Berkeley Talks

In Berkeley Talks episode 216, celebrated poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins in conversation with UC Berkeley English Professor Cathy Park Hong, a poet and writer whose creative nonfiction book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Together, they discuss the importance of genre fluidity and artistic experimentation, the role of disobedience in their writing and how language can be both a tool of oppression and liberation.“I personally feel a lot of affinity with you as a writer for many reasons,” began Hong, in front of a packed auditorium at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in April 2024. “But I think one of the key shared experiences is how the English language, once a site of estrangement and inadequacy for you, became this playground for bounty and experimentation. And part of that bounty and experimentation is how you refuse to limit genre by the way you swing from poetry to prose without feeling tethered by either.”“I think for me, genre was always as fluid as gender, even punctuation,” replied Vuong, author of two poetry collections — Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother — and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a widely acclaimed novel. “The rigor of punctuation, I think, is arbitrary. They're still up for grabs. And then the dialect of standard English, how legitimate is it? The linguists would tell us it's no more efficient or better or capacious than AAVE or other regional dialects. However, standard English is attached to the court system. It's a dialect that is also attached to an army and a navy, and so within that comes great, immense power.“I'm interested in genre as tendency rather than an ontological position to be. And I think there are tendencies that could be utilized and then left aside or even departed. What is a tendency in us stylistically that is then abandoned? I'm interested in abandon not as a way to cast away or to denounce, but as a restlessness. Like, I will use this mode until I'm done with it. I'll find something else and then return to it later. There's a kind of cyclical relationship. I think maybe if I'm trying to put order to it, I'll say there's a kind of inherent queerness in it — that, for me, my queerness demanded an alternative route, always.” Vuong was UC Berkeley’s 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, established in 1987 to bring distinguished figures in the arts and humanities to Berkeley for lectures, panel discussions, and meetings with students and faculty. Vuong is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant in 2019, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.Read more about Vuong and Hong on the Townsend Center for the Humanities website.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Tom Hines/courtesy of Ocean Vuong.

In Berkeley Talks episode 215, a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices. Panelists include: Wes Holliday, professor of philosophy. Holliday studies group decision-making, including the best methods of voting, especially in the democratic context. Marika Landau-Wells, assistant professor of political science. Landau-Wells studies the effect that threat perception has on national security decision-making, and how some decisions we make to protect ourselves can endanger many others.Saul Perlmutter, Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor of Physics and 2011 Nobel laureate. Perlmutter co-teaches a Big Ideas course, called Sense and Sensibility and Science, designed to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers by exploring key aspects of scientific thinking.Linda Wilbrecht, professor of neuroscience and psychology. An adolescent scientist, Wilbrecht studies how adolescent learning and decision-making changes from ages 8 to 18, and how it compares to that of adults and children. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, executive dean of the College of Letters and Science (moderator).The campus event was held on Oct. 9 as part of the College of Letters and Science’s Salon Series, which brings together faculty and students from a swath of disciplines to interrogate and explore universal questions or ideas from disparate perspectives.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.College of Letters and Science photo.

In Berkeley Talks episode 214, former editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dean Baquet and Marty Baron, evaluate how the media covered the 2024 U.S. presidential election and share thoughts on how journalists should effectively cover Donald Trump’s second term.  In 2016, the New York Times was shocked that Trump won, because they didn’t understand that the country was “ready to elect a Donald Trump,” said Baquet at a UC Berkeley Journalism event on Nov. 13. But, he said, he thinks the coverage of the most recent election was much better.  “My argument would be that, and people have trouble accepting this, but all of the stuff you know about Donald Trump — his abuse of the tax structure that David Fahrenthold wrote about, his taxes and his tax dodges that the New York Times, including David Barstow, wrote about, the allegations of women, all of the things that became controversies about Donald Trump — were written about in the American press, and the American people voted Donald Trump in anyway. So I actually think the press did a much better job. How do you think the press performed this election?”“Well, I think there was a lot of good work,” responded Baron. “I would say this: When people asked me, ‘How did we do?’ in 2016, I said that our problem predated 2016. Our problem is that we did not understand America well enough to understand that this country would produce a candidate like Donald Trump.“We did not understand the level of rancor and grievance against elites, including, and maybe particularly, the press, to understand that they didn’t want Jeb Bush, who was called the front-runner at one point. They wanted exactly the opposite of Jeb Bush. They wanted somebody who was not part of governing the ruling elites, the political families. They wanted somebody who was going to go to Washington, basically be an arsonist, burn everything down, punch people in the face. And that’s what they elected. And we didn’t capture that. We didn’t understand the country well enough. I do think that we suffered from the same problem this time.”“But this time, people knew that there was a good chance he’d win,” said Baquet. “There was a good chance he would win, but I don’t think people anticipated that he would win as decisively as he has,” said Baron. “And they didn’t understand that he would win in the voting segments that he won, to the degree that he did, among Black Americans, among Latinos, among even women, among you name it. To win all of the swing states, I don’t think that that was anticipated at all.“And so, I don’t think we detected that level of desire for a change. And to me, that is, I think we need to work harder at really understanding the country.”Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.UC Berkeley photo by Marlena Telvick.

