Demarquin Johnson HLS/HKS 2020 stepped up to a podium for the first time as a freshman in high school in Missouri City, Texas, as a member of his school’s debate team. After several weeks spent doing research, he was prepared to defend the right to vote for citizens convicted of a felony. Fueled by a deep belief that felony disenfranchisement is unjust and a legacy of Jim Crow-era attempts to strip voting rights from Black people, he hammered home how prohibiting people from voting because they were formerly incarcerated runs contrary to the American belief in democracy.

Boston likes to fashion itