade were also improper interpretations of the Constitution.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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As a kid growing up in New York City, Roqua Montez was interested in everything — comics, dinosaurs, science, music and dance, martial arts — and his calendar filled up fast. Now, as the executive director of communications and media relations in UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs, he still has a lot to keep track of. To manage his activities and responsibilities, Roqua has relied on something that we all rely on: the seven-day week.
The week has been used as a timekeeping unit and calendar device to organize society for about 2,000 years, says David Henkin, a professor of history at Berkeley and author of the 2021 book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are. But it's only for the past 200 years in America that the week has had a grip on our daily lives.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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(UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese and music by Blue Dot Sessions)
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Between 1910 and 1970, about 6 million Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, the West and other parts of the United States. It’s known as the Great Migration. Musicians who moved to these cities became ambassadors, says UC Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin, “not only for the music of the South, but for the culture from which the music emerged. And the music was made and remade, and continues to be today. On Feb. 17, mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and jazz pianist Jason Moran — and an all-star roster of jazz collaborators — will perform their remaking of the music in Two Wings: The music of Black America in Migration for UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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(UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese)
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As drought and the effects of climate change continue to threaten the water supply that Californians rely on, experts at UC Berkeley are looking for new ways to generate an ongoing, stable water supply in its cities that is not as reliant on the weather. "Californians are leaders worldwide in the recycling of water," says David Sedlak, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Berkeley Water Center. There's just one problem that needs to be solved — and if it is, it could open up water recycling opportunities in many parts of the world.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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(UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese; Music by Blue Dot Sessions)
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When Joshua Kyan Aalampour was 16, he taught himself to play the piano using a cheap 61-key keyboard and videos on YouTube. Four years later, Joshua is a music student at UC Berkeley. He has performed his work at Lincoln Center, written a symphony and composed a score for a feature-length film. He teaches music to students around the world. He performs a new piece for TikTok every day. All while taking at least 26 credits each semester so that he can graduate this May — two years early.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Today, we share an episode of The Science of Happiness, a podcast produced by our colleagues at the Greater Good Science Center. Host and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner talks with Berkeley Journalism professor and bestselling author Michael Pollan about what it was like for Pollan to give up Twitter — something that he found was becoming a somewhat unproductive compulsion.
Next week, we'll be back with our final Berkeley Voices episode of the season.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
(Artwork by Whitney Anderson)
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Ehren Tool is the ceramics studio manager in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. In his off-time, he makes brutal-looking clay cups to start conversations about war. Since 2001, he has made and given away more than 21,000 of them. Here he is — in his own words — talking about his cups. Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
This audio is from a video about Tool that was published with a feature story on Berkeley News in February 2020.
If you have a moment, please give Berkeley Voices a rating and a short review on Apple Podcasts.
(Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
In 2018, China enacted a policy that effectively banned the import of most plastics and other materials. "That really, I think, was the Chinese government drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'Look, we don’t want to be seen as the world’s garbage dump anymore,'" said Kate O'Neill, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and author of the 2019 book Waste. The United States, which had been shipping some 700,000 tons of recyclable waste to China each year, faced a crisis. Since then, communities across the U.S. have curtailed collections or put an end to their recycling programs altogether. Waste has been piling up, leaving many wondering: What now? At UC Berkeley, the Cal Zero Waste team has been hard at work answering this question. "We’re really talking about not just recycling, but reducing, reusing and composting," said Lin King, manager of Cal Zero Waste. "Really, it comes down to what you purchase and that mentality of how you get to zero waste." Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (NurPhoto photo by Mamunur Rashid via AP)
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The labor economist and UC Berkeley professor of economics, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, talks about why his research on the economics of the minimum wage, immigration and education was so controversial — and how it continues to be today. Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)
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In January 2015, 15-year-old Mariana Soto Sanchez woke up one Saturday morning at her home in Ontario, California, with weakness in her hand. Within minutes, the feeling had spread throughout her body. Her parents rushed her to the hospital. By the time they got there, she had total paralysis. Later that night, they found out she had a rare disorder called transverse myelitis. From that point on, Mariana had to adjust to an entirely new way of living. Six years later, Mariana has regained some mobility and will graduate from UC Berkeley this December with a degree in media studies and a minor in journalism. She says she continues to learn how to advocate for herself in a world that isn’t built for her. “I felt like I would place limitations on myself,” says Mariana. “But it’s really just limitations imposed by society that prevent me from achieving what I want to achieve.” And she has done things she never thought she could — including going to her first Cal football game, a dream she had since she first came to Berkeley in 2018. Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.(UC Berkeley photo by Neil Freese)
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Growing up in a Mexican household in San Diego, California, Berkeley student Alexa Carrillo Espinoza says there was always dancing in her home. She'd always wanted to try ballet folklórico, a traditional Mexican dance, but never had the chance. So, when she saw Ballet Folklórico Reflejos de Mexico tabling on Sproul Plaza as a first-year student in 2019, she signed up right away. "As I dance, I have this overwhelming sense of pride," she says. Listen to the episode, see photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Third-year UC Berkeley student Maryam Karimi was born in Afghanistan in September 2001. A month later, the United States invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks. The Taliban was ousted from power, but everyday violence remained. Her family applied for asylum and eventually settled in Fremont, California, when Maryam was 12. Now, she and her family watch as the Taliban once again takes control of their home country. But Maryam knows that Afghans — especially her generation — won't give up. “The fire of revolution and freedom is lit in their hearts. And with a little breeze, it's going to burn brighter than ever before," she said. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
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Berkeley News writer Kara Manke discusses a new report from UC Berkeley that shows how allowing lightning fires to burn in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin recreated a lost — and more resilient — forest ecosystem. Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (Photo by Emily Gonthier)
