In this Berkeley Talks episode, Salvadoran American journalist and activist Roberto Lovato, discusses his new book Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, with Jess Alvarenga, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker and a graduate of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

In Unforgetting, Lovato exposes how the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was responsible for killing 85% of the 75,000 to 80,000 people killed during the Salvadoran Civil War that was fought from 1979 to 1992.

"The book is ... a journey through different underworlds — the underworlds of the guerillas, the underworlds of the gangs, the underworlds of our family histories and secrets, the underworld of the secrets of nations, the things that countries don't like for us to know, I mean, which is theoretically how you get a president like Donald Trump, for example," said Lovato.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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"I would say the loudest, boldest, most powerful voices coming out of Washington have been the voices of women," said U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood (IL-14). "The way that we, collectively, have reframed the conversation about where this country is going has really, I think, been jarring for some of those who have been the power class in Washington for decades."

Underwood was part of a panel that discussed the history-making women of the 116th Congress, and a recently published New York Times book that features powerful portraits of all but one Congresswoman. Also part of the conversation was Rep. Jackie Speier (CA-14), UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in political science and photojournalist Elizabeth Herman and New York Times photo editor Marisa Schwartz Taylor.

Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18, 2020, Berkeley Law professors — Amanda Tyler, Catherine Fisk, Orin Kerr, Bertrall Ross and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky — came together to discuss Ginsburg's legacy, what will be the likely effects of her no longer being in the Supreme Court and what is likely to happen in the nomination and confirmation process of a new justice.

"Her legacy as an advocate completely changed the face of American society," said Tyler, who clerked for Ginsburg in 1999. "As an advocate, she opened the eyes of the Supreme Court to the lived experiences of both men and women who are held back by gender stereotypes. Because of that, she was able to convince them, to educate them, to teach them as to how gender stereotypes do that, not just to women but to men as well, and how putting women on a pedestal, as Justice Brennan said, and Justice Ginsburg loved this quote, is actually putting them in a cage. It's holding them back."

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

Photo credit: Supreme Court of the United States via Flickr

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In this Berkeley Talks episode, Stephen Small, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and interim director for the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, discusses research from his upcoming book, tentatively titled Inside the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana. 

Since the 1990s, Small has visited more than 200 plantation museum sites in 10 states. Tours of these sites included narratives that privileged white elites and consistently avoided mention of slavery and the experience of enslaved people, says Small.

"Slavery is typically described in passive, general and abstract ways," said Small. "If mentioned at all, Black people typically appear as an undifferentiated stereotypical mass, with few exceptions."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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As the global pandemic stretches on and massive wildfires rage along the West Coast, many people are finding it hard — if not impossible — to get the restful sleep they need. But Allison Harvey, a professor of clinical psychology and director of the Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic at UC Berkeley, says although anxiety can make it more difficult to sleep well, there are evidence-based treatments that can help. 

"I think as humans, at this point, we either have too many people in our lives and in our faces, or we're lonely and we're maybe feeling that as we go off to sleep," said Harvey, of life during the pandemic. "We need to go to safe burrows and nests in order to sleep. So, things that are comforting really make a difference to us."

On Aug. 7, Harvey gave a talk, sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how changing certain behaviors — when and how we wake up and go to bed, for instance — can allow us to experience the sleep rhythms we naturally have.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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"Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same. There’s a pink one, and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses all went to the university, where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same. And there's doctors and lawyers and business executives, and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same."

That's the first part of the song "Little Boxes," written by Berkeley alumna and political activist Malvina Reynolds in 1962. In the first episode of a new campus podcast — the Berkeley Podcast for Music — professor Nicholas Mathew talks with Reynolds' daughter, Nancy Schimmel, as well as Berkeley professors Margaret Crawford from architecture, Timothy Hampton from French and comparative literature and Maria Sonevytsky from music. They discuss Reynolds' life, music, activism and the contested politics of her most famous song "Little Boxes" — a satire of suburban conformity inspired by the 1960s housing developments in Daly City.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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"I don't know anybody who can honestly say there hasn't been somebody in their life that helped them along," said Louise Renne, a lawyer who served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as San Francisco City Attorney. "And I try to pay it back by working with young people in public housing here in San Francisco."

