Berkeley Voices

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 taugh...

It was summertime in the early 1970s in New York City. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht boarded a school bus headed for the Catskill Mountains, home to Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. As the bus approached the camp, he peered out the window at the warm and raucous group below. "I wasn't exactly sure who was a camper and who was a counselor," he said. "I think that's really ind...

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...

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. i...

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 l...

Yesterday at sunset 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 childho...

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...

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 cours...

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, they talk about the process of Bridges claiming and using her v...

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....

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 d...

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-y...

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...

In this episode of Berkeley Voices , 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. "Sometime...

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 broa...

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." L...

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...

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 me...

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 an...

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...

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...

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 m...

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 Engin...

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 t...

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. N...