Berkeley Talks

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is considered the father of Western philosophy, one whose most famous ideas have all but risen to the level of pop culture. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His name has been invoked by politicians to bolster their stance against “cancel culture.” There’s even an AI chat app modeled after Socrates that promises intelligent conversations. But what exactly were Socrates’ philosophical views? We may be quick to reference his name, but if asked, many of us would likely be hard-pressed to give a thorough account of what he actually believed. In Berkeley Talks episode 224, Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and author of the 2025 book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, joins UC Berkeley’s Judith Butler, a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and a leading philosopher and theorist, for a conversation. Together, they dive deep into Socrates’ work and beliefs, discussing the value of pursuing knowledge through open-ended questions, how philosophical inquiry is a collaborative process where meaning and understanding are constructed through conversation, and how critical questioning can lead to greater freedom of thought and help us to ask and answer some of life’s most important questions. This event took place on Jan. 30, 2025, and was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities.Watch a video of the conversation.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

When J Finley arrived at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in 2006, she planned on studying reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after a fellowship in South Africa, where she studied the Zulu language and culture, Finley says she realized Black people were never going to get reparations. Switching gears, she started thinking: “How else do Black people make do? Well, we laugh.”In Berkeley Talks episode 223, Finley, an associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College who earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2008 and 2012, discusses her 2024 book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity. During the talk, Finley shares how Black women have used and continue to use humor and, more specifically, sass, to speak back to power and assert their own humanity. Black women’s humor, she contends, is “rooted in the racist, patriarchal and, many times, degrading conditions from which it developed” and is “an embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis that has come to be the hallmark of Black women’s humor.”   It’s not that sass is merely for show, she argues, but there’s an internal process that happens first that is then expressed gesturally and vocally. “If you are a Black woman, and you don't understand yourself as empowered, to have the agency to speak back within those relations,” she says, “in what world can you be free?”This UC Berkeley event, which took place March 18, was sponsored by the Department of African American Studies.Read more about J Finley, and her research on the use of Black women’s humor as a form of resistance.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Pomona College photo.

In Berkeley Talks podcast episode 222, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Brian Fitzpatrick, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, debate the merits of originalism in constitutional interpretation. Originalism is a theory that argues that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption nearly 250 years ago, rather than evolving with society. Arguments for originalism in this debate include: Originalism limits judicial discretion and prevents judges from imposing their own political views under the guise of constitutional interpretation.It promotes certainty, predictability and stability in law by relying on a fixed meaning of constitutional texts.Changes to the Constitution should be left to the formal amendment process, rather than judicial interpretation.Arguments against originalism include: Originalism is often unworkable in practice because it’s difficult to determine the original meaning or intent of constitutional provisions, and historical context can be challenging to fully understand. The theory ties modern society to the views and values of earlier generations, potentially limiting constitutional rights and guarantees to outdated perspectives.It allows judges to impose their own biases under the guise of historical interpretation.This symposium, which took place on March 17, 2025, was UC Berkeley Law’s inaugural Thomas David and Judith Swope Clark Symposium on Constitutional Interpretation. Watch a video of the debate on UC Berkeley Law’s YouTube page.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Image from pixabay.com.

In Berkeley Talks episode 221, American historian Heather Cox Richardson joins Dylan Penningroth, a UC Berkeley professor of law and history, in a conversation about the historical evolution of the Republican Party, and the state of U.S. politics and democracy today. Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, is the author of the popular nightly newsletter Letters from an American, in which she explains current political developments and relates them to historical events. With more than 3 million daily readers, Richardson says Letters has grown a “community around the world of people who are trying to reestablish a reality-based politics.”Topics in the conversation include: The origins of the Republican Party: President Lincoln had a vision of a government serving the common person, including equal access to resources like education and land. After the Civil War, Republicans under Lincoln created a national taxation system, which former Confederates argued was an unfair redistribution of wealth from white people to Black people and from rich people to poor people.The backlash after Lincoln: After Lincoln, there was a rise of robber barons — industrialists whose business practices were considered ruthless and unethical — and a group of people who argued that intervention for ordinary people was a form of socialism. Wealth began to concentrate at the top and led to an inevitable crash. As a consequence, the Republican Party had to repeatedly rethink the way it did business and the way it worked.How Donald Trump changed the Republican Party: Richardson says President Trump took oligarchs' language about government overreach and "stripped away the veneer," appealing directly to racism and sexism. This empowered a new base of supporters and led to a movement encouraging violence and anti-authority sentiment. What gives Richardson hope: Richardson says the current moment in politics reminds her of the 1850s, when it appeared that elite enslavers, who made up 1% of the U.S. population, had completely taken over the country. But over the next decade, the nation went on to elect Lincoln and form a government by the people and for the people. “I believe that all of us coming together in the 21st century can do it again,” she says. The event took place on Feb. 26 in Zellerbach Hall, and was presented by Cal Performances and the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley as part of the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures.More about the speakers: Richardson has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian, and is the author, most recently, of the best-selling 2023 book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Penningroth is the author of the award-winning 2023 book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. He serves as associate dean of the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley Law; his scholarship focuses on African American and legal history.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Screenshot from a UC Berkeley video.