Renne took part in a panel discussion — "Bay Area Women in Politics" — hosted by the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center in July 2020. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Shanelle Scales-Preston, who sits on the Pittsburg City Council, also spoke on the panel.

"I think all of us will say we have to be optimists to survive in these careers," said Schaaf. "It's what gets you out of bed in the morning because we also have to hold tremendous suffering and tragedy in our communities. That is also part of our jobs. But I want to see a world that is equitable and where everyone thrives. And when I talk about equity, I believe that structural racism is one of the biggest barriers to everything good that we want for the world. And that includes getting an actual representative democracy. It's not just about women, but it's also about people of color. It's about anyone who does not fit the dominant identity. And we have to start to reverse engineer those policies, those practices that have been in place forever that are maintaining these obstacles to people getting these opportunities."

This discussion was part of the Bay Area Women in Politics Oral History Project, which highlights the work of women leaders in the Bay Area. "We really wanted to think about this project as a way to document the history of our region's political women, from elected officials to activists to campaign staffers to fundraisers," said Amanda Tewes, a historian and interviewer for the Oral History Center who is leading the project. "I think we can all agree that women are often the backbone of America's political work — and we felt it was important to record that."

Listen to the discussion and a read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 70 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, joined Poet Laureate and Berkeley English professor Robert Hass in March 2019 to discuss her 2018 book Hazards of Time Travel. 

Set in a dystopian America in 2039, the novel tells the story of a 17-year-old who, after her subversive valedictorian speech, is exiled to rural Wisconsin in 1959.

"It seems like dystopian novels are mostly about extrapolating scary political trends in the present into the future," said Hass. "1984. The Handmaid's Tale. It felt like you found yourself more interested in exploring 1959."

"Or the sort of foundation for the present," replied Oates, a professor emerita of humanities at Princeton University who has taught as a visiting professor of English at Berkeley. "... Because when I wrote the novel — I was working on it in 2011 — I had no idea at all, as none of us did, that we would have a different kind of political situation today.

"... My novel was written before the campaign of 2016, which was a vicious and wildly divisive campaign from which we will probably never recover. No, I was actually looking ahead toward a surveillance state, which doesn't have that populist personality demagogue, who's like a clown, a sadistic clown, who's very vicious and funny in an ignorant way, playing to the populous.

"In my vision, it's more of a surveillance state, where the government is actually impersonal, and you never see a personality. ... It's more like, it's just all around us. We'e in a mesh, a web, of being surveyed and recorded all the time."

This conversation was part of Berkeley Book Chats, a series presented by the Townsend Center that features faculty members discussing recently completed publications, performances or recordings.

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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"Economists begin with this notion of the free market invisible hand, and we need to be clear that the hand has a color — it's a white hand, let me say, a white male hand," said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University. ... I was a major in sociology and economics... I ended up choosing sociology, in part because of the foundation of economics is assumptions about the rational actor making decisions on a cost-benefit basis in something called efficient market. And we all know that the Homo sapiens — they're a complex animal shaped by multiple social forces and group divisions."

Bonilla-Silva joined a panel of scholars — Daina Ramey Berry, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Arjumand Siddiqi, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Toronto; and Mario Small, a sociology professor at Harvard University — for a discussion on July 13, 2020, about how the conceptual approaches of economics discount Black and Latinx perspectives, and what they think economics could learn from other disciplines. The discussion was moderated by Sandy Darity, a professor of economics, public policy and African and African American studies at Duke University.

This talk was sponsored by UC Berkeley's Department of Economics and Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, co-founded by Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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“I’ve seen a huge capacity for redemption from people… if given a chance.” That’s Thelton Henderson, a renowned civil rights lawyer who spent 37 years as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in conversation with Savala Trepczynski in a 2017 podcast series, Be the Change.

Be the Change was created and hosted by Trepczynski, the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law. The series highlights people who Trepcyznski says “embody, and therefore model, a progressive and subversively compassionate way of being a human being.”

Henderson, who graduated from Berkeley Law in 1962, was the first African American lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the early 1960s. In the interview, he shares what it was like working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in the South, investigating local law enforcement and human rights abuses, and how the bravery he saw at the time inspired his work as a judge.

Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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