Be the Change is the Henderson Center’s first-ever summer podcast series featuring conversations with people who, in their lives and work, are the change we need to see in the world.
SEASON 1
EP 1: MELISSA MURRAY
My first guest on Be the Change is Interim Dean Melissa Murray. We talk about how leaders make decisions, how to spark a potent feminist revolution at Berkeley Law, what she’ll miss when she’s in New York, and why black motherhood is a political act.
Episode date: 6.28.2017
EP 2: HON. THELTON E. HENDERSON
The singular and beloved Judge Thelton Henderson is my guest on the second episode. We talk about his youth in South Central Los Angeles, working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the ’60s, one way he knows he’s doing something right as a jurist, and his favorite provisions of the Constitution. This conversation was incredibly fun to record and I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Episode date: 7.9.2017
EP 3: VIRGIE TOVAR
The third episode of Be the Change features writer, speaker, and activist Virgie Tovar. A radical theorist with a background in critical race theory and queer feminism, Tovar’s work liberates people from the patriarchal, racialized, and phobic system of oppression commonly known as the beauty industry. Virgie and I explore the process of divesting from diet and body image culture and investing in rehumanization, community-building, and a new vision for our lives. I hope our conversation resonates with everyone, but especially with social justice lawyers and activists: Sustaining our intense work requires rich communal- and self-care practices that, by definition, are at odds with the endless task of conforming to normative beauty and body standards.
EP 4.: ERWIN CHEMERINSKY
Somehow, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky found time in his first days on campus to sit down with me for the fourth episode of Be the Change. We had a lovely conversation and talked about his experiences growing up on the south side of Chicago, the role that tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of healing the broken world, plays in his life, and what would happen if he could take a red pen to the Constitution and make a few changes. There’s also a little insider information that Barbri alumni will appreciate.
Episode date: 7.31.2017
EP. 5: EVA PATERSON
I’m delighted to share one last episode of Be the Change with you. This time, I talk with Eva Paterson, the co-founder and president of Equal Justice Society. We talk about her groundbreaking July 2017 victory in Sanders v. Kern High School District, how she became radicalized, the joys of blackness, and her vision for the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection.
Episode date: 8.14.2017
SEASON 2
INTRO: SAVALA NOLAN
In season two of Be the Change, a collaboration between Berkeley Law and Berkeley News, Nolan interviews three changemakers who have started something that wasn’t there before, and that makes the world a better place.
Episode date: 3.01.2023
EP 1: KHIARA BRIDGES
In this episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Khiara M. Bridges. Bridges is a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Law and a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.
Episode date: 3.08.2023
EP 2: NAZUNE MENKA
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.
During their conversation, they talk about how to bring a decolonial lens to education, and about the joys and challenges of being a trailblazer who is pushing against the inherited wisdom and mythology surrounding UC Berkeley — “a place we love deeply and, therefore, as James Baldwin said, claim the right to criticize and to call to higher levels of intellectual and moral honesty,” Nolan says.
Episode date: 3.15.2023
EP 3: PURVI SHAH
In the final episode of Be the Change, host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Purvi Shah.
During their conversation, they talk about the nuts and bolts of founding a legal nonprofit in response to current events, and the intellectual and philosophical theory behind movement lawyering, a type of lawyering that aims to support and foment lasting social change.
Episode date: 3.22.2023