Hayden Shelby (PhD 2019), leading expert on Baan Mankong, on how learning Thai at Berkeley made her a better researcher | Podcast
The latest episode of the Berkeley Voices podcast spotlights CED alum Hayden Shelby (PhD in City & Regional Planning 2019), now an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. She talks to podcast host Anne Brice about how learning Thai while a student at UC Berkeley helped her become an expert in Thailand’s cooperative housing program, Baan Mankong.
“People open up when they know that you’ve made this really deep and difficult investment in learning their language,” says Shelby. “As a researcher, that is incredibly important for me because it establishes a rapport that you really can’t through a translator. . . . My attitude is that everybody has something to teach me, and when I speak their language, they’re able to.”
She also talks with Brice about how the Baan Mankong model could be a partial solution to our housing crisis: “In the U.S. right now, we’re at a moment where there are people across the political spectrum who are willing to have a conversation about: How do we build community in our society? And thinking about how we rearrange our built space and our notions of ownership and how we live together can be a bigger piece of that conversation.
I think that we could learn from this program.”
Listen or read the transcript via Berkeley News. You can also find Berkeley Voices on most podcast apps.