Berkeley Voices

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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When Savala Trepczynski, the director of the social justice center at UC Berkeley, first heard the decision in the Breonna Taylor case — that only one of three police officers involved in Taylor's killing in March was indicted on charges of reckless endangerment — a familiar feeling sunk in.

"The fact of the charge is upsetting, disappointing, angering — all of those things," said Trepczynski. "And so, I felt the exhaustion of forbearance and abiding and feeling again and again that even when you get justice, it’s kind of a half step. It’s a measure of justice. It’s not the whole thing."

And she was reminded of a murder so similar to Taylor's that happened in her own family — to her great-great-grandmother.

Read the story and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/25/fiat-vox-savala-trepczynski-on-breonna-taylor-and-racial-justice

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"People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. — and they should. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement," says Ula Taylor, a professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. But, what they might not know, she says, is that it was actually the behind-the-scenes organizing effort by the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, that made the boycott successful.

"Even though these women were not in the limelight, they were engaging in a form of leadership," says Taylor. "But because we live in a country in a culture where we oftentimes identify leadership as a talking head, we don’t understand all of the thinking that goes behind a lot of the ideas that the talking head is even articulating."

Read the story and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/02/11/podcast-montgomery-bus-boycott-womens-political-council/

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UC Berkeley's Oral History Center and KQED teamed up to record the longest interview that Jerry Brown has ever done — one that offers a first-person account of his nearly five decades in California politics. For 20 sessions, they sat at Brown’s dining room table at his ranch in Colusa County and asked him about everything from what it is was like having a father in politics to dating singer Linda Ronstadt to his views on politics today.

See photos and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/21/podcast-jerry-brown-oral-history-center/

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Feb. 14, 2018, began like any other day for Kai Koerber. He was running late for his early morning AP English class at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. When he got there, he was handed the class's biggest assignment of the year and groaned. "At the time, I was like, 'Man, this is going to be the worst part of my day,'" says Koerber, now a first-year computer science major at UC Berkeley.

After English, he had honors chemistry, followed by pre-calculus, then guitar class in the band room. At 2:18 p.m., he asked to use the restroom, but another classmate was out, so his teacher told Kai to wait. Two minutes later, the fire alarm went off. And what followed was a tragedy that his school would become known for — one that Kai would decide to speak out about, changing the narrative about the impact of gun violence on youth in the United States.

At Berkeley, in between classes and studying, Kai works to promote his nonprofit and mental health curriculum — something that he's become passionate about since he survived one of the deadliest school shootings in the country.

Read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/12/17/podcast-student-kai-koerber-on-gun-violence-and-mental-health/

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