Talks: 2024 Videos

Primary Source

Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics, usually on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.

Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after March 2020, we started hosting outdoor "Urban Forum: Walk and Talks" which turned out to be as or more popular than our original Public Talks series... Many of them were recorded on video which you can see on the video pages covering 2020-2023. This page may include some Walk & Talks from 2024 but will be primarily indoor Talks hosted at 518 Valencia.

December 4, 2024

Refusing Silicon Valley

Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley pulled back the façade on the Horatio Alger myths surrounding tech work and start-up culture and left no doubt about the emptiness of life in that world. Erin McElroy, a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, has turned her prodigious analytical skills to the expansion of the tech industry to the periphery of the former Iron Curtain in Romania in their new Silicon Valley Imperialism. As San Francisco gropes its way through yet another faltering tech bubble pushed by AI hucksters and grifters, join us for a blisteringly honest look at what the titans of silicon are really promoting.

October 23, 2024

Anti-Apartheid Organizing Then and Now

With the explosion of campus-based organizing and occupations against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we juxtapose historic anti-Apartheid organizing with the current events. With deep knowledge about the historic efforts to overthrow South African Apartheid in the 1980s, Dr. Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, teams up with local scholar and activist Eddie Yuen, Visiting Professor in the Anthropology and Social Change department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (a student at UC Berkeley during the original movement, and who knows the decades-long history of alter-globalization and radical movements better than most), and the Arab Resource Organizing Committee’s own Lara Kiswani, a key organizer in the Bay Area’s robust efforts to block the Gaza genocide and to fight for Palestinian liberation, to present an historically informed look at the dynamics of current protest and politics.

October 16, 2024

Rebel Airwaves: Looking back at 75 years of KPFA

In 1949, a group of pacifists launched America’s first listener-supported radio station. Despite government repression, infighting, and countless financial crises, KPFA has managed to survive 75 years. Join Liam O’Donoghue, host of the East Bay Yesterday podcast, as he explores stories of the people who helped the station achieve this remarkable milestone.

October 9, 2024

The First Post-Pandemic Political Era: After WWI

American Midnight author Adam Hochschild and Building the Population Bomb author Dr. Emily Merchant (UC Davis) A critical reappraisal of the first post-pandemic political era after WWI, with its brutal authoritarian assault on civil liberties, and overt racism bolstered by the pseudo-scientific Eugenics movement (that continues to lurk in today's AI, Hi-Tech "TESCREAL" madness), and the white supremacist hysteria about a “foreign population bomb.” This history rhymes a month before the 2024 election with the racist anti-immigrant bombast of the Republican campaign.

September 25, 2024

Art & Politics: Will Maynez Interprets Diego Rivera

Even if you don't know Will Maynez, you may know his work about Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity mural (1940). Over 600,000 people saw it while it was on display at SFMOMA from June 2021 to January 2024. Over the two decades prior, while housed in City College's Diego Rivera Theatre, Will collected mural stories and discovered an unknown episode of composer George Gershwin going to Mexico, where he got slightly politically radicalized by the artists he met. Will has written a play about a real-life party thrown for Gershwin and relates how the play came to be and shares selections from the work.

September 11, 2024

Muni Labor, Muni Love

An amazing chance to listen to folks who keep our public transit system moving (Muni operator Brendan), extremely less conflict-ridden (MTAP or Muni Transit Assistants Program reps Daisy and Sharia), and clean (transit car cleaner Carmine). Lia Smith and Keith Scott Ferris took us beyond their book, Muni is My Ride, to showcase the hidden ways these hardworking folks shape the City. We even enjoyed a trivia quiz including Keith’s sketches from the book and Muni parlance.

July 5, 2024

1934 Big Strike 90th Anniversary

On the 90th anniversary of “Bloody Thursday” (July 5, 1934), a series of presentations revisit the actual Big Strike on San Francisco’s waterfront that led to a General Strike in 1934, as well as tracing the pat of the Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU) in the subsequent decades. In 1960 the ILWU signed the Mechanization & Modernization Agreement, the first trade union deal of its kind. Following that they later conceded to the rise of “steady men” running container cranes, undercutting the power of their unique institution, the Hiring Hall. Further discussion on the long arc of deskilling and automation, the many episodes in which the ILWU rank and file blocked cargoes and refused to unload ships, and recent organizing on the Alcatraz ferry are all addressed too. Speakers: Chris Carlsson, Joel Schor, Gifford Hartman, and Jack Calvin. (Sorry for audio falling in and out of sync with the speakers. Editing problems!)

May 22, 2024

Rainbow Grocery Cooperative

RAINBOW GROCERY Cooperative, a long-time supporter of Shaping San Francisco’s Public programming, will be our featured guests. Rainbow has been a steady presence in San Francisco’s Mission District for almost a half century. Come meet current staffers, learn about the post-pandemic issues facing the store, hear about the advantages of cooperative self-management, and bring your questions about food politics, grocery price inflation, flood recovery, and whatever else you’ve been wondering about.

May 8, 2024

Art& Politics: Hughen/Starkweather

“Conversations, interviews, and deep research are a significant piece of their process for every project they take on. Feeling a ‘responsibility to educate the viewer, to give them a window in,’ they have, over the course of the last decade, developed a nuanced strategy for avoiding what many artists fail to acknowledge as a problem: leaving their audiences out in the cold. . .When the colors and shapes of a nonrepresentational work of art rearrange themselves into remembrance or recognition, magic happens. Hughen/Starkweather describe this as ‘closing the space between abstraction and language.’” —Excerpt from Selene Foster article on Hughen/Starkweather's Adjacent Shores, April 2016.

April 24, 2024

History of Monopoly (the game)

David Giesen brings his extraordinary collection of original 1907 Monopoly game artifacts to anchor his presentation of the fascinating political history of the game, with roots in the anti-monopoly politics championed by Henry George in the 19th century. Following the presentation we will have a GAME NIGHT!

April 10, 2024

Life and Death in a Great American City

Cities grow, cities change. Some businesses and institutions thrive, while others die off and are replaced. In this joint presentation of words and images, Lorri Ungaretti (Vanished San Francisco), and Alec Scott (Oldest San Francisco) speak to the history of our great, sometimes troubled city, what's been lost over the years, what's stuck around. The discussion ranged widely, from science to religion, from food to drink, from sports to shopping, from sex to death.

March 26, 2024

Cultivating Food Resilience and Combating Global Challenges

The French Punk Gardener Eric Lenoir presents a discussion on territorial food resilience, combating biodiversity collapse, and addressing global warming effects.