Berkeley Talks

NIMBYism, geographical limitation and weaponized policies have led California to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem?  

California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here? Why has the development of solutions shifted from a city level to a state level?

UC Berkeley MPP student Spencer Bowen speaks with Ophelia Basgal and Elizabeth Kneebone from the Terner Center and California Assembly member, David Chiu. Here are five intersecting causes of California’s housing crisis that they help identify:  

1. Limited land and diverse geography  
2. Production not keeping pace with booming job market 
3. Housing is expensive to build and new methods are limited 
4. Cities wield their power to slow down or vote down projects that they don’t like  
5. Proposition 13 and the California Environmental Quality Act have been weaponized to limit housing production 

Talk Policy To Me is a podcast built by students at the Goldman School of Public Policy in partnership with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans.

Read more and listen to other Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy's website.

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How are individuals and groups racially classified? What are the meanings attached to different racial categories? And what impact do these categories have on a range of policies and practices? Taking the U.S. Census as a site of racial classification, Michael Omi, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, examines the shifting state definitions of race and how individuals and groups assert, embrace, reject and negotiate different racial categories and identities.

Michael Omi is co-author, along with Howard Winant, of Racial Formation in the United States (3rd edition, 2015), a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. 

At UC Berkeley, Omi serves as the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, is a core faculty member in the Department of Ethnic Studies and is an affiliated faculty member of sociology and gender and women’s studies. Omi is also a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since its inception in 1959. 

This lecture, given on Feb. 20, 2019, was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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National analysts have noted the sharply increased number of women running for elective office in 2018, especially among Democrats. In a panel discussion, “Year of the Woman?," Nicole Boucher, co-executive director of the California Donor Table; Mary Hughes, a democratic strategist and founder of Close the Gap California; and Amanda Renteria, chair of Emerge America examines the phenomenon in the California context and whether it's likely to continue in future election cycles. The discussion was moderated by Laurel Rosenhall, a political reporter for Calmatters.

This discussion was part of a Feb. 1, 2019 conference, “California Votes: A Post-Mortem on the 2018 Election,” hosted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Dancer/choreographer Akram Khan appeared in the West Coast premiere of XENOS, a Cal Performances co-commission, in Zellerbach Hall on March 2-3, 2019. 

Khan, who is of British and Bangladeshi descent, is celebrated for physically demanding, visually arresting solo productions that combine Indian kathak with contemporary dance to tell stories through movement. Khan’s full length solo performances of XENOS conjure the despair and alienation suffered by an Indian soldier recruited to fight for the British Crown in the trenches of World War I.

As an instinctive and natural collaborator, Khan has been a magnet for world-class artists from other cultures and disciplines. His previous collaborators include the National Ballet of China, actress Juliette Binoche, ballerina Sylvie Guillem, singer Kylie Minogue, writer Hanif Kureishi and composer Steve Reich.

In this talk, Akram Khan speaks with Cal Performances’ interim artistic director Rob Bailis in the weekly open session of the Arts + Design course Creativity, Migration, Transformation held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Feb. 28, 2019. The event was free and open to the public.

More information about the class can be found on Berkeley Arts and Design's website.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (2016), gave a lecture on Feb. 13, 2019, that examines some of the recent radical changes in the law of the workplace in California and nationwide. She discusses how the transformation of work through the gig economy and through the decline of union presents unprecedented challenges for regulating work for the common good, but how it also presents opportunities for a fresh start.

This lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at Berkeley. She teaches and writes on the law of the workplace, on the legal profession, and on free speech and freedom of association. Her most recent book is Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (2016) and her next book will be on labor protest and labor lawyers in the mid-20th century.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (2016), which was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in various journals, in Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and as part of the MOTHA exhibition, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects.

Banias is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program. He lives in Berkeley, teaches poetry and works with small press books.

On Feb. 7, 2019, Banias read his poetry — from Anybody and some new work — at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Richard Rothstein, a fellow of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America, gave a lecture on Feb. 6, 2019, about the forgotten history of how federal, state and local policy segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. This lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow, emeritus, at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004). Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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In a panel discussion, "The Changing California Electorate," Lisa García Bedolla, the director of Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies; Kristin Olsen, a Republican who served on the California State Assembly from 2010-2016; Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project at USC; and Dan Schnur, director of the Sacramento Bee California Influencer series examine the changing demographics of California's population and electorate, the impact of the changes in 2018 and the implications for future election cycles. The discussion was moderated by Marisa Lagos, a political reporter for KQED.

This discussion was part of a Feb. 1, 2019 conference, "California Votes: A Post-Mortem on the 2018 Election," hosted by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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What are some of the current challenges to maintaining social welfare programs for the nation's most vulnerable people in the Trump era?

Tina Sacks, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Social Welfare, gave a lecture on this topic on Jan. 30, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Sacks's fields of interest include racial disparities in health, social determinants of health, race, class and gender and poverty and inequality. Prior to joining Berkeley Social Welfare, Sacks spent nearly a decade in federal service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has also served as legislative director at the Baltimore City Health Department as well as executive director of the Illinois Association of Free and Charitable Clinics.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, public intellectual and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture and design. As dean of design at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada, she is the first Black woman dean of a faculty of design. She leads the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative, focused on using old ways of knowing to drive innovation processes that directly benefit communities.

Tunstall's talk, given on Jan. 25, 2019, is part of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation's design conversations.

Each semester, the institute invites a distinguished group of designers and thinkers to speak as part of Jacobs Design Conversations, Design Field Notes and its other public programs. This semester, these programs engage questions of inclusion, accessibility and justice under the title, For Whom? By Whom?: Designs for Belonging.

Read a Q&A with Tunstall and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation's Robert Kett.

Learn more about upcoming events in the series.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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