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Istruzione

Istruzione

Ogni 2 mesi
Cultura e società

Cultura e società

Ogni 2 mesi

20 FEB

The rule of law depends on the courage of judges

In 1957, 6-year-old Bernice Bouie Donald started first grade in rural DeSoto County, Mississippi. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school segregation three years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, the young girl’s educational reality remained unchanged: Her all-Black school was a two-room cinderblock building with no indoor plumbing, and her books were hand-me-downs discarded by white students. Donald went on to have a decadeslong career as a federal judge, and at a recent UC Berkeley Law event, she shared her personal memories to highlight a sobering truth: The rule of law is not self-executing. For the promise of Brown to reach her classroom, Donald explained, it required "extreme moral courage" from judges who faced bombings, social ostracization and death threats to enforce the law. Without that bravery, she warned, the law is "simply words on a piece of paper." This ongoing challenge was at the heart of a Dec. 5, 2025, panel discussion featuring Donald and a group of legal experts. Together, the panelists discussed the rising tide of personal and political threats facing the judiciary, exploring how modern pressures — from social media harassment to political tribalism — threaten the independence necessary for a fair society. The event was part of “Conversations in Civil Justice,” a webinar series presented by UC Berkeley Law’s Civil Justice Research Initiative and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Judicial Institute. The series is supported by a gift from the American Association for Justice’s Robert L. Habush Endowment. The panelists include: Bernice Bouie Donald, a retired judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Philip Pro, a retired federal judge from the District of Nevada.Amrit Singh, a professor of professional practice and faculty director of the Rule of Law Lab at New York University School of Law. Jeremy Fogel (moderator), executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a retired federal judge from the Northern District of California.Richard Jolly (moderator), professor at Southwestern Law School and senior fellow at the Civil Justice Research Initiative.Watch a video of the discussion. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Photo via Unsplash. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

20 feb

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58 min
12/03/2021

Novelist Alice Walker: 'Dance when you feel like dancing'

"I think that part of why we are lost is that we've forgotten we have to study where we've come from and what we're doing," said novelist Alice Walker at a UC Berkeley event last month. "And I just can't stress enough how much I want our people — all people, but, you know, our people — to really get a grip on how you have to understand where you've been in order to know where you are or where you're going." Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her novel, The Color Purple, was in conversation on Feb. 15, 2021, with Ra Malika Imhotep, a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley, and Darieck Scott, a professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, as part of the department's spring 2021 Critical Conversations series. Walker's parting advice? "Study, be free, enjoy your life, dance when you feel like dancing, sleep outside under the moon ... Live your life. Live it. I don't care if every time you open your mouth, somebody's ready to throw something at you or trip you up or lie about you. The joy of being here, I think, only comes if you are really here as you." Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

12/03/2021

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1 h 5 min
22/03/2024

Sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson on the need for 'angry optimism'

In Berkeley Talks episode 193, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson discusses climate change, politics and the need for "angry optimism." Robinson is the author of 22 novels, including his most recent, The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020. "It's a fighting position — angry optimism — and you need it," he said at a UC Berkeley event in January, in conversation with English professor Katherine Snyder and Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology and director of the Sociospatial Climate Collaborative. "A couple of days ago, somebody talked about The Ministry for the Future being a pedagogy of hope. And I was thinking, 'Oh, that's nice.' Not just, why should you hope? Because you need to — to stay alive and all these other reasons you need hope. But also, it's strategically useful. "And then, how to hope in the situation that we're in, which is filled with dread and filled with people fighting with wicked strength to wreck the earth and human chances in it. "The political battle is not going to be everybody coming together and going, 'Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a problem, let's solve it.' It's more like some people saying, 'Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a problem that we have to solve,' and other people going, 'No, we don’t have a problem.' "They'll say that right down over the cliff. They'll be falling to their death going, 'No problem here because I'm going to heaven and you're not,' or whatever. Nobody will ever admit they're wrong. They will die. And then the next generation will have a new structure of feeling. "In the meantime, how to keep your hope going, how to put it to use … I think all novels have a little of this, and then Ministry is just more explicit." This Jan. 24 event was sponsored by the Berkeley Climate Change Network and co-sponsored by Berkeley Journalism; Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, home to the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Read the transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu). Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

