Berkeley Voices

By UC BerkeleySociety & Culture Arts

Berkeley Voices episodes

June 25, 2021 79: The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who made it possible (revisiting)
While Fiat Vox is on summer break, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Today's episode, originally released in February 2020, is about how the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which lasted for more than a year, was led by a group of Black women activists working behind the scenes: the Women's Political Council. In June, this episode received a gold award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), as part of the 2021 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/06/25/montgomery-bus-boycott-revisiting/
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11 min
June 04, 2021 78: En pointe for her Ukrainian culture (revisiting)
Fiat Vox is going on summer break! We'll be back with new episodes in mid-August. In the meantime, we'll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Here's one from 2019 about UC Berkeley staffer Erika Johnson, who talks about why her family fled Ukraine after World War II and how ballet connects her to her culture like nothing else does. (Today, Erika is a development coordinator on the major gifts team with University Development and Alumni Relations (UDAR) at UC Berkeley. When this episode first came out, she had a different position with UDAR.)
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/06/04/revisiting-ballet-erika-johnson/
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13 min
May 21, 2021 77: How do we talk about the Asian experience with Asians at the center?
Today, in the final episode of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how, in his Asian American theater workshop, he encourages students to approach issues, like anti-Asian violence, from an "inside-out" point of view, where they look at the world with Asians at the center. We also hear from a student, Wesley Tam, about how Gotanda’s workshop inspired Tam to start the ARC Repertory Theatre on campus.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/21/podcast-philip-kan-gotanda-part-3/
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10 min
May 14, 2021 76: How the Asian American movement began at Berkeley, sparked creativity and unity
In the second part of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how he began to write music during the emerging Asian American movement, which began at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And how, after his music career didn’t take off as he’d hoped, he went to law school, where he wrote his first play. Now, he’s one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/14/podcast-philip-kan-gotanda-part-2/
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8 min
May 07, 2021 75: Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda on growing up in California after World War II
Philip Kan Gotanda is a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States. In the first episode of a three-part series, Gotanda talks about growing up in Stockton, California, after World War II and the anti-Japanese racism that he couldn’t name as a child, but that he’d go on to write about as an adult.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/07/podcast-philip-kan-gotanda-part-one
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8 min
April 20, 2021 74: Berkeley MFA student Fred DeWitt: George Floyd never wanted to be in my art
Fred DeWitt is a Master of Fine Arts student and the first artist-in-residence in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. DeWitt, 61, shares in his own words what the Black Panthers meant to him as a young boy growing up in the Bay Area, how Barack Obama’s election as president inspired him to go back to school to study art, and the complicated nature of honoring the lives of people who never wanted to be remembered for their deaths. His MFA show will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in June.
Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos of DeWitt's artwork on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/04/20/podcast-artist-fred-dewitt/
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16 min
April 06, 2021 73: The uncertain outcome of the Chauvin trial
Berkeley News writer Ed Lempinen talks about why Berkeley Law professor Jonathan Simon thinks an acquittal of former police officer Derek Chauvin, on trial for the death of George Floyd, is more likely than not.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/04/06/the-uncertainty-of-the-chauvin-trial-outcome
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11 min
March 30, 2021 72: Power corrupts even the best of us. But there’s an antidote.
Humans are a super-collective species that succeeds through cooperation and community, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. But power and privilege, she says, can corrupt anyone — even the best, most morally guided people. “Social hierarchy is an interesting moderator of our empathic, nurturing, compassionate tendencies,” she says. The good news? There’s an antidote.
(A podcast episode featuring this interview with Simon-Thomas was originally published on Berkeley News in 2017. This is a new version that has been rewritten and remixed.)
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/30/podcast-power-corrupts/
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12 min
March 16, 2021 71: How we create ‘imagined communities’ with celebrity gossip
"By gossiping about celebrities and by talking about what they've done that isn't so great, it allows us to establish our values as a community and also for me, as an individual, to advertise my values to the people I'm speaking with," says Julia Fawcett, a professor who teaches a course called The History of Celebrity in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies.
Celebrities, one theory goes, act to unite imagined communities in a modern nation. When people used to know everyone in their villages, now we use celebrities to come together in a new kind of group. "I’m a fan of Beyoncé, and you’re a fan of Beyoncé, so now we’re a part of this imagined community," says Fawcett.
Listen to the episode and read a transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/fiat-vox-podcast-celebrity/
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11 min
March 09, 2021 After Thoughts: ‘I’m American, regardless of how my ancestors got here’
Rose Wilkerson, a sociolinguist and lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley, shares how it feels to her to live in the U.S. as an African American.
After Thoughts is a series that highlights moments from Fiat Vox interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Wilkerson featured in Fiat Vox episode #69: “Language is more than how we speak — it's home.”
Listen and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/09/after-thoughts-rose-wilkerson/
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2 min

About Berkeley Voices

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Berkeley Voices highlights UC Berkeley’s advances in teaching and research, sparking curiosity about how we live and the histories that shape us. Each season centers on a new theme. It's…