Berkeley Talks

"Now, some would like us to believe that racism can be cured pharmacologically," said Amani Allen, executive associate dean at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "One major problem with this argument is that it suggests that racism is primarily facilitated through individual actors, and if we can just fix those bad people, everything will be fine. Well, racism, I would argue, won’t be cured by...

"One myth I think that increasingly people are realizing, and I think Trump has accelerated this, is that national security is really about military and crime," said Politico reporter Nahal Toosi at a UC Berkeley event in March. ...I think what we're learning increasingly is that it's about the economy. It's about cyber issues. It's about climate. It's about migration. It's about the coronavirus....

In adopting a different diet or driving less, a person has an effect on the planet, says Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University. But not for the reason they might think. "If you don't do it, the world will be the same as if you do it," said Frank, who spoke at UC Berkeley in January. "But the effect you have through your own actions are only a small fraction of the total effect...

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian , in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020. "Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continues, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is...

For the first week of quarantine during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Vitali-DeCola's 82-year-old dad, Joe DeCola, seemed upbeat. "He was like, 'I got my dinner and I have this beautiful bouquet of flowers.' He just sounded, like, tucked-in and content." DeCola has stage 4 lung cancer. He's become accustomed to isolating himself from time to time, especially during flu season. But after a...

"All waste is global," said Kate O'Neill, a professor in the the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley , at a campus event in February. "What we throw away has value. What we throw away often travels the globe. And that's not just the things we know about like electronic wastes, but also plastics... and things like cars, used cars, secondhand cars, clothes, bike...

Robert Hass, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of English and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, read from Summer Snow — his first poetry collection since 2010 — on Feb. 6, 2020, at the Morrison Library's monthly event, Lunch Poems. Geoffrey O'Brien, a Berkeley English professor and poet, introduced Hass: "He has a remarkable way of making a language that's tensile and full of prosodies,...

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times , a family-run newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa, joined Berkeley Journalism professor and author Michael Pollan on Jan. 29, 2020, to discuss journalism in rural America, Trump and the farm vote, immigration, regenerative agriculture and the potential for farmers to sequester carbon to help curb climate change. In 2017, Cullen won a Pulitzer prize for his rep...

In 1968, following a wave of urban uprisings, politicians worked to end the practice of redlining by passing the Housing and Urban Development Act. While the act was meant to encourage mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat black homebuyers equally, the disaster that came after revealed that racist exclusion hadn’t been eradicated, but rather transformed into a new phenomenon of pr...

"...At this very moment in our history, the men rising to the highest office in country after country... are full-fledged planetary arsonists," said Naomi Klein at a Berkeley Journalism event on Oct. 24, 2019. "They are pouring fuels on these fires with defiance. We have Trump rolling back every environmental law conceivable, cracking open public lands to unrestricted drilling and fracking, trolli...

On Feb. 21, 2020, Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Nebraska, was on campus to discuss her work tracing the origins of medical racism back to its roots. In her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the origins of American Gynecology ,  Cooper Owens reveals the ways the field of gynecology, pioneered by 19th century medical men, was deeply inte...

"During global climate crisis, we need more writing in and through water," read poet Indira Allegra at UC Berkeley earlier this month. "This is the perspective through which we must contextualize ourselves. The downward squint into saltwater mysteries or the movement of light across the surface of freshwater above. Emergency is not separate from us. We have to partner it. We must find ways in our...

On Jan. 23, 2020, Jemele Hill, a staff writer for the Atlantic and host of the podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered, spoke at UC Berkeley's Cal Performances about her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. In conversation with with KALW's radio host and reporter, Hana Baba, Hill touched on the NFL and Colin Kaepernick, what it's like reporting on sports as a black woman an...

In this episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, Berkeley professors Denise Herd and Waldo Martin discuss 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice , a yearlong initiative that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies. "The commemoration of the 400th anniversary of slavery — it's part of a nat...

Harry Chotiner, a film historian and an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, gave a lecture on Jan. 22, 2019, about film in the past year, from Hollywood blockbusters and indie favorites to the impact of the #MeToo movement, changes in the film academy and the Oscars. The lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) . "The...

"People say, 'Oh no, the institutions in the United States can support anything. We are safe.' No, beware. Nothing is safe. Nothing is forever. Everything can change. We have to be aware of that and be therefore very alert. I wouldn't say vigilant because the word vigilant has a double meaning, but alert." That's Chilean author Isabel Allende in conversation with playwright Caridad Svich, who won...

The United States now locks up more people than almost any country in the history of the world, and by virtually any measure, prisons have not worked, said Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University, during a UC Berkeley lecture in October. Instead, Butler advocates abolishing prisons and finding alternative ways to deal with those who cause harm — something that he says would create a...

"The purpose of medicine is to create a bigger, deeper, more thorough experience of our inner functioning, our physical functioning, our emotional functioning, our energetic functioning, our spiritual functioning, our relational functioning, how we are with the land," said author and consciousness guide Françoise Bourzat. "... Mushrooms bring it to your face, like, 'This is your illness.' By ...

On Oct. 29, artist Paul Chan delivered the 2019-20 Una's Lecture , a series sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities since 1987. In his talk, called the "Bather's Dilemma," Chan explores the figure of the bather — a visual trope with a rich history, and a prominent theme in his own work — as an embodiment of pleasure that is linked to the act of renewal. "The bather in art history has a...

"If rights aren't enforced, do they really exist?" asks Beverly Crawford, a professor emerita of political science and international and area studies at UC Berkeley. "We can say, 'Yes, they exist,' but if they're not enforced, people can be treated as if their rights don't exist ... Once a person steps outside their own borders, let's say they're fleeing persecution, or they're fleeing poverty, or...

At 13, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote an article in her school paper about the importance of the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. But she didn't think about pursuing a career in law because she didn't see any women in the field. When she began college at Cornell, however, she learned about how attorneys were defending people called in for questioning during the wave...

With the 2020 general elections looming, the nominee for the Democratic Party undetermined and a defiant and volatile president at the helm, the impeachment inquiry is heating up. At stake in this topsy-turvy political theater are our democratic institutions, which may be forever altered. In this Nov. 5 talk for UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix event, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, an...

Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer." Jobrani was recently a guest on the Science of Happiness,  a podcast from the Greater...

An important case of the current U.S. Supreme Court term is about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — a program that some 700,000 undocumented people depend on for the right to work and protection from deportation — and whether or not it was properly ended by the Trump administration in 2017. The program has been kept in place since then by federal court injunctions. The Supreme Cour...

Nadine Burke Harris, named the first surgeon general of California in January, has seen how childhood stress and trauma leads to declining health in adulthood. She began studying the correlation as a pediatrician years ago, and continued her research as medical director of the Bayview Child Health Center in San Francisco and founder of the Center for Youth Wellness. "I believe, fundamentally, that...