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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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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"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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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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When archeologists, funded by University of California benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, found hundreds of crocodile mummies on an expedition to Northern Egypt in 1899, they were annoyed. They were searching for human mummies and artifacts, fueled by Egyptomania — the Western obsession with all things Egyptian.

When they found papyri — paper's earliest ancestor — stuffed inside of the mummies with text written on it by Egyptians thousands of years before, they were suddenly interested. But instead of collecting the mummies, they began to break them open, remove the papyri and discard the crocodiles.

Now, more than 100 years later, 19 mummified crocodiles are part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. These mummies, along with a collection of papyri held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, give us clues about how everyday ancient Egyptians lived and how far they went to appease crocodiles, hoping their devotion would win them some good will toward humankind.

Listen to the episode, read a transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/02/crocodile-mummies/

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Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center and a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, discusses how our sense of self goes silent while experiencing awe and while using psychedelics. 

Listen and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/22/after-thoughts-dacher-keltner-on-awe-and-psychedelics

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 Keltner featured in Fiat Vox episode #68: “Building community one person at a time.”

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When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to — they're not ... necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings," she says.

How we speak, says sociolinguist and Berkeley lecturer Rose Wilkerson, represents who we are— our culture, our family and our sense of place in the world. So, when a person is criticized for how they speak, she says, it cuts to the heart. 

Listen to the episode, see photos and read a transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/16/language-is-home/

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In a time when our nation is more ideologically divided than ever, it's crucial that we find ways to come together across differences and find common ground, says UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. But how do we do this?

For staffer Tyrone Wise, it starts with asking tough questions and then listening — really listening — to the answer. "When we take time to understand what people are saying to us,” he says, “then we can better understand who they are as people."

Wise says that including a range of perspectives when making decisions creates a stronger community — something that he's working to build at Berkeley.

And a sense of community, says Keltner, which has been lost in our individualistic society, is essential to our survival. By searching for shared values, honoring differences and knowing when to use "tough compassion," he says, we can begin to build bridges and heal as a nation.

Listen and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/02/podcast-building-community-across-differences

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This is the second part of the two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations.

Last week, we heard from UC Berkeley's Ella Callow about how the U.S. government built a psychiatric institution in the early 1900s to imprison Native Americans.

Today, Callow discusses how Native communities are still forced to exist in societal systems that use disability to justify taking Native children away from their families, and to ultimately control, and make money from, their lives.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/11/24/podcast-how-state-courts-use-disability-to-remove-native-children-from-their-homes

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In the late 1800s, two South Dakota congressmen were looking for ways to build an economy in their newly minted state — one that was carved out of Indigenous homelands. They decided on a mental institution for Native Americans. It would become the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians — a place where Native people from across the country would be forcibly committed and imprisoned, often for reasons that had nothing to do with mental illness. From its opening in 1903 to 1933, when it was closed after a short, but brutal, existence, more than 350 Native people had been held, and at least 121 people had died, in the facility.

This is the first part of a two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations. In the next episode, we'll learn about how state courts today use disability as a reason to justify removing Native children from their parents' custody and cultural environment to place them in non-Native homes.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/11/19/using-disability-to-imprison-native-americans

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