Kennedy School Review (KSR)

Our first episode of 2021! We recorded this episode in the last weeks of 2020 - a year that revealed the best and the worst sides of our country. As we grappled with these 2 dualities, our team wanted to reflect on how we communicate moving forward, and bridge the divides: between accountability and unity, between personal and political ideologies, and between truth, and perceived truth.

Before all the changes regarding the coronavirus pandemic, Super Tuesday reset the Democratic Primary. Fifteen states hold their primaries on this date, and the results always set the tone of the race moving forward. Listening to this episode now will have a different flavor because of all the disruptions coronavirus has caused in our everyday lives. Nonetheless, these conversations among students tell a story about the primary that is still continuing in the background. Tune in to listen as Phoenix, Lucy and Nagela (all members of the podcast team) discuss with other Kennedy School students what Super Tuesday looked like in individual states, perspectives on the different candidates, what’s at stake in the 2020 elections, and ways to move forward from here.

Two of our Kennedy School Review Podcast Team members describe their experiences observing and supporting the Iowa Caucus, discussing what the process was like, what went wrong, and what the role of technology should be in facilitating a more inclusive, participatory model of democracy.

S3E4: (Th)interventions for (Th)inspiration?: Policy Responses to the Rise of Pro-Anorexia Websites by Kennedy School Review (KSR)

Every year dozens of students organise ‘treks’ to their home towns and countries. Entirely voluntary and student led, they plan activities to to initiate their fellow students in the culture, politics and history of the place. Samer Hjouj leads the Palestine trek for the Harvard Kennedy School and Phoenix McLaughlin just led a trek to Maine. What motivates them to put in this hard work over and above their course load? How do they design the itinerary and what do they prioritise? What dilemmas do they face and how do they navigate it? What do they want the students to take away from this experience? Prachi Naik from the KSR Podcast team, also a participant in the Palestine trek, talks to them about all this and more.

What can two small cities in Maine and upstate New York teach us about the national housing crisis? Phoenix and Prachi take the lessons of their field lab course into economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and reflect on how they came to be that way.

Conversations around immigration in Europe and America are reaching a new victim-blaming low. The KSR Podcast team sits down for a chat with law and policy student Niku Jafarnia to discuss why this is happening and what can be done to change the way we talk about immigrants and extremism. Find her recent publication on this topic at: https://www.justsecurity.org/66184/stop-blaming-immigrants-for-right-wing-extremism/

Teaching doesn't stop mattering in graduate school; in this second episode focusing on Equity at the Harvard Kennedy School, the podcast team explores dynamics of diversity and identity within HKS classrooms from the perspectives of students and professors.

On this episode, Nusheen Ameenuddin sits down with Drs. Chen and Murthy to discuss how health policy has evolved since the Obama administration. Professional physician organizations, namely the AMA, have played a prominent role in opposing attempts to enact universal health insurance by stoking fears of “socialized medicine.” Yet in the summer of 2017, we saw very vocal and broad support for the ACA from the public as well as from individual physicians and medical societies. How does this shift inform the future of health policy, and how can we secure and maintain political engagement from the physician community?

In the fourth episode of Season 2, the KSR podcast team examines issues of equity, identity, and diversity within the faculty hiring process at the Harvard Kennedy School. The 2018 HKS Diversity Report quantified the school’s persistent demographics among professors: 83% of faculty are white and 71% are male. Our team spoke with students and staff about the process that leads to those numbers, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how faculty are hired, how students get involved, and where the school can go from here.

In the third episode of Season 2, the KSR podcast team sits down with Mo Safdari, a former Facebook staffer in charge of election integrity. This wide-ranging interview covers everything from Facebook’s values, to its content moderation, to the future of social media regulation. We explore the fine line between free speech and harmful content, and the difficulties of moderating political content worldwide in a fair and unbiased manner.

The new KSR podcast team takes on the 2018 midterm elections, covering key conservative and liberal sentiments from before, during, and after Election Tuesday. This episode is jam-packed with interviews covering everything from candidate-camp expectations, to historic voter turnout, election monitoring, and hot-takes from election night in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

The KSR Podcast is back! To kick off this season, two veterans of the Obama White House sit down to talk about what "innovation in government" really means. Plus, we get to hear the Joe Biden pool party story. Erica Pincus is a Master in Public Administration candidate who previously served as a Policy Advisor and Special Assistant for the White House Office of Social Innovation, and Nick Sinai is a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and former U.S. Deputy CTO in the White House.

In this episode, managing editor Matt McDole sits down with Shorenstein Center fellows Dipayan Ghosh and Claire Wardle, and entrepreneur Howard Cohen, to discuss fake news. Ghosh is a computer scientist who has worked in the tech industry as a privacy policy adviser at Facebook as well as in government as an adviser to the Obama administration. Wardle is one of the world’s leading experts in online disinformation. Cohen is the CEO and founder of Privacy Watch. These experts discuss the different types of fake news, labels we can use to tell the difference among them, how the online environment has fundamentally changed over the past five years, what we know and don’t know about fake new, and what governments and private companies can do about it. In addition, they share details with us about a new project launching this summer at the Shorenstein Center designed to combat online disinformation during elections.

The Kennedy School Review’s Podcast explores the vast range of talents and experiences that HKS students and faculty bring to our community. We highlight student voices and bring students and faculty together to discuss the work they do. In this episode, Masters in Public Policy student Gulika Reddy tells KSR editor, Deepra Yusuf, about her work in Southern India founding Schools of Equality, an NGO that that runs activity-based programs in schools with the aim to shift social attitudes that perpetuate gender-based violence and other forms of identity-based discrimination. Gulika tells the story of how she came to found this organization, why it matters, and how these lessons apply to the Kennedy School's efforts to diversity its curriculum and staff.

In this episode, we interview three authors from our print journal who have written about incarceration in the United States. Catia Sharp has written about the links between mental illness and incarceration, Max Wynn has studied the immigrant prison system, and Sibella Matthews has written about the abuse-to-prison pipeline in which many young girls find themselves trapped.

In this episode, first-year Masters in Public Policy student Amanda Matos has a candid conversation with Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad about the March For Our Lives movement, the tension between the question of gun violence in communities of color and the narrative of mass shootings, and the power of intersectional youth organizing to develop a principled platform against gun violence.

Join Anna Mysliwiec as she interviews Masters in Public Administration student Tarek Zeidan, chairperson of Helem, the first LGBTQ Rights organization in the Middle East. Tarek discusses growing up gay in Lebanon, his process of coming out, and his fight to sustain the organization that accepted and empowered him. Tarek also provides an update on the status of LGBTQ rights in the Middle East and his thoughts on the road ahead.

Deepra Yusuf interviews Kennedy School student and lawyer Tobias Garnett. In 2017 Garnett received the Human Rights Lawyer of the Year award from the Law Society of England and Wales for his work defending jailed journalists in Turkey.

Conor Hand, who was Director of Field Operations for Senator Bernie Sanders' primary campaign in Michigan, joins the Kennedy School Review to discuss life on the campaign trail and what became possibly the greatest primary upset in US history.