22/03/2024

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1 h 26 min
01/11/2024

The future of American democracy

In Berkeley Talks episode 212, a panel of UC Berkeley experts from former presidential administrations take a critical look at the issues that have led the U.S. to this year’s historic election and reflect on the future of American democracy. The Oct. 29 campus event was sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and Cal Performances, and was part of the Goldman School’s Interrogating Democracy series. Panelists include: Janet Napolitano, professor of public policy and director of the new Center for Security in Politics; former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration; former president of the University of California. Robert Reich, emeritus professor of public policy; senior fellow at the Blum Center for Economic Development; former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.Maria Echaveste, policy and program development director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy; former assistant to the president and deputy White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute.Angela Glover Blackwell (moderator), chief vision officer for the Goldman School of Public Policy’s new Democracy Policy Initiative; founder-in-residence of PolicyLink.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Dyana Wing So via Unsplash. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

01/11/2024

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1 h 18 min
07/08/2020

Joyce Carol Oates on her dystopian novel 'Hazards of Time Travel'

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

07/08/2020

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54 min
26/05/2025

How new color 'olo' stretches the limits of human perception

Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens. The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones. Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz. “Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.” It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo via Unsplash+ This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall. See all episodes of the series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

26/05/2025

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19 min
24/02/2023

Economists on what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine

To mark the first anniversary of Russia’s initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are sharing a panel discussion with four leading economists about what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine. In this Feb. 14 talk, the panelists summarize trends in the region before the war, assess war damage and propose paths forward, laying the groundwork for future recovery efforts and increasing the chances of post-war success in revitalizing Ukraine. A recent Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) report, “Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and Policies,” provides a background for the panel. The report is available to download in English and Ukrainian. Panelists include: Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics, UC BerkeleyBarry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science, UC BerkeleyGérard Roland, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, UC BerkeleyRoger Myerson, David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago; 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, University of ChicagoThe Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES) sponsored this event. Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. UNDP Ukraine photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

24/02/2023

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1 h 24 min
15/07/2022

America wants gun control. Why doesn't it have it? (revisiting)

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian, in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020. "Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continued, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the American narrative, and the inability of gun control advocates to develop a counter-narrative. ... When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force and power, a broad atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than narrower rational arguments to contain it." Listen to the lecture and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Detail of a mural by Kyle Holbrook and local youth in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Terence Faircloth via Flickr) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

15/07/2022

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1 h 26 min
22/10/2022

Indigenous access, political ecology in settler states

Clint Carroll, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, gives a talk called "Reuniting with Our Lands and Waters: Indigenous Access and Political Ecology in Settler States." "The early periods of what is known as the U.S. Federal Indian Policy are defined in terms of the specific type of dispossession they entailed," begins Carroll, author of the 2015 book Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. "While the removal era of the 1830s forcibly relocated tribes hundreds and thousands of miles from their traditional homelands, the creation of reservations beginning in the mid-1800s also entailed numerous relocations via treaties and land cessions. "The early U.S. conservation movement, coinciding roughly with the establishment of Indian reservations, excluded Native peoples from former hunting-and-gathering areas in the name of wilderness preservation," Carroll continues. "The allotment era, from about 1887 to 1934, broke up Indigenous systems of communal land ownership and opened Native lands to speculators in the market. Since this time, access has become a principle issue for Native peoples — specifically, the ability to access lands and waters through which to enact culturally sustaining practices and ceremonies that are tied to relations of reciprocal care." This Sept. 22 UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, part of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. It was co-sponsored by the Native American Studies Program, Native American Student Development, the American Indian Graduate Program, the American Indian Graduate Student Association and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo courtesy of Clint Carroll. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

22/10/2022

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59 min
27/08/2022

How we learn language across communities and cultures

In Berkeley Talks episode 149, Mahesh Srinivasan, an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Psychology, discusses the importance of child-directed speech in language learning, how poverty may suppress parents' speech to their children and how children learn language from overheard speech, a main form of children’s early experience with language in many cultures around the world. This March 2022 lecture was sponsored by Science At Cal. Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Esteban Benites via Unsplash. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

27/08/2022

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1 h 35 min

Podcasts by UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs