Berkeleyside Idea Makers

Guests: New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang and Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges.

We'll be exploring issues of race, identity and the rocky terrain of rights in the country today with two incisive Berkeley thinkers. Jay Caspian Kang's recent The Loneliest Americans is a personal examination of the struggle for Asian Americans to locate themselves in what he terms the nation's binary racial structure. Khiara Bridges' work at the intersection of race, class, and reproductive rights is central to several of today's key political and social issues.

Idea Makers is Berkeleyside's quarterly celebration of Berkeleyʼs stature in the world of ideas through unscripted, informative, and thought-provoking conversations. Please join us when the doors open at 6PM and share a drink and to mix & mingle at the pre-talk reception. Berkeleyside thanks Red Oak Realty and Kaiser Permanente for their generous sponsorship support of Idea Makers.

More about our guests:

Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer at the New Yorker and an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker. His work has appeared in The New York Times, This American Life, The New York Review of Books and Grantland, where he was a founding editor. His book The Loneliest Americans was chosen as one of the best books of 2021 by Time, NPR and Mother Jones. He lives in Berkeley with his family.

Khiara Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press. She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer.

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