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Timothy McCarthy. 3/30/2020. ““May You Rise to It”: A Love Letter to Students in an Unprecedented Time.” Medium. See full text. Abstract

In a letter to his students, Timothy McCarthy calls for a serious commitment to compassion.

My dear students,
Let me say this first: I love you — and I hope all of you are somewhere safe right now.
I know this doesn’t find any of us well. This global pandemic has profoundly upended our lives and livelihoods and routines and responsibilities, to say nothing of our capacity to work and dream together to build a better world. The corona crisis has catapulted us into complete chaos, accompanied by a disorienting mix of emotions: fear and despair, anxiety and anger, uncertainty and longing, concern and compassion. If you are like me, you’re experiencing all these things at once on any given day. As one friend put it: “I didn’t realize I could have so many mood swings before my first cup of coffee.” As a historian, I rarely use the word unprecedented — after all, almost everything has some kind of precedent — but I dusted it off last week and have been using it more and more with each passing day. History will have time to take full account of this moment, but first we must survive it.



Joan Donovan. 7/1/2020. “You Purged Racists From Your Website? Great, Now Get to Work.” Wired. See full text.Abstract

Joan Donovan explains that the covid-19 infodemic has taught social media giants an important lesson: they must take action to control the content on their sites. 

For those who follow the politics of platforms, Monday’s great expulsion of malicious content creators was better late than never. For far too long, a very small contingent of extremely hateful content creators have used Silicon Valley’s love of the First Amendment to control the narrative on commercial content moderation. By labeling every effort to control their speech as “censorship,” these individuals and groups managed to create cover for their use of death threats, harassment, and other incitements to violence to silence opposition. For a long time, it has worked. Until now. In what looks like a coordinated purge by Twitch, Reddit, and YouTube, the reckoning is here for those who use racism and misogyny to gain attention and make money on social media.

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Yanilda María González

Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Yanilda María González is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and... Read more about Yanilda María González

Women in Resistance (WiRe)

The Women in Resistance (WiRe) Dataset catalogues women’s participation in 338 maximalist resistance campaigns, meaning campaigns that call for the toppling of an oppressive government or for territorial self-determination. The dataset identifies both nonviolent and violent maximalist campaigns in every country in the world from 1945 to 2014, providing a comprehensive and systematic look at various dimensions of women's participation in both types of campaigns.

The WiRe dataset and supporting materials can be found on the project’s...

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Women Hong Kong Protesters Upend Gender Roles in Democracy Fight

February 21, 2020

According to Erica Chenoweth, relatively high female participation in protests correlates with success in overthrowing a government or achieving territorial independence because it suggests widespread support and an openness to different strategies.

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Neal Cohen. 3/7/2020. “Why the AI We Rely on Can’t Get Privacy Right (Yet).” VentureBeat. See full text.Abstract

Neal Cohen analyzes why AI technologies fall short on privacy. While artificial intelligence (AI) powered technologies are now commonly appearing in many digital services we interact with on a daily basis, an often neglected truth is that few companies are actually building the underlying AI technology.

 



When Discrimination and a Pandemic Collide

April 20, 2020

Cornell Brooks joins HKS PolicyCast to examine how communities of color are disproportionately hit by COVID-19.... Read more about When Discrimination and a Pandemic Collide

2020 Sep 10
What Remains? Liberalism and Racial Justice
Registration Closed 1:30pm to 2:30pm
Location: 
Virtual Event (Registration Required)
Please join the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for its signature weekly series this fall, The Fierce Urgency of Now, featuring Black, Indigenous, People of Color scholars, activists, and community leaders, and experts from the Global South. Hosted and facilitated by Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse, the series also aligns with a course they will co-teach this fall at the Harvard Kennedy School on Economic Justice: Theory and Practice.
In this discussion, Charles Mills, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, will examine how liberal thought...
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Registration: 



We Need to Take Bold Action to Contain Coronavirus, Say Harvard Experts

March 19, 2020

Kathryn Sikkink and other Harvard experts address crucial steps to tackling the coronavirus. 

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2020 Feb 10
We Didn't Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Us
5:30pm to 6:45pm
Location: 
Rubenstein 414-AB
Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21^st Century is a talk series organized and facilitated by Mathias Risse, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration. Drawing inspiration from the title of Max Tegmark’s book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the series draws upon a range of scholars, technology leaders, and public interest technologists to address the ethical aspects of the long-term impact of...
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