If someone asked you to describe democracy in one word, what would you say? An October 2024 survey by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project, led by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson, asked people just that. Many respondents said, “freedom,” but a lot of others said, “broken.” In Berkeley Talks episode 220, Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady discusses how we got to a place of growing disillusionment with democracy, where so many mistrust the U.S. government and deride fellow voters’ ability to make informed decisions. In his Feb. 3 talk, part of the Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures series, Brady says factors include the rise of moral traditionalism and social division; the rise of the religious right; the demise of unions; and concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion and who belongs. There’s also a new division between less-educated elites and elite professionals, “which I think really affects us as university folks,” he says. Watch Brady’s full lecture on YouTube, which includes slides from his talk. Brady is the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He served as dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy from 2009-2021 and as director of the University of California’s Survey Research Center from 1998-2009. He is co-author, most recently, of the 2021 book, Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Find us on YouTube @Berkeley News.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Dyana Wing So via Unsplash.

When Luke Messac began his emergency medicine residency at Rhode Island Hospital in 2018, he noticed a lot of his patients came to him concerned about costs. Some worried about his recommendations for them to stay in the hospital overnight. Others questioned his motives when he asked them to undergo a test, like an X-ray or MRI. A few came in way too late in the course of their illnesses out of fear of the cost. He’d heard about aggressive debt collection practices at hospitals around the country that put people at risk of profound financial and legal consequences. It made him wonder: Was his hospital doing that, too? After a quick trip to the country courthouse to examine the case files, what he found troubled him. “I was inundated with what I thought were pretty horrific cases,” said Messac, author of the 2023 book, Your Money or Your Life: A History of Medical Debt Collection in the United States. “Low-income single moms, people living on disability, recent immigrants, were facing thousands of dollars of bills and court fees and interest fees. And if they did not pay and if they did not settle their suits quickly, then they could have their wages garnished. They would be charged double-digit interest rates.”In Berkeley Talks episode 219, Messac, now an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses how the changing role of hospitals, and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, transformed how medical debts are collected in the U.S.This talk took place on Sept. 17, 2024, and was sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and cosponsored by Berkeley Public Health.  Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts) or on YouTube @Berkeley News (youtube.com/@BerkeleyNews/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Ahmed for Unsplash+.

In Berkeley Talks episode 218, sociology professor Stephanie Canizales discusses her 2024 book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, about the experiences of undocumented immigrant youth as they come of age in the United States without their parents. Over six years, Canizales conducted 75 in-depth interviews with adult immigrants living in Los Angeles who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied children years before.  “Many arrive in the U.S. to find that long-settled relatives who are constrained by their own legal and socioeconomic status are unable to offer material and emotional support, rendering children unaccompanied upon their arrival,” says Canizales, faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), at a December 2024 event on campus. “Young people might feel disoriented as they are thrust into material and emotional independence, and their role as low-wage workers in the U.S.”Today, about 146,000 unaccompanied children from Central America, Mexico and other countries are apprehended every year at the U.S.-Mexico border, says Canizales. That’s double the number from 2014, when the U.S. declared a humanitarian crisis at the border. In addition to Canizales, the talk includes a panel of Berkeley professors who share their thoughts about the book, including Kristina Lovato, assistant professor of social welfare; Caitlin Patler, associate professor of public policy; and law professor Sarah Song, who moderates the conversation.This event took place on Dec. 3, and was part of the Author Meets Critics series by the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix. It was cosponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute and the Latinx Research Center.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Image from Sin Padres, Ni Papeles book cover.

In Berkeley Talks episode 217, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, director and assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, discuss their 2024 book, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. During the campus event, the scholars touch on the transformative role of imagination and storytelling, why responding to demagogues with condemnation doesn’t work and how to create a world where everyone feels they truly belong. The October 2024 conversation was moderated by Ashley Gallegos, director of the institute's Places of Belonging program.powell and Menendian contend that for people to feel a strong sense of belonging in society, they must see their own stories and experiences reflected in the broader social narrative that shapes their everyday lives. “What we say in the book is that if people don't see themselves in the story, not only will they reject the story, but they will reject it violently,” says Menendian, who supervises many of the institute’s ongoing research projects and leads major initiatives. “People have to have a place for themselves in that future story.” “We're anxious as a world,” adds powell, a professor of law, ethnic studies and African American studies. “And the root of that anxiety is, will you belong in the next world? Most of us do not feel very secure. … When you have this deep anxiety caused by a rapid change, we make sense of it through stories.”This event took place on Oct. 28, and was sponsored by the Othering and Belonging Institute. Founded in 2012, the institute conducts research and develops policies aimed at addressing exclusion, marginalization and inequality to create a more just society. Learn more about powell’s and Menendian’s book on the Othering and Belonging Institute’s website.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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.