Berkeley Talks

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Paul Butler on how prison abolition would make us all safer Jan 17, 2020

Show notes

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 safer, more just society.

"Prison has been a miserable failure," said Butler, also a legal analyst on MSNBC. "It doesn't work. Most young people who come home from prison wind up right back there within two years. Prisons themselves are horrible places. They're violent, they stink, they're dangerous, they're noisy. It's really hard to leave a space like that better than when you came in."

Butler, author of the 2017 book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, gave a talk called "Prison Abolition, and a Mule" on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of UC Berkeley's Jefferson Memorial Lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Division. It was also part of the campus's yearlong initiative, 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Consciousness guide on using psychedelics as medicine Jan 10, 2020

Show notes

"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 knowing your illness, you resolve your illness, you deal with it, you treat it from within yourself. The mushroom helps you see the truth."

Bourzat, author of Consciousness Medicine, gave a talk on Nov. 14 at UC Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside an exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which ran from March 15 to Dec. 15. Bourzat, a counselor who is trained in somatic psychology, has been mentored in the Mexican Mazatec tradition of the sacred mushrooms, and has been sharing her approach internationally for 30 years.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Artist Paul Chan on the 'Bather's Dilemma' Jan 03, 2020

Show notes

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 long and storied pedigree," says Chan. "What I was interested in was how this motif inspired a few artists to experiment with new ways to depict a human form that took into account movement in different ways.

"Thinking about bathers touched a nerve that was sensitive to a need I didn't realize was in me," he continues. "I needed some way to think about whether pleasure has a place in these punishing times and whether our capacity for pleasing and being pleased has any bearing on how we renew ourselves to better meet what genuine appeals of progress asks of us."

Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art. His art is held in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Professor Emerita Beverly Crawford on lies about migrants Dec 27, 2019

Show notes

"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 they're fleeing environmental crisis or disaster, they are rightless, as if their rights don't exist."

Crawford, former director of Berkeley's Center for European and German Studies, gave a lecture, "Lies about migrants: immigration policy in a time of post-truth politics," on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). During the lecture, she discussed two problems in formulating immigration policy that leads to dehumanization — the absence of migrant rights and rival national identities. For example, in the U.S., there are rival definitions of what it means to be an American for American citizens. But, she says, it happens in other countries, too.

"What we have seen is the rise of the extreme right wing to dominate the narrative about immigration, both in the United States and in Europe," Crawford continues. "What's happened is, this extreme right, which dominates the narrative, has created a false narrative, and has turned to the weaponization of dehumanizing words and pictures to control the narrative based on people's fear and emotion, and the formulation of an exclusionist immigration policy. We don't have a comprehensive immigration law now."

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on overcoming the odds Dec 14, 2019

Show notes

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 of Communist accusations led by Senator Joe McCarthy. In reading about their advocacy, "I got the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing," said Ginsburg at an Oct. 21 event at UC Berkeley.

Ginsburg, who, at 86, is the oldest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, gave Berkeley Law’s inaugural Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture to a packed house of Berkeley Law students, faculty and staff in Zellberbach Hall.

Ginsburg and Kay, who both graduated from law school in 1959, were trailblazers for women in the law and gender equality. They met at a conference on women in the law in 1971, and went on to co-author the first casebook on sex-based discrimination. They were good friends for decades before Kay, who taught for 57 years at Berkeley Law and was its first woman dean, died in 2017.

During the lecture, Ginsburg talks about the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field, how "overjoyed" she is that women are now welcomed at the bar and on the bench, how unconscious bias is still a problem — and the "zest for life" she has after having survived several bouts of cancer.

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley scholars on the politics and law of impeachment Dec 07, 2019

Show notes

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, and Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, discuss what the mechanisms are for removing or sanctioning a president of the United States, what are impeachable offenses and how it's no longer about left vs. right, but democracy vs. oligarchy.

(whitehouse.gov photo)

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Comedian Maz Jobrani on noticing the good in his life Nov 27, 2019

Show notes

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 Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant.