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In this interview, Savala Nolan, executive director of Berkeley's social justice center, talks about the "deeply corporeal nature" of her new memoir, Don't Let It Get You Down. "The body is where it all happens," she says. "It's where we experience life. It’s where we experience the world — the joys and the frictions. It’s where we experience the categories and the divisions in the world. They’re very often about our bodies and how other people see our bodies. And so, I think that our bodies become, over time, the site of so much knowledge and epiphany and humor and insight and also lies — we all probably believe lies about our bodies." Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Over the summer, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. In this episode, from 2018, then-Ph.D. candidate Sonia Travaglini talks about how we could use fungi, of which there are more than 5 million species, to mitigate a wide range of environmental and social crises — just by letting them eat our waste. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. (UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova)
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While Fiat Vox is on summer break, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Today’s episode, originally released in April 2019, is a conversation between UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and Professor Emerita Carol Clover about what it was like for women in the academy 50 years ago and how it has changed. They also discuss what it takes to be a strong leader and offer advice to the next generation of Berkeley women. See photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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While Fiat Vox is on summer break, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Today's episode, originally released in February 2020, is about how the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which lasted for more than a year, was led by a group of Black women activists working behind the scenes: the Women's Political Council. In June, this episode received a gold award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), as part of the 2021 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Fiat Vox is going on summer break! We'll be back with new episodes in mid-August. In the meantime, we'll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Here's one from 2019 about UC Berkeley staffer Erika Johnson, who talks about why her family fled Ukraine after World War II and how ballet connects her to her culture like nothing else does. (Today, Erika is a development coordinator on the major gifts team with University Development and Alumni Relations (UDAR) at UC Berkeley. When this episode first came out, she had a different position with UDAR.)
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
Today, in the final episode of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how, in his Asian American theater workshop, he encourages students to approach issues, like anti-Asian violence, from an "inside-out" point of view, where they look at the world with Asians at the center. We also hear from a student, Wesley Tam, about how Gotanda’s workshop inspired Tam to start the ARC Repertory Theatre on campus.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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In the second part of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how he began to write music during the emerging Asian American movement, which began at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And how, after his music career didn’t take off as he’d hoped, he went to law school, where he wrote his first play. Now, he’s one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Philip Kan Gotanda is a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States. In the first episode of a three-part series, Gotanda talks about growing up in Stockton, California, after World War II and the anti-Japanese racism that he couldn’t name as a child, but that he’d go on to write about as an adult.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Fred DeWitt is a Master of Fine Arts student and the first artist-in-residence in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. DeWitt, 61, shares in his own words what the Black Panthers meant to him as a young boy growing up in the Bay Area, how Barack Obama’s election as president inspired him to go back to school to study art, and the complicated nature of honoring the lives of people who never wanted to be remembered for their deaths. His MFA show will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in June.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos of DeWitt's artwork on Berkeley News.
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Berkeley Newswriter Ed Lempinen talks about why Berkeley Law professor Jonathan Simon thinks an acquittal of former police officer Derek Chauvin, on trial for the death of George Floyd, is more likely than not.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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Humans are a super-collective species that succeeds through cooperation and community, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. But power and privilege, she says, can corrupt anyone — even the best, most morally guided people. “Social hierarchy is an interesting moderator of our empathic, nurturing, compassionate tendencies,” she says. The good news? There’s an antidote.
(A podcast episode featuring this interview with Simon-Thomas was originally published on Berkeley News in 2017. This is a new version that has been rewritten and remixed.)
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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"By gossiping about celebrities and by talking about what they've done that isn't so great, it allows us to establish our values as a community and also for me, as an individual, to advertise my values to the people I'm speaking with," says Julia Fawcett, a professor who teaches a course called The History of Celebrity in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies.
Celebrities, one theory goes, act to unite imagined communities in a modern nation. When people used to know everyone in their villages, now we use celebrities to come together in a new kind of group. "I’m a fan of Beyoncé, and you’re a fan of Beyoncé, so now we’re a part of this imagined community," says Fawcett.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
Rose Wilkerson, a sociolinguist and lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley, shares how it feels to her to live in the U.S. as an African American.
After Thoughts is a series that highlights moments from Fiat Vox interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Wilkerson featured in Fiat Vox episode #69: “Language is more than how we speak — it's home.”
Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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When archeologists, funded by University of California benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, found hundreds of crocodile mummies on an expedition to Northern Egypt in 1899, they were annoyed. They were searching for human mummies and artifacts, fueled by Egyptomania — the Western obsession with all things Egyptian.
When they found papyri — paper's earliest ancestor — stuffed inside of the mummies with text written on it by Egyptians thousands of years before, they were suddenly interested. But instead of collecting the mummies, they began to break them open, remove the papyri and discard the crocodiles.
Now, more than 100 years later, 19 mummified crocodiles are part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. These mummies, along with a collection of papyri held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, give us clues about how everyday ancient Egyptians lived and how far they went to appease crocodiles, hoping their devotion would win them some good will toward humankind.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center and a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, discusses how our sense of self goes silent while experiencing awe and while using psychedelics.
Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
After Thoughts is a series that highlights moments from Fiat Vox interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Keltner featured in Fiat Vox episode #68: “Building community one person at a time.”
When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to — they're not ... necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings," she says.
How we speak, says sociolinguist and Berkeley lecturer Rose Wilkerson, represents who we are— our culture, our family and our sense of place in the world. So, when a person is criticized for how they speak, she says, it cuts to the heart.
Listen to the episode, see photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
In a time when our nation is more ideologically divided than ever, it's crucial that we find ways to come together across differences and find common ground, says UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. But how do we do this?
For staffer Tyrone Wise, it starts with asking tough questions and then listening — really listening — to the answer. "When we take time to understand what people are saying to us,” he says, “then we can better understand who they are as people."
Wise says that including a range of perspectives when making decisions creates a stronger community — something that he's working to build at Berkeley.
And a sense of community, says Keltner, which has been lost in our individualistic society, is essential to our survival. By searching for shared values, honoring differences and knowing when to use "tough compassion," he says, we can begin to build bridges and heal as a nation.
Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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This is the second part of the two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations.
Last week, we heard from UC Berkeley's Ella Callow about how the U.S. government built a psychiatric institution in the early 1900s to imprison Native Americans.
Today, Callow discusses how Native communities are still forced to exist in societal systems that use disability to justify taking Native children away from their families, and to ultimately control, and make money from, their lives.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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In the late 1800s, two South Dakota congressmen were looking for ways to build an economy in their newly minted state — one that was carved out of Indigenous homelands. They decided on a mental institution for Native Americans. It would become the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians — a place where Native people from across the country would be forcibly committed and imprisoned, often for reasons that had nothing to do with mental illness. From its opening in 1903 to 1933, when it was closed after a short, but brutal, existence, more than 350 Native people had been held, and at least 121 people had died, in the facility.
This is the first part of a two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations. In the next episode, we'll learn about how state courts today use disability as a reason to justify removing Native children from their parents' custody and cultural environment to place them in non-Native homes.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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When Savala Trepczynski, the director of the social justice center at UC Berkeley, first heard the decision in the Breonna Taylor case — that only one of three police officers involved in Taylor's killing in March was indicted on charges of reckless endangerment — a familiar feeling sunk in.
"The fact of the charge is upsetting, disappointing, angering — all of those things," said Trepczynski. "And so, I felt the exhaustion of forbearance and abiding and feeling again and again that even when you get justice, it’s kind of a half step. It’s a measure of justice. It’s not the whole thing."
And she was reminded of a murder so similar to Taylor's that happened in her own family — to her great-great-grandmother.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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"People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. — and they should. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement," says Ula Taylor, a professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. But, what they might not know, she says, is that it was actually the behind-the-scenes organizing effort by the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, that made the boycott successful.
"Even though these women were not in the limelight, they were engaging in a form of leadership," says Taylor. "But because we live in a country in a culture where we oftentimes identify leadership as a talking head, we don’t understand all of the thinking that goes behind a lot of the ideas that the talking head is even articulating."
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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UC Berkeley's Oral History Center and KQED teamed up to record the longest interview that Jerry Brown has ever done — one that offers a first-person account of his nearly five decades in California politics. For 20 sessions, they sat at Brown’s dining room table at his ranch in Colusa County and asked him about everything from what it is was like having a father in politics to dating singer Linda Ronstadt to his views on politics today.
See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Feb. 14, 2018, began like any other day for Kai Koerber. He was running late for his early morning AP English class at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. When he got there, he was handed the class's biggest assignment of the year and groaned. "At the time, I was like, 'Man, this is going to be the worst part of my day,'" says Koerber, now a first-year computer science major at UC Berkeley.
After English, he had honors chemistry, followed by pre-calculus, then guitar class in the band room. At 2:18 p.m., he asked to use the restroom, but another classmate was out, so his teacher told Kai to wait. Two minutes later, the fire alarm went off. And what followed was a tragedy that his school would become known for — one that Kai would decide to speak out about, changing the narrative about the impact of gun violence on youth in the United States.
At Berkeley, in between classes and studying, Kai works to promote his nonprofit and mental health curriculum — something that he's become passionate about since he survived one of the deadliest school shootings in the country.
Read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.
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After student Drew Woodson took a playwriting course with Philip Gotanda, a professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at Berkeley, he realized he had a story to tell. Two years later, that story would become his first play, Your Friend, Jay Silverheels.“The original idea for this play came out of this frustration I was having as an actor of not being able to find monologues that really fit and felt true to who I am as a Native person,” says Woodson. “I knew I had to write this story, to get it down on paper — not only for myself as an actor, but for other Native actors who maybe felt the same way as me.”
On Dec. 5, Woodson is staging a reading of Your Friend, Jay Silverheels in Durham Studio Theater in Dwinelle Hall on campus.
Listen, see photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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Saida Dahir grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. At first, she thought she was like everyone else. But by sixth grade, she realized she was different. Her family was from Somalia — she was born in a refugee camp in Kenya after her family fled the civil war. The more she tried to fit in, the worse she felt. But in eighth grade, when she met Mr. Brandy, a journalism and English teacher, she began to realize her own power and started writing poetry. By her senior year, she was performing her poetry at protests and rallies across the country, proudly commenting on the injustices she saw all around her.
Listen, see photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.
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When UC Berkeley architect Ronald Rael took his bright pink teeter totters to the U.S.-Mexico border wall, he didn't know that what he and his team did next would go viral. He just wanted to create a moment where people on both sides of the wall felt connected to each other. “Women and children completely disempowered this wall for a moment, for 40 minutes," says Rael. "There was a kind of sanctuary hovering over this event."