In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around the world, and how it can influence belief, for good and for bad. “Stories give a basis and a justification for people to take real life action,” Tangherlini said at an Alumni and Parents Weekend at Homecoming event on campus in October. “They can be retrospective justification, but they can also be motivating justification.” A computational folklorist, who’s also a professor in the School of Information and associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Tangherlini works at the intersection of informal culture, storytelling and AI. He uses a combination of methods from the study of folklore and machine learning to describe storytelling networks and classify stories. “This is where we start to unravel narrative at internet scale,” he said. “One of the things that's kind of interesting, if we start to think about conspiracy theories, is you've all heard little bits of these in different places. But what a conspiracy theory is able to do is to take simple threat narratives and link them together to form complex representations of threatening groups and their interconnections.” Tangherlini went on to address specific conspiracy theories, from #stopthesteal to Pizzagate, and explored the potential of using storytelling to change the conversation. “Can we use the structure of the storytelling to … question exclusionary ideas about who belongs and turn them into more inclusive ideas in the storytelling itself?” he asked. “Can we question ideas of what is threatening? Can I develop ways to steer conversations to more inclusive and less destructive strategies?”This Oct. 18 event was hosted by Berkeley’s Division of Arts and Humanities.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.UC Berkeley photo.

In Berkeley Talks episode 212, a panel of UC Berkeley experts from former presidential administrations take a critical look at the issues that have led the U.S. to this year’s historic election and reflect on the future of American democracy. The Oct. 29 campus event was sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and Cal Performances, and was part of the Goldman School’s Interrogating Democracy series.Panelists include: Janet Napolitano, professor of public policy and director of the new Center for Security in Politics; former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration; former president of the University of California. Robert Reich, emeritus professor of public policy; senior fellow at the Blum Center for Economic Development; former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.Maria Echaveste, policy and program development director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy; former assistant to the president and deputy White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute.Angela Glover Blackwell (moderator), chief vision officer for the Goldman School of Public Policy’s new Democracy Policy Initiative; founder-in-residence of PolicyLink.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Dyana Wing So via Unsplash.

In Berkeley Talks episode 211, Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion, an ex-evangelical minister and the co-host of the politics podcast Straight White American Jesus, discusses Project 2025, Christian nationalism and the November elections.“Project 2025 is a deeply reactionary Catholic vision for the country,” said Onishi, who gave the 2024 Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance on Oct. 1. “It's a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic leaders, and in many cases, reactionary Catholic thought.”Many see Trump’s vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio, as bolstering Trump’s outsider image, said Onishi. But it has gone mostly unnoticed that Vance is a radical religious politician, even more so than former Vice President Mike Pence.  “Vance's Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, and yet it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency — and a direct link to Project 2025,” he said.The UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

In 2011, mass protests erupted in Syria against the four-decade authoritarian rule of the Assad family. The uprising, which became part of the larger pro-democracy Arab Spring that spread through much of the Arab world, was met with a brutal government crackdown. Soon after, the country descended into a devastating civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced over 13 million people, more than half of the country’s prewar population. When the civil war broke out, groups of volunteers formed to provide emergency response to communities across Syria. In 2014, those volunteers voted to form the Syria Civil Defence, a national humanitarian organization widely known as the White Helmets. Since then, the group has expanded to become a nearly 3,000-strong network that has saved more than 128,000 lives in Syria.In their daring and life-threatening work, the White Helmets provide critical emergency services, including medical care, ambulances and search-and-rescue operations. They also document military attacks and coordinate with NGOs in pursuit of justice and accountability for the Syrian people. In Berkeley Talks episode 210, we hear from the director of the White Helmets, Raed al-Saleh, and from Farouq Habib, a founding member of the organization who serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. They were part of a panel discussion hosted by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center on Sept. 19, 2024.“For us, as Syrian people, the most strategic and important work is on justice and accountability, our human rights work,” said al-Saleh, whose remarks were translated by Habib during the event. The group has become instrumental in exposing human rights violations and atrocities during the war. After they used GoPro cameras to record a double-tap strike in 2015 — when two strikes are launched in quick succession, often targeting civilians or first responders — the White Helmets recognized that the videos could be used to document these war crimes.  “We realized that the footage … is not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but it’s even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.”When asked later in the discussion how the White Helmets envision the future of Syria, al-Saleh replied that they want to see “a peaceful Syria, where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.”Habib and al-Saleh were joined on the panel by Andrea Richardson, a senior legal researcher for investigations at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, and emergency physician and medical adviser Rohini Haar, a Berkeley Law lecturer and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center. The discussion was moderated by Andrea Richardson, executive director of the Human Rights Center. Learn more about Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo courtesy of the White Helmets.

In Berkeley Talks episode 208, three UC Berkeley professors from a wide range of disciplines — psychology, biology and ethnic studies — broach a deep question: What is understanding?“When I think about it through the lens of being a psychologist, I really think about understanding as a demonstration of, say, knowledge that we have about the world,” begins Arianne Eason, an assistant professor of psychology, in this episode. “But that knowledge doesn't necessarily have to be through what we say. It doesn't necessarily have to be explicit. It's really about shaping the way that we engage with the world around us, and with those around us, and being very flexible. “I think, a lot of times, if we’re thinking about the college context, and what is understanding, people's first reaction might be, ‘I'm able to give an answer.’ But that's not really understanding. It's really about being able to apply it to different contexts that you may not have seen before. “And I think kind of wrapped up in that for me is a recognition of what you don't know. To really understand also means to recognize what you don't understand, and where the limits of your knowledge are.” The fall 2024 discussion also included Christian Paiz, an associate professor of ethnic studies, and Hernan Garcia, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology and of physics. It’s part of a video series for Research, Discovery and You, a course for new students offered every fall semester by Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science. In the course, students are introduced to different ways of thinking and approaches to knowledge production as practiced across the college’s 79 majors.  Research, Discovery and You is taught by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, professor of psychology and the college’s associate dean of student outreach and engagement, and Aileen Liu, the college’s director of curricular engagement initiatives. The video series, part of the course’s recent redesign, was supported by the College of Letters and Science and the Division of Undergraduate Education’s Instructional Technology and Innovation Micro Grant Program.Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Screenshot from L&S video.