"The reason I called my recent special Immigrant was because “immigrant” under Trump had turned into a bad word. It was a derogatory term. And really, people that that grasped onto that xenophobia, it broke my heart because I look around — first of all, I’m an immigrant. And then I look around and I know a lot of really good people that are immigrants, and then I’m looking at people like the Syrian refugees who are trying to come to America and flee hardship or the people come from Central America and I go, 'These people are leaving a really bad situation.' No one’s in a great situation is going, 'Oh we know the economy is great, there’s no violence in our country — let’s go somewhere where we don’t speak the language and we’re not wanted and see how it will go.’ No."

"That’s so true, Maz," says Keltner. "You know, what really strikes me about the immigrants who I am friends with and who I work with is not only their perseverance, but their ability to stay focused on the brighter side of human nature in spite of the rise of white supremacy and xenophobia in our country today."

In each episode of the Science of Happiness, a guest chooses a practice from the Science of Happiness free online course that’s been shown to increase happiness, connection and kindness. Jobrani chose a practice that focused on positivity — writing about three good things. When Jobrani got the assignment, he was on vacation with his wife and two kids in Japan, so the whole family participated. Each day, they would take 10 minutes to write down three good things, then they'd read what they wrote aloud to each other. It's something that Jobrani says encouraged them to look for positive things throughout the day.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on defending DACA Nov 22, 2019

Show notes

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 Court heard argument in these cases on Nov. 12.

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and attorney Ethan Dettmer of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher's in San Francisco are key members of the litigation team that won one of the court injunctions, and are currently defending the program in the Supreme Court. In this Nov. 18 talk, they discuss what it's like litigating a case like this and the Supreme Court arguments that happened last week.

Related Berkeley News content:

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris on the health impacts of childhood stress Nov 15, 2019

Show notes

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 social determinants of health are to the 21st century what infectious disease was to the 20th century," Harris told Berkeley Public Health Dean Michael Lu during the school's Dean's Speaker Series event on Sept. 26.

As surgeon general, Harris is leading the state's efforts to implement routine screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences, known as ACEs, among California's Medicaid population.

ACEs, explained Harris, are experiences — abuse, homelessness, losing a caregiver — that lead to health issues later in life, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes. The more ACEs a person has, she said, the more at risk they are.

"When we recognize that childhood adversity is a common root cause," she said, "it gives us really powerful insight into some of the most urgent issues of our day, specifically when we understand that cumulative adversity has an impact on our stress response system. And that impacts our later risk of heart disease. It helps us understand that when a black boy is walking down the street and get stopped, the more times it is activated, the greater the risk to the youth."

Harris ended her talk with her goal and a call to action: "In my role as state surgeon general, it’s my intention to lay the infrastructure to ensure that, in the state of California, we will cut ACEs in half in one generation. And y’all are going to help me with that.”

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law's Ian Haney López on defeating racial fearmongering Nov 08, 2019

Show notes

People across the country, from presidential hopefuls and engaged voters to journalists and activists, are grappling with how to think and talk about racism in American politics.

In this Oct. 11 talk, Berkeley Law professor Ian Haney López, one of the nation's leading thinkers on how racism has evolved in the U.S. since the civil rights era, discusses his new book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections and Saving America, offering insight and hopeful new strategy for defeating the right's racial fearmongering and achieving bold progressive goals.

"... Republicans have been saying for 50 years, 'Democrats only care about people of color.' And now, whenever folks hear a conversation about race, about racial justice, they immediately default to a frame, 'This is racial justice? That's for people of color.' We need to say expressly, 'Racial justice? That's for white folks, too.'

"Whites need to hear that they will benefit from being part of a multiracial coalition ... When we tested this message with communities of color, they had far more confidence in a multiracial coalition when we said, 'Whites will benefit,' because that told people of color, 'Oh, this isn't just kumbaya and we're all going to do this because we should.' This is, 'White folks need to save their families, and to save their families, they've got to work with us.' And once they know that, people of color say, 'Yes, this might work. This might work.'"

This talk was organized as part of a series of events under the banner of the 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice initiative, UC Berkeley’s yearlong commemoration marking the anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in the English colonies in 1619. The initiative was launched in the spirit of the 400 Years of African American History Commission Act, federal legislation signed last year that acknowledged the impact of slavery in the United States and called for a national commission to help support events around the country to commemorate the anniversary.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Learn about upcoming 400 Years events on the Haas Institute's website.

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