Gender Forum at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Join the Pulitzer Center and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on Wednesday, November 8, for a forum focused on gender. The two-part forum includes a discussion of societal responsibilities to protect individuals sex trafficked and keynote remarks by New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on democracy and authoritarianism in the context of gender, race, and identity in the United States.

Failure to Protect: How to help survivors of sex trafficking

3:00pm PDT

Sex trafficking can appear invisible if we don’t know where to look or what to look for. Many victims move through hotels and motels, emergency rooms, and transit hubs. Doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators—all of us—can do more to protect survivors. Join us for a discussion with journalists Bernice Yeung and Isabella Gomes and gender-based violence expert Holly Joshi, moderated by UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Nikki Jones.

• Isabella Gomes is a public health journalist, infectious diseases epidemiologist, and medical student at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a former Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow and grantee. The Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health magazine published her article, “Health Care Providers Are Missing Chances to Help Victims of Sex Trafficking.”

• Nikki Jones is a professor and the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and the author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. She conducted the federally-funded study “Experiences of Youth in the Sex Trade in the Bay Area.”

• Holly Joshi is the director of the Center for Social Justice at Glide and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence prevention and intervention. She was the executive director of MISSSEY, a direct service organization that supports trafficked youth and served on then Attorney General Kamala Harris’ Task Force on Human Trafficking and Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

• Bernice Yeung is the managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program and a former ProPublica reporter. Her first book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers was honored with the PEN America/John Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. She recently published in The New Yorker, “Should Hotel Chains Be Held Liable for Human Trafficking?”

Register here.

A conversation with journalist Michelle Goldberg

5:45pm PDT

Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand talks with journalist Michelle Goldberg about democracy and authoritarianism in the context of gender, race, and identity in the United States. Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism alum, considers that while progress is often at the heart of the story the U.S. likes to tell itself, the backlash to that progress is just as central, if not more so.

Goldberg will explore why we’ve seen a furious response to gains by women and gender and racial minorities, and how journalists can best cover these cultural clashes in the upcoming election year.

• Michelle Goldberg became an Opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2017 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She is the author of three books: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism; The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World; and The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. Her first book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and her second won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award. She also is a former grantee of the Pulitzer Center.
• Geeta Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who serves as dean and professor at Berkeley Journalism. Her stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003. She wrote the non-fiction book, The Cure, about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, which was made into the Harrison Ford movie Extraordinary Measures in 2010. She worked as a journalist for 27 years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India.

Register here.

This event is organized by the Pulitzer Center and UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Support comes from the PIMCO Foundation.