Berkeley Voices

Wikipedia as resistance

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After Wikipedia made its debut in 2001, some trends quickly emerged. Most editors were male, topics tended to skew toward geek culture interests like ...

How a Pomo elder's recordings are helping this student reclaim his culture

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speake...

New season: Two sides of a story

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s so much incredible research and work that happens every day at UC Berkeley, on everything from artificial intelligence and quantum computing...

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

26 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 peacoc...

130: AI helped this paralyzed woman speak again after 18 years

28 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friend...

129: Fakes, replicas and forgeries: What counts as art?

31 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined. The Chinese village was known for mass produ...

128: An evolution of American friendship, from Victorian-era letters to Swiftie bracelets

24 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is ...

127: How fear is being weaponized against you (and how to respond)

27 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified o...

126: Think you know what dinosaurs were like? Think again.

30 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For UC Berkeley Professor Jack Tseng, the world of paleontology never gets old. With each new discovery, paleontologists like him learn more about the...

125: As crises escalate, so does our fascination with cults

25 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Like millions of other Americans, UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha watched a lot of docuseries about cults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more Sa...

124: Psychopathy goes undetected in some people. Why?

28 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In a June 2024 study, UC Berkeley psychology professor Keanan Joyner and his colleagues found that by using a combination of methods tailored to the m...

123: One brain, two languages

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 youn...

122: A language divided

05 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 E...

121: A linguist's quest to legitimize U.S. Spanish

29 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist ...

120: Medieval song holds clues to lost dialects

05 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

119: Art student's photo series explores masculine vulnerability

22 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 blac...

118: Take the first Black history tour at UC Berkeley

01 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 10...

117: Bonobos and chimps show 'a rich recognition' for long-lost friends and family

26 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest extant relatives to humans — could have the longest-lasting nonhuman memory, a study led by a UC Berkel...

Afterthoughts: The true origins of American immigration policy

08 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese...

116: How WWII incarceration fueled generations of Japanese American activists

14 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 fou...

115: They built the railroad. But they were left out of the American story.

14 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. transcontinental railroad is considered one of the biggest accomplishments in American history. Completed in 1869, it was the first railroad ...

114: Theater as power: New professor brings Caribbean performance practice to Berkeley

17 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

UC Berkeley's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancip...

113: Funky and free-spirited: How a 1970s summer camp started a disability revolution

05 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 C...

112: How the Holocaust ends

18 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

111: Britt H. Young on learning to navigate the world with the body she has

10 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

110: Gericault De La Rose knows who she is and won't change for anyone

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

109: Ali Bhatti on Ramadan and how his faith guided him through deep loss

23 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

108: 'Be the Change': Purvi Shah on the moments of beauty as a civil rights lawyer

22 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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....

107: 'Be the Change': Nazune Menka on creating the course, Decolonizing UC Berkeley

15 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menk...

106: 'Be the Change': Khiara M. Bridges on claiming her voice as a prominent Black woman

08 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Khiara M. Bridges. Bridges is a professor at ...

105: 'Be the Change': A podcast that aims 'to remove the mystery of making change'

01 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

104: Ty-Ron Douglas: Bridging the academic and athletic worlds

09 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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, incl...

103: Law student Hoda Katebi: Iran's protests are about 'total liberation'

07 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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, s...

102: Exploring the sound of the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz

08 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

101: 'Interior Chinatown' is about roles and how we play them

24 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

100: How Roe v. Wade radically changed American culture

29 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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,” say...

99: Indi Garcia lives and breathes the 'abolitionist philosophy'

05 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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-Convicti...

98: How one student finds hope in her 'fellow earthlings'

15 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 wor...

97: Biologist confronts deep roots of climate despair

01 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

96: Should we bring back woolly mammoths?

18 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

95: 'The past will be present when Roe falls’

04 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

94: How the seven-day week made us who we are

18 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As a kid growing up in New York City, Roqua Montez was interested in everything — comics, dinosaurs, science, music and dance, martial arts — and ...

93: How the Great Migration transformed American music

04 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 State...

92: California needs a new water supply. Could wetlands be an answer?

21 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 n...

91: From a $16 keyboard to a symphony

10 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 i...

90: Giving up Twitter with Michael Pollan

26 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 Berk...

89: Cups for conversations — about war

11 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 mak...

88: Recycling isn't what we thought it was. So, what now?

29 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 2018, China enacted a policy that effectively banned the import of most plastics and other materials. "That really, I think, was the Chinese govern...

87: How Nobel winner David Card transformed economics

15 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 o...

86: Disabled and empowered: How Mariana Soto Sanchez found self-advocacy at Berkeley

01 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 m...

85: Ballet folklórico: Celebrating Mexican culture through dance

17 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

84: Maryam Karimi: This generation in Afghanistan will not give up

03 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Third-year UC Berkeley student Maryam Karimi was born in Afghanistan in September 2001. A month later, the United States invaded Afghanistan following...

83: How wildfire can create healthier forests

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Berkeley News writer Kara Manke discusses a new report from UC Berkeley that shows how allowing lightning fires to burn in Yosemite’s Illilouette Cr...

82: When the personal, political and historical collide — in our bodies

06 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this interview, Savala Nolan, executive director of Berkeley's social justice center, talks about the "deeply corporeal nature" of her new memoir, ...

81: Nature's unsung superheroes? Mushrooms! (revisiting)

23 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

80: Chancellor Carol Christ: 'I always felt like a pioneer' (revisiting)

09 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 c...

79: The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who made it possible (revisiting)

25 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ab...

78: En pointe for her Ukrainian culture (revisiting)

04 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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. ...

77: How do we talk about the Asian experience with Asians at the center?

21 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today, in the final episode of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how, in his Asian American theat...

76: How the Asian American movement began at Berkeley, sparked creativity and unity

14 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 em...

75: Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda on growing up in California after World War II

07 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

74: Berkeley MFA student Fred DeWitt: George Floyd never wanted to be in my art

20 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

73: The uncertain outcome of the Chauvin trial

06 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Berkeley News writer Ed Lempinen talks about why Berkeley Law professor Jonathan Simon thinks an acquittal of former police officer Derek Chauvin...

72: Power corrupts even the best of us. But there’s an antidote.

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Humans are a super-collective species that succeeds through cooperation and community, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Goo...

71: How we create ‘imagined communities’ with celebrity gossip

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

"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 al...

After Thoughts: ‘I’m American, regardless of how my ancestors got here’

09 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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....

70: What crocodile mummies can tell us about everyday life in ancient Egypt

02 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When archeologists, funded by University of California benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, found hundreds of crocodile mummies on an expedition to Northern E...

After Thoughts: Dacher Keltner on the science of awe and psychedelics

22 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center and a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, discusses how our sense of self goes si...

69: Language is more than how we speak — it's home

16 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches...

68: Building community one person at a time

02 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

67: How state courts use disability to remove Native children from their homes

24 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 popul...

66: How the U.S. government created an ‘insane asylum’ to imprison Native Americans

20 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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 I...

65: Savala Trepczynski on Breonna Taylor and the elusive nature of racial justice

25 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When Savala Trepczynski, the director of the social justice center at UC Berkeley, first heard the decision in the Breonna Taylor case — that only o...

64: The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who made it possible

11 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"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...

63: Oral history project reveals '20 shades of Jerry Brown'

21 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

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...

62: After Parkland shooting, student fights for mental health resources in schools

17 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

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...

61: What does it mean to be a Native artist today?

26 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

After student Drew Woodson took a playwriting course with Philip Gotanda, a professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at B...

60: Fighting injustice with poetry

25 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Saida Dahir grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. At first, she thought she was like everyone else. But by sixth grade, she realized she was different. Her...

59: Teeter totters as activism: How the border wall became a playground

08 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When UC Berkeley architect Ronald Rael took his bright pink teeter totters to the U.S.-Mexico border wall, he didn't know that what he and his team di...

57: Staffer's search for birth mom reveals dark history of Guatemalan adoption

09 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Gemma Givens, who works at UC Berkeley's International House, was adopted from Guatemala in 1990 when she was 4 months old. Her mom, Melinda, was a gr...