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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"I grew up just super dirt poor ... about as poor as you can be in this country," says first-year Berkeley Law student, Blake Danser. School was where Danser felt safe, where he thrived. "And then puberty hit, and I felt weird in a way that I couldn't really identify," he says. At the time, Blake was actually Amanda — a 14-year-old self-described tomboy. After seeing a transgender character in a TV show, Danser thought that maybe that's why he felt different — because he was transgender. But a friend convinced him that he wasn't, and Danser forgot about it until years later.
After high school, Danser realized he couldn't afford college, so he joined the Air Force. "In the military, everything is very divided into male and female," says Blake. "It just very much sank in that this was not right for me. I was not female." For the next three years, he transitioned from female to male — an experience he says was awkward at times, but supported by the military. He also took online courses throughout his active service, and received his bachelor's degree in history.
Now, at Berkeley Law, Danser says he wants to help low-income communities, like the one he grew up in. And he wants to share his experience of what it’s like to be transgender and a veteran.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Gemma Givens, who works at UC Berkeley's International House, was adopted from Guatemala in 1990 when she was 4 months old. Her mom, Melinda, was a graduate student at Berkeley at the time. She had a simple story she would tell Gemma about her adoption. "The story was that Gemma needed a mom and I needed a child, and so we found each other. It was a good enough story for a while," says Melinda. As Gemma grew older, though, it wasn't enough. "I felt like I was foundationless, or that I was floating, or I was a ghost, or I was a genetic isolate, which, in a way, I was," Gemma says. It would lead her to Guatemala, where her search for her birth mother would reveal the corrupt business of intercountry adoption in Guatemala and inspire her to create an international community of Guatemalan adoptees.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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For Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, coming out didn’t happen all at once. As a graduate student in 1980, she met her wife, Esther Hargis. A few of their friends knew they were together, but “it wasn’t something you told people.” Esther was a Baptist pastor, so she needed to be careful at the time to protect her career. It wasn’t until the couple decided to adopt their son, Jimmy, nearly two decades later, that they decided they had to live their lives fully out.
See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.
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Growing up in New York City, UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy remembers seeing a lot of nurses — dressed in their crisp white uniforms. She and her mom lived in an apartment building near several hospitals, so seeing health workers in the community wasn’t unusual.
But she also noticed that many of the nurses were Filipino.
Her mom was an immigrant from the Philippines. And when they’d go to Filipino events, it was common to see a lot of nurses.
“I think when I was growing up, it was just part of the familiar landscape of home,” she says, “and what it was like to be in New York City. I didn’t really question it as a child. It just seemed natural or normal to me.”
Years later, as a graduate student at UCLA, Choy began to wonder: Why were there so many Filipino nurses in the U.S.? What she found took her back to the early 20th century after the Philippines became a U.S. colony.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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On October 11, 1923, three brothers — Hugh, Ray and Roy DeAutremont — boarded a Southern Pacific Railroad train called the Gold Special near the Siskiyou Mountains in Oregon. The trio planned to rob the mail car. But instead of making off with their fortune, they killed four people and blew up the mail car and the valuables inside. A huge manhunt followed and authorities called in an up-and-coming forensic scientist and UC Berkeley lecturer and alumnus Edward Oscar Heinrich to help solve what became known as the Last Great Train Robbery. He didn't know that the case would put him on the map as a pioneer in American criminology.
And now, nearly 100 years later, Heinrich's collection of crime materials from this case — and thousands of others he worked on throughout his career — are available for research in the Bancroft Library's archives at UC Berkeley.
See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.
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In 1970, when Chancellor Carol Christ joined UC Berkeley's English department as an assistant professor, only 3% of the faculty on campus were women. “I always felt like a pioneer, in part, because I’m of the generation of the feminist revolution,” says Christ.
In this Fiat Vox podcast episode, Christ and her longtime friend and colleague Carol Clover, a professor emerita in Scandinavian studies and film studies, discuss what it was like for women in the academy 50 years ago and how it’s changed, what makes a strong leader — and offer advice to the next generation of Berkeley women.
See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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When Amy Nostbakken and Nora Sadava started writing Mouthpiece six years ago, they revealed their deepest secrets to each other with the prompt: “Tell me something that you would never want anyone ever to know.” From that, they created a raw, one-hour confessional that reflects what it feels like in one woman’s head after she finds out her mother has died and that she has to deliver the eulogy the next day.
Mouthpiece premiered in 2015, and four years later, Amy and Nora, who make up the Toronto-based company Quote Unquote Collective, are performing the play for the last time on March 22-24 in the Zellerbach Playhouse. It’s the last performance of Cal Performances’ 2018-19 Berkeley RADICAL Initiative’s strand “Women’s Work,” which takes a specific look at the extraordinary artistry of women who are expanding the definition of what it is to be an artist in the 21st century.
“This continuum of women’s voices and their work — the work that drives them — is important to put a spotlight on,” says Sabrina Klein, director of artistic literacy at Cal Performances. “Every single one is unique. Every single one is different. But it’s not incidental that they’re connected as women across this continuum of making work — live work, new work, fresh work, continually meaningful work.”
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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Malika Imhotep grew up in West Atlanta, rooted in a community that she calls an "Afrocentric bubble," in a family of artisans, entrepreneurs and community organizers. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, she's studying how black women and femmes make sense of themselves in a society designed, in many ways, to keep them out. "I’m interested in how people create new possibilities for themselves, either inside of mainstream society or outside of it, or underneath it or on top of it.”
But she couldn't do it alone. She needed to find and nurture a community of thinkers who could aid in the development of her research and her personal journey of discovery. So, she — along with Miyuki Baker, a Ph.D. candidate in theater, dance and performances — started the Church of Black Feminist Thought.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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When Karen Denton got a job in UC Berkeley's registrar's office at 20, she had one job: to remove incompletes. "I did that all day every day," she says. Her tools of the trade? A fountain pen, an inkwell, an eraser, a razor blade and a marble. At 71, Karen has been the assistant registrar for two decades and has worked in records for 49 years. And she has no plans to retire anytime soon. "Why would I retire?" she asks. "I love working here. I love the students. I love the challenge." But she will leave sometime, and before she does, she wants to have all student records — dating back to the late 1800s — digitized.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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In 1849, a man named Abraham Holland packed up his things and left his life on the East Coast for California, in hopes that he’d strike it rich. The year before, gold had been discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and people were coming from across the U.S. — and the world — to seek their fortune. It became known as the California Gold Rush. It marked a new set of opportunities for African American migration to California.
On Saturday, Feb. 23, Berkeley staffer Gia White, who volunteers as a docent at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, will give a tour about notable African Americans — including Holland, and Berkeley alumni Ida Louise Jackson and Walter Gordon — who are buried in the cemetery.
“It’s a privilege to talk about their life stories, because when are they going to be heard?" says Gia. "I feel like, you’re just doing them a little honor by talking about them again.”
See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.
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For Black History Month, we are resharing Fiat Vox episode #23, first published in 2018, about Clothilde Hewlett, the executive director of the Cal Alumni Association:
Some people move to San Francisco for its jobs. Or its nightlife. Or its natural beauty.
But Clothilde Hewlett moved for Rice-A-Roni. Hewlett was 14 years old waiting at the Canadian border with her mom and two younger sisters. They’d been there for two weeks, but things weren’t looking promising. “And at one point, my mother, out of despair, looked at me and she said, ‘Where do you wanna go?’ says Hewlett. “And all I could think of is I had a seen a commercial called Rice-A-Roni and it didn’t look like people in San Francisco were suffering. So I said, ‘San Francisco.'”
Listen to Hewlett’s story — how she pulled herself out of poverty, found salvation as a student at UC Berkeley, climbed the ranks in the government and corporate America and returned to the campus, where she giving back to students who need it most.
Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.
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When Erika Johnson was 7, her Ukrainian mom put her in ballet class. Although Erika didn’t have the body that most principal dancers were known for, she had the work ethic that it took to be successful. "It was never like, ‘I must handpick you and cultivate you like a rose,’ says Erika. "You know it was like, ‘If you work hard, you might get a job.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, well I’m going to work hard.’” Shaped by her ballet career, Erika is now a development associate at Berkeley. Not only has ballet has played a big role in her life — it has helped keep her connected to her Ukrainian culture.
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Every morning, Marco Lindsey wakes up in East Oakland, where he was born and raised. He puts on a suit and tie, packs his briefcase, chats with his neighbors and drives to work at Berkeley Haas. It's a typical morning routine, but to Marco, it’s a lot more than that. It’s a way to show boys and young men in his community that they have possibilities. He didn't have that growing up. But his drive — and mentors who helped steer him — propelled him forward, and now he's helping others to succeed. His motto: Live your life as if your 80-year-old self is guiding you.
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In the summer of 1996, Will Thomas and Dave Deacy were wading in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, watching the annual hydroplane races. Will kicked something with his foot, bent down and pulled something up. It was a human skull. Turns out, it was a really old skull — 9,000 years old, one of the oldest human remains found in North America. It’s a discovery that would fuel an ongoing debate between scientists and Native Americans about how ancestral remains should be treated. It also inspired Beth Piatote, an associate professor of Native American studies at UC Berkeley and a member of the Nez Perce tribe, to write the play Antíkoni. It’s a Native American version of the Greek tragedy, Antigone.
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When John Patton was in high school, he changed his name to Quamé. When he got to UC Berkeley as a student, "it stuck, instantly," he says. At Berkeley, Quamé's world opened up: "African American studies changed my life." After graduating, getting a master's degree, trying to make it as a DJ, hitting rock bottom, then coming back to his alma mater to teach hip hop, Quamé is still Quamé. And he's an academic counselor, helping students unlock their potential and follow their hearts.
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In the 1940s and 50s, actors in major American films, like Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, spoke with a kind of faux British accent as a way to sound “upper class.” This pronunciation spread across the country as a kind of standard to imitate. The problem was, this way of talking left out nearly all actual American voices, says Tom McEnaney, a UC Berkeley professor who teaches a class called “Sounding American.”
While the class talks about the generational differences of sound — no one today really speaks like movie stars of the 40s — they also discuss how today’s filmmakers, like Boots Riley in “Sorry to Bother You,” are pushing back against the racial norms concealed in what we might say sounds American. McEnaney says the film, about a young black telemarketer who uses his “white voice” to be successful at sales, takes the sense that many people have — that whiteness is a kind of invisible standard against which all other cultures are judged in the U.S. — and makes the audience think about how whiteness is audible, and is another kind of difference.
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Professor Tom McEnaney, who teaches a class called “Sounding American,” says the U.S. has a long history of men criticizing the way women speak. Sound technologies, starting with the gramophone and phonograph, he says, were developed for men's voices — and distort women’s.
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After Lux — one of the peregrine falcons born on the Campanile — died last year after striking a window of Evans Hall, the campus community was heartbroken. But Carla Cicero, the staff curator of birds at UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, has given the peregrine a new purpose. Lux is now one of 750,000 specimens — birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals — at the museum used for research at Berkeley and across the world. Lux is the 4,287th specimen that Carla has prepped for the museum in the past 30 years. Although the museum is closed to the public, for one day a year — Cal Day, in April — people are invited in to see special displays.
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Last week, Berkeley students noticed that one of the Campanile’s four clocks stopped. While the north-facing clock was at a standstill, the other three kept going. How could that happen? Turns out each of the clocks has its own motor and runs independently from one another. But because the bell tower’s clocks are so old — the Campanile was built more than 100 years ago — its parts can’t just be replaced. The campus has to send them away to be repaired or find another way to keep the clocks ticking.
A few years ago, I interviewed Art Simmons — an electrician on campus whose job it was to keep the clocks going. Now, a machinist who worked with Art is looking after the clocks. But I thought it’d be a good time to share a story that Art told me about how he saved the day with a light bulb and a little common sense.
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As a kid, Makayla Bozeman could not stop dancing. She'd go to bed late because she was dancing. She'd wake up in the middle of the night to dance. When she was 13, she applied to AileyCamp — a six-week summer program run by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley where 11- to 14-year-olds from the East Bay learn dance from professional choreographers. She soon realized that AileyCamp was so much more than a dance camp — it was a chance to discover who she was and learn how to navigate her complex social world.
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Canadian author Margaret Atwood doesn't like being called a soothsayer. "Anyone who says they can predict the future is... not telling the truth," she says. But like it or not, it's a label she's been given since the revival of her 33-year-old dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale" was made into a popular Hulu TV series that aired just months after the election of Donald Trump as president. The story is set in near-future New England in a totalitarian and theocratic state that has overthrown the U.S. government. Because of low reproduction rates, certain fertile women are forced to become Handmaids to bear children for elite couples.
As part of On the Same Page, a program of UC Berkeley's College of Letter and Science, all 8,800 incoming students got a copy of the novel to read over the summer, so when they arrived on campus, they would have something in common to talk about — socially, in classes and at events designed to explore the book's themes.
Berkeley News sat down with Margaret Atwood for a few minutes before her appearance on campus last week to talk about her book's recent revival and how — in her view, and that of many of the book's fans — the Trump presidency is bringing the U.S. a step closer to becoming her fictional Republic of Gilead.
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After seeing Handspring Puppet Company — the creators of the puppets in Broadway's " War Horse" — at UC Berkeley in 2015, Glynn Bartlett knew he wanted to work with them. So he packed his bags and traveled to South Africa, where he built puppets for an annual parade and play performed on the Day of Reconciliation. Bartlett, a scenic artist for the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, says the experience reminded him just how powerful puppets can be in bringing people together.
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When Derek Coates was 10, he found out he had a degenerative eye disease and was going to gradually lose his eyesight. Over the next 30 years, his visual world shrunk until he became completely blind at 41. Now, as a disability compliance officer at UC Berkeley, it’s his job to make sure students with disabilities are getting the accommodations they need to be academically successful.
Read the transcript, see photos and find more disability resources on Berkeley News.
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The peregrine falcons that first made a home on UC Berkeley's Campanile last year get a lot of attention every spring when their babies hatch. But it's also amazing to watch the adults in action. At speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, peregrines are the fastest animal in the world — three times faster than a cheetah. Mary Malec, a volunteer raptor nest monitor for the East Bay Regional Park District, describes a time when the mama peregrine chased a pigeon through unknowing crowds on campus.
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Noah Whiteman, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, has always known how to survive. He moved to Sax-Zim, a rural area in Minnesota, when he was 11 and spent the next seven years learning to fish and hunt with his naturalist dad and hiding that he was gay. When a boy he'd been friends with started to bully him at every chance he got, Noah knew it was time to get out.
See photos and read a Q&A with Noah Whiteman on Berkeley News.
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When Thalia Zepatos joined the Freedom to Marry campaign in 2010, she had a big job ahead of her: she had to craft a totally new message about same-sex marriage that would convince Americans that supporting the issue was the right thing to do. "It was looking for that statement that a lot of people could nod their heads to," said Zepatos. "It wasn’t about who was participating in the marriage, it was about what it really stands for. And we were trying to elevate that conversation."
Five years later on June 26, 2015, same-sex marriage was made legal in the U.S.
Martin Meeker, the director of the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, interviewed Zepatos and nearly a dozen others about the Freedom to Marry campaign for the center's Freedom to Marry Oral History Project. Listen to Meeker talk about how a single message can help change a nation's opinion.
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Billy Curtis, the director of the Gender Equity Resource Center at UC Berkeley, has spent the past two decades working to build a more inclusive campus for the LGBTQ community. This year, he was named a grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade and Celebration, an honor given to people and organizations for their work and advocacy in helping strengthen LGBTQ communities in the Bay Area. “I see this as an opportunity for us as a university to highlight our past, present and continued support of the LGBTQ community,” he said. “We’re getting honored, but let’s recommit to serving the LGBTQ+ community and any emerging un-yet-named marginalized sexualities and genders.”
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Inside of Joshua Ahazie’s mind live hundreds of songs. Since he was a kid, he would hear a melody and then he would hear all the parts — the vocals, how to play it on the piano. How it all went together. "I really thought I was going crazy." But he soon realized it was a gift. It's this gift of seeing how different pieces can go together to create a whole, he says, that has helped his succeed as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business — he's graduating Monday, May 14 at the Hearst Greek Theatre — and has given him the vision to launch his social enterprise, Atide.
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When Marcy Whitebook worked as a childcare teacher in the 1970s, she made less than $2 an hour. She was amazed at how little she made for the hard and important work she did with infants and toddlers. So Whitebook, with a group of teacher-activists, launched a national campaign in 1992 called Worthy Wage Day. The day of action, held every year on May 1, aims to raise awareness of the low wages earned by early childhood educators and draw attention to the chronic underfunding of public education. In this podcast episode, Whitebook, now the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley, talks about how she and her team used faxes and mimeographs to get Worthy Wage Day to go viral.
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There are more than 5 million species of fungi, and each one likes a particular food. Some like sawdust. Others like plastic. Some can even digest heavy metals. After the fungi eat their meal, what was once waste turns into a new, natural and compostable material that can just be left to decompose or be used in all sorts of practical ways, from cleaning up oil spills to fashioning faux leather handbags to building houses. Sonia Travaglini, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, tells us all about it.
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When Derrika Hunt was in third grade, she didn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. She remembers telling her mom, "This doesn't feel right to me. Why am I saying this pledge and then going home every day to my community, seeing people suffering, seeing people marginalized?" Now, a Ph.D. candidate in education at UC Berkeley, Derrika takes teenage girls of color around the world through her nonprofit, Dreamers4Change Foundation. It's a way for them, all of whom are from economically disadvantaged communities, to see that another world exists and realize that change is possible.
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"People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. And they know that it's the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement," says Ula Taylor, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. What people often don't know, she says, is that the boycott was started by the Women's Political Council, a group made up of more than 200 black women led by Jo Ann Robinson in Montgomery, Alabama.
In the last of a four-part series that highlights a different African American leader on campus for our podcast, Fiat Vox, Taylor talks about the women activists that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence and how she encourages her students to harness the leader within themselves to create the world they want to live in.
Read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Like a lot of leaders, Sidalia Reel started young. In fifth grade, she ran her household, making sure her four younger siblings didn't get into too much trouble. Now, she's the director of staff diversity initiatives in the Office of Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley, making sure more than 9,000 staff feel like a valued part of campus. To some, it might seem daunting. But for Reel, it's a natural fit. This is part of a series for Black History Month highlighting the work of African American leaders on campus.
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As a kid, Alfred Day would spend hours holed up indoors reading comics. He loved Batman and Superman, but the character who really spoke to him — who taught him that he could be smart and powerful — was Black Panther. Day, the director of student affairs case management at UC Berkeley, is a co-founder of Berkeley HEROES, a staff club that meets once a month to talk about comics and graphic novels on their list. In February for Black History Month, they're reading the first volume of Ta-Nehisi Coates' current Black Panther series.
Read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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As an undergraduate in Colorado, Kenly Brown was one of only a few African Americans on her campus. She felt isolated in the classroom, often expected to speak on behalf of all black people. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in African American studies at UC Berkeley, she’s made it her priority to be a mentor to students of color.
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Before Clothilde Hewlett became the executive director of the Cal Alumni Association in 2016, she had lived many other lives. She spent years of her childhood in tenement housing in Philadelphia's inner city before she and her family were called to San Francisco by a Rice-A-Roni television commercial. She attended UC Berkeley, became a lawyer, climbed the ranks of the government of corporate America, then came back to her alma mater, where it all began.
Read the story and see photos of Hewlett on Berkeley News.
This is part of a 2018 series for Black History Month, featuring interviews with African American leaders at UC Berkeley.
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Underground at UC Berkeley, seismic sensors capture the deep rumbles from Bay Area earthquakes. Here's what a 4.4-magnitude earthquake that shook the Bay Area last year on Jan. 4, 2018 sounded like. Geophysicist Peggy Hellweg from the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab explains what we're hearing when an earthquake happens.
Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.
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Most of us know by now that recreational cannabis became legal in California on Jan. 1. But there's still a lot we don't know about the plant, despite its long history of human use, says Eric Siegel, the director of the UC Botanical Garden. So the garden is hosting a lecture series called the "Science of Cannabis," where experts will discuss everything from the environmental impacts of large-scale cannabis cultivation to the neurological effect of cannabis in our brains.
Read more about the lecture series on Berkeley News.
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Christopher Richardson, a sophomore and aspiring triple major at UC Berkeley, has been competing in classical piano since he was 9 years old. Since then, he's competed at least 50 times. It's when he feels most alive, and most connected to himself.
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Parham Pourdavood, an incoming computer science student at UC Berkeley, grew up in Iran. He says that he, like most people, didn't challenge authorities. He wasn't an activist. He studied hard in high school and didn't draw attention to himself. He'd heard about government oppression, but hadn't seen it with his own eyes. He just knew he couldn’t speak his mind. It's why he's such a strong supporter of free speech today.
Story and photos on Berkeley News.
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"I was amazed at how he walked on, and he just got the attention of everyone right there,” says Kyle Ko, a fourth-year music major. “You could see everyone’s intense focus. You could feel it on the stage.” Ko, along with student Hallie Jo Gist, attended a master class taught by world-class conductor Riccardo Muti. Master classes, put on by Cal Performances and the Department of Music, give members of the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra a chance to learn from top musicians.
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When Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas coast in late August, Americans had a choice: they could share their resources or look the other way. Although as a society, we tend to value individualism, it doesn’t always make us happy, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Instead, sharing what we have often brings us more joy.
Read the story on Berkeley News. (Texas National Guard photo by Zachary West via Flickr)
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Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke on UC Berkeley's campus in September 2017. Berkeley News spoke to students and alumni as they waited in line to attend the event, protested peacefully outside — and got some reactions as they left the venue.
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When Roaya and Nissma met as freshman at UC Berkeley last year, they were amazed at how much they had in common. They were both Canadian and Moroccan, and were on the pre-med track. They became fast friends. But the next year, when they were moving into their new apartment, they realized their friendship wasn't a new one. Photos and story on Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/30/roaya-and-nissma-reunited-at-berkeley/Photo by Anne Brice
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Incoming students discuss how the hit musical Hamilton has changed Broadway and inspired students to learn more about the nation's history, as students from campus groups including the UC Women’s Chorale and BareStage, perform a medley of songs from the musical. Read the story on Berkeley News.
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UC Berkeley assistant professor of history and expert in African American history Stephanie Jones-Rogers discusses the historical basis and the modern implications of the recent exonerations of police officers who killed African Americans in the line of duty. Read the piece and see photos on the Berkeley Blog.
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Tyler Deaton's story is one of 23 interviews conducted by Bancroft Library’s Oral History Center at UC Berkeley that explore the national campaign that won federal marriage rights for same-sex couples. More on Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/23/freedom-to-marry-oral-history-center-tyler-deaton/
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Sayah Bogor, a UC Berkeley graduate student in public health, will make the short walk across the stage to receive her master’s degree. For Bogor, a native of war-torn Somalia, the event will mark a joyous leap in a long and difficult journey. See photos and read the story on Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/05/09/sayah-bogor-masters-in-public-health/Photo by Anne Brice
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Cal Quidditch got its start on Berkeley's campus about eight years ago. For two consecutive years, the team has played in a national competition. "It wasn't expected from a young, scrappy team out of UC Berkeley," says co-captain Owen Egger. Scrappy or not, the 60-some players on the Cal team have a lot of fun.
Story and 360-degree video on Berkeley News.
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Imagine a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico not as a barrier, but as a piece of architecture that brings people together. That’s what UC Berkeley architect Ronald Rael does in his new book, 'Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.' Photos and story on Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/05/borderwall-as-architecture-ronald-rael-podcast/Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
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The acoustics that make the sound of Zellerbach Hall didn’t just happen. The sound has been created with an acoustic system of some 40 microphones and 140 speakers, all intricately placed throughout the hall. It’s called Constellation by Meyer Sound.
Constellation allows you to digitally create multiple environments in one space by changing the length of reverberation, strength or loudness. It can even change the perceived height and width of a room.
So, if you close your eyes, it can transport you to a big, open space like a cathedral. Turn off the reverb and it becomes a normal stage.
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We’re at UC Berkeley’s Campanile courtyard listening to sounds of an ancient bell that have never been heard before. It’s the 20-foot-tall, 200-ton Russian “Tsar Bell” — the largest bell in the world — in duet with the campus’s carillon.
But the bell isn’t actually here. It’s at the Moscow Kremlin. A UC Berkeley team, along with researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan, worked together to digitally create the sound they believed the bell would make.
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The CDC released a report recommending that women of childbearing age who aren’t taking birth control should abstain from drinking alcohol. Berkeley Law professor Melissa Murray says the report gives the impression that women are incapable of making responsible choices about their reproductive health.
Photo by Frédéric Poirot via Flickr.
Story on Berkeley News.
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These days so many of our devices are smart. Our phones are smart. Our cars are smart. Our TVs are smart. And now, even vibrators can be smart. It’s called Lioness. It’s a sleek, sophisticated vibrator that works kind of like a running app on your smartphone, but instead of mapping the distance and terrain of a route, it records a person’s sexual arousal states.
Liz Klinger is the CEO and co-founder of Lioness. She and her team work out of SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s incubator for startups. She says her upbringing inspired her to pursue a career in sexual health.
Photos, video and story on Berkeley News.
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Marriage — modernly — is seen as sort of unalloyed good, says law professor Melissa Murray. “Everyone would like to get married, or most people would like to get married. Certainly, most people’s mothers want them to get married.”
Murray teaches family law at UC Berkeley. She says the marriage equality movement has built up the idea that marriage is this wonderful thing that everyone should want. And there are a lot of benefits to being married in the United States. People who are married have better financial outcomes than people who aren’t. They are often healthier (especially men), and they have access to a range of public and private benefits, like Social Security and shared employee health and other benefit plans.
But she says there’s a darker side to marriage that’s been overlooked.
Photo by Blyth Scott Photography via Flickr. See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.
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In 2004, Scott Zimmermann had a big idea. He had just quit the oil and gas industry — he’d been working in it for eight years, trying to reduce the impacts of fossil fuels — and enrolled at UC Berkeley as a dual-degree law student and master’s student in the Energy and Resources Group.
He knew he wanted to do something about climate change. But instead of lobbying for the state or the federal government to adopt carbon cap laws, as a lot of environmentalists were doing at the time, he decided to start right where he was — with the campus.
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The Campanile clock tower is the campus’s North Star. At 100 years old and 307 feet tall, it’s a landmark everyone knows and trusts. But what happens when the clocks stop? There’s only one person to call: Art Simmons.
“Everybody in Berkeley watches those clocks,” says Simmons. “Not just the people on campus. So when the clocks stop, the whole city knows about it and it doesn’t look good.”
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We’re at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. A long line curves through the gardens, and a small group huddles in a steamy greenhouse, all here to get a whiff of Trudy.
Garden director Paul Licht stands at the front, talking to one of the many groups to visit during the latest Trudy mania. “It goes in waves, doesn’t it?” he asks. “None have ever smelled as much the day after it opened.”
Trudy is a tropical plant called a Titan Arum, known best for the putrid odor it emits when it blooms.
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