For the first three years of Justin Davidson's childhood in Chicago, his mom spoke only Spanish to him. Although he never spoke the language as a young child, when Davidson began to learn Spanish in middle school, it came very quickly to him, and over the years, he became bilingual. Now an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish …

There are countless English varieties in the U.S. There's Boston English and California English and Texas English. There's Black English and Chicano English. There's standard academic, or white, English. They're all the same language, but linguistically, they're different. "Standard academic English is most represented by affluent white males from …

Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. It’s part of the country's long history of scrutiny of non-monolingual English speakers, he says, dating back to the early 20th century. "It’s groups in power — its discourses and col…

In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how …

Brandon Sánchez Mejia stood at a giant wall in UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery and couldn’t believe his eyes. In front of him were 150 black-and-white photos of men’s bodies in all sorts of poses and from all sorts of angles. It was his senior thesis project, "A Masculine Vulnerability," and it was out for the world to see. "It came from this…

The self-guided Black history tour at UC Berkeley begins at Memorial Stadium, where student Walter Gordon was a star of the football team more than 100 years ago. It then weaves through campus, making stops at 13 more locations, each highlighting an important person or landmark related to Black history. There's Ida Louise Jackson Graduate House, na…

Bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest extant relatives to humans — could have the longest-lasting nonhuman memory, a study led by a UC Berkeley researcher found. Extensive social memory had previously been documented only in dolphins and up to 20 years. "What we're showing here," said Berkeley comparative psychologist Laura Simone Lewis, "is that c…

Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. But UC Berkeley history professor Hidetaka Hirota, author of Expelling the Poor, says state immigration laws in the country were created earlier than that — and …

Today, we're sharing the first episode of the new season of the Berkeley Remix, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Oral History Center. The four-episode season, called "From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration," centers the experiences of descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World …

The U.S. transcontinental railroad is considered one of the biggest accomplishments in American history. Completed in 1869, it was the first railroad to connect the East to the West. It cut months off trips across the country and opened up Western trade of goods and ideas throughout the U.S. But building the railroad was treacherous, brutal work. A…

UC Berkeley's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancipation, drives her work today. "Trinidadian Carnival, it’s social justice theater in practice. Every moment, it’s all about emancipation, the subverting of the powerful narrative through humor, through p…

It was summertime in the early 1970s in New York City. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht boarded a school bus headed for the Catskill Mountains, home to Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. As the bus approached the camp, he peered out the window at the warm and raucous group below. "I wasn't exactly sure who was a camper and who was…

Growing up, Linda Kinstler knew that her Latvian grandfather had mysteriously disappeared after World War II. But she didn't think much about it. "That was a very common fate from this part of the world," says Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. "It didn't strike me as totally unusual. It was only later when I began looking into…

At 6 months old, Britt H. Young was fitted with her first prosthetic arm. "The belief was that you would get started on using an adaptive device right away and that would be easiest for you, rather than learning to adapt to your body the way that it is, rather than learning about how to navigate the world with the body you have," said Britt, who is…

Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx woman, and refuses to change for anyone. "Being that queer trans person completely owning herself I hope gives other people permission to be themselves, too," she says. A master's student in UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice, Gericault explores in her art Philippine mythology and her experience …

Yesterday at sunset marked the start of Ramadan, the ninth and holiest month of the Islamic calendar. For Ali Bhatti, a Ph.D. candidate in science and math education at UC Berkeley, it’s a time to feel closer to God, to break habits and to remember what he’s thankful for. In this episode, Ali describes, in his own words, what the month means to him…

In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Purvi Shah. Shah is the founder and executive director of Movement Law Lab and a civil rights litigator, policy advocate and law professor who has spent over a decade working at the intersection of law and grass…

In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka. Menka is a lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. She is Denaakk’e from Alaska and Lumbee from North Carolina. In fall 2021, Menka designed a…

Embodying the change you want to see in the world can feel ... well, intimidating. Impossible, even. But Berkeley Law's Savala Nolan wants to help us all figure it out — one step at a time — in her podcast, Be the Change. "We're talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts," says Nolan, director of the The…

We’ve heard the acronym DEIBJ a lot on campus, especially in the past few years. For those who might not know, it stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice. A growing number of people at UC Berkeley have positions dedicated solely to this incredibly important work. But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what DEIBJ means, what …

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Hoda Katebi discusses how, after she began wearing the hijab as a sixth-grader in Oklahoma, she learned that clothes are inherently political. "It played a huge role in shaping my own personal growth, as well as my relationship to politics," Katebi says. Since protests broke out in Iran nearl…

On Nov. 20, 1969, a group of Indigenous Americans that called itself Indians of All Tribes, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, took boats in the early morning hours to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They bypassed a Coast Guard blockade and took control of the island. The 19-month occupation that followed would be regarded as one of the …

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Charles Yu discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science. "This is really a book about …

When Roe v. Wade was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion, “it changed everything,” says Kristin Luker, a professor emerita of law and of sociology at UC Berkeley. “It was so revolutionary — I argue it was on a par with the American Revolution or the French Revolution.” Last Friday, the Supre…

In episode 99 of Berkeley Voices, Berkeley Law student Indi Garcia, who is graduating on May 13 with pro bono honors for her work on the Post-Conviction Advocacy Project, talks about how meeting with incarcerated men as a college student inspired her anti-prison and criminal justice work. "These men were just brilliant," said Garcia. "They were so …

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Hope Gale-Hendry, a fourth-year student in ecosystem management and forestry at UC Berkeley, shares in her own words how she discovered her deep interconnectedness with all living things, and why she decided to study the American pika. "We have a shared history on this planet," said Hope. "That is the lesson that…

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet. "We are in such an individual and collective squ…

Today, we are sharing an episode from The Edge, a podcast by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association: "Should we bring back woolly mammoths?" Hosts Laura Smith and Leah Worthington sat down with a genetic engineer and an ecologist to understand how de-extinction works and to explore its unintended consequences. This episode was originall…

Berkeley Law professor and anthropologist Khiara Bridges discusses the history of reproductive rights in the U.S., what’s at stake when Roe v. Wade is overturned and why we should expand our fight for reproductive justice. "Roe v. Wade didn't fall out of the sky," says Bridges. "In 1973, the justices weren’t like, 'You know what we should make up? …

As a kid growing up in New York City, Roqua Montez was interested in everything — comics, dinosaurs, science, music and dance, martial arts — and his calendar filled up fast. Now, as the executive director of communications and media relations in UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs, he still has a lot to keep track of. To mana…

Between 1910 and 1970, about 6 million Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, the West and other parts of the United States. It’s known as the Great Migration. Musicians who moved to these cities became ambassadors, says UC Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin, “not only for the music of the South, but for the culture…

As drought and the effects of climate change continue to threaten the water supply that Californians rely on, experts at UC Berkeley are looking for new ways to generate an ongoing, stable water supply in its cities that is not as reliant on the weather. "Californians are leaders worldwide in the recycling of water," says David Sedlak, a professor …

When Joshua Kyan Aalampour was 16, he taught himself to play the piano using a cheap 61-key keyboard and videos on YouTube. Four years later, Joshua is a music student at UC Berkeley. He has performed his work at Lincoln Center, written a symphony and composed a score for a feature-length film. He teaches music to students around the world. He perf…

Today, we share an episode of The Science of Happiness, a podcast produced by our colleagues at the Greater Good Science Center. Host and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner talks with Berkeley Journalism professor and bestselling author Michael Pollan about what it was like for Pollan to give up Twitter — something that he found was be…

Ehren Tool is the ceramics studio manager in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. In his off-time, he makes brutal-looking clay cups to start conversations about war. Since 2001, he has made and given away more than 21,000 of them. Here he is — in his own words — talking about his cups. Listen to the epi…

In 2018, China enacted a policy that effectively banned the import of most plastics and other materials. "That really, I think, was the Chinese government drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'Look, we don’t want to be seen as the world’s garbage dump anymore,'" said Kate O'Neill, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, …

The labor economist and UC Berkeley professor of economics, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, talks about why his research on the economics of the minimum wage, immigration and education was so controversial — and how it continues to be today. Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser…

In January 2015, 15-year-old Mariana Soto Sanchez woke up one Saturday morning at her home in Ontario, California, with weakness in her hand. Within minutes, the feeling had spread throughout her body. Her parents rushed her to the hospital. By the time they got there, she had total paralysis. Later that night, they found out she had a rare disorde…

Growing up in a Mexican household in San Diego, California, Berkeley student Alexa Carrillo Espinoza says there was always dancing in her home. She'd always wanted to try ballet folklórico, a traditional Mexican dance, but never had the chance. So, when she saw Ballet Folklórico Reflejos de Mexico tabling on Sproul Plaza as a first-year student in …

Third-year UC Berkeley student Maryam Karimi was born in Afghanistan in September 2001. A month later, the United States invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks. The Taliban was ousted from power, but everyday violence remained. Her family applied for asylum and eventually settled in Fremont, California, when Maryam was 12. Now, she and …

Berkeley News writer Kara Manke discusses a new report from UC Berkeley that shows how allowing lightning fires to burn in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin recreated a lost — and more resilient — forest ecosystem. Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (Photo by Emily Gonthier) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor…

In this interview, Savala Nolan, executive director of Berkeley's social justice center, talks about the "deeply corporeal nature" of her new memoir, Don't Let It Get You Down. "The body is where it all happens," she says. "It's where we experience life. It’s where we experience the world — the joys and the frictions. It’s where we experience the c…

Over the summer, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. In this episode, from 2018, then-Ph.D. candidate Sonia Travaglini talks about how we could use fungi, of which there are more than 5 million species, to mitigate a wide range of environmental and social crises — just by letting them eat our waste. Listen to the episode and read…

While Fiat Vox is on summer break, we have been revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Today’s episode, originally released in April 2019, is a conversation between UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and Professor Emerita Carol Clover about what it was like for women in the academy 50 years ago and how it has changed. They also discuss what it …

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…

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, …

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 studen…

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’…

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…