56: The ministry of being out

11 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

For Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, coming out didn’t happen all at once. As a graduate student in 1980, she met her...

55: Why are there so many Filipino nurses in the U.S.?

28 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Growing up in New York City, UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy remembers seeing a lot of nurses — dressed in their crisp wh...

54: How a botched train robbery led to the birth of modern American criminology

30 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On October 11, 1923, three brothers — Hugh, Ray and Roy DeAutremont — boarded a Southern Pacific Railroad train called the Gold Special near the S...

53: Chancellor Carol Christ and Professor Emerita Carol Clover on women in the academy, then and now

16 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In 1970, when Chancellor Carol Christ joined UC Berkeley's English department as an assistant professor, only 3% of the faculty on campus were women. ...

52: 'Mouthpiece' says what many women never say

18 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Amy Nostbakken and Nora Sadava started writing Mouthpiece six years ago, they revealed their deepest secrets to each other with the pro...

51: For Malika Imhotep, devotion to black feminist study is a life practice

11 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Malika Imhotep grew up in West Atlanta, rooted in a community that she calls an "Afrocentric bubble," in a family of artisans, entrepreneurs and commu...

50: In campus records 49 years and still loving it

04 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Karen Denton got a job in UC Berkeley's registrar's office at 20, she had one job: to remove incompletes. "I did that all day every day," she say...

49: Black history cemetery tour: Abraham Holland and the Sweet Vengeance Mine

19 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In 1849, a man named Abraham Holland packed up his things and left his life on the East Coast for California, in hopes that he’d strike it rich.&nbs...

48: Cal alumni leader gives hope to students who need it most

11 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

For Black History Month, we are resharing Fiat Vox episode #23, first published in 2018, about Clothilde Hewlett, the executive director of the Cal Al...

47: For international relations staffer, ballet kept her family’s Ukrainian culture alive

22 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Erika Johnson was 7, her Ukrainian mom put her in ballet class. Although Erika didn’t have the body that most principal dancers were known for,...

46: Berkeley Haas Chief of Staff Marco Lindsey lives like his 80-year-old self is watching

11 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Every morning, Marco Lindsey wakes up in East Oakland, where he was born and raised. He puts on a suit and tie, packs his briefcase, chats with his ne...

45: Native American 'Antigone' explores universal values of honoring the dead

20 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 1996, Will Thomas and Dave Deacy were wading in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, watching the annual hydroplane races. Wi...

44: Academic counselor Quamé on standing out, dreaming big—and letting go

05 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

When John Patton was in high school, he changed his name to Quamé. When he got to UC Berkeley as a student, "it stuck, instantly," he says. At Berkel...

43: 'White voice' and hearing whiteness as difference, not the standard

16 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1940s and 50s, actors in major American films, like Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, spoke with a kind of faux British accent as a way to s...

42: The history of why some say women sound shrill, immature 

09 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Tom McEnaney, who teaches a class called “Sounding American,” says the U.S. has a long history of men criticizing the way women speak. S...

41: At Berkeley, nobody stuffs a bird like Carla Cicero

25 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

After Lux — one of the peregrine falcons born on the Campanile — died last year after striking a window of Evans Hall, the campus community was he...

40: From the archive: On Berkeley time? He keeps Campanile's clocks ticking

18 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Last week, Berkeley students noticed that one of the Campanile’s four clocks stopped. While the north-facing clock was at a standstill, the other th...

39: AileyCamp — so much more than a dance camp

04 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

As a kid, Makayla Bozeman could not stop dancing. She'd go to bed late because she was dancing. She'd wake up in the middle of the night to dance. Whe...

38: Margaret Atwood: 'Things can change a lot faster than you think'

28 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Canadian author Margaret Atwood doesn't like being called a soothsayer. "Anyone who says they can predict the future is... not telling the truth," she...

37: Bringing people together, one puppet at a time

25 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

After seeing Handspring Puppet Company — the creators of the puppets in Broadway's " War Horse" — at UC Berkeley in 2015, Glynn Bartlett knew he w...