Berkeley Voices

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 book about 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.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.Key takeaways: The reality of replica painting in China is more complex and nuanced than the stereotypical image of assembly-line factories.There is much greater similarity between the most successful artists and the most accused forger than many of us can imagine.The anxiety around AI-generated art today parallels earlier concerns about globalization and outsourcing of manufacturing. Both challenge traditional notions of creativity, originality and the value of human-made art.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by José Joaquin Figueroa.

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.

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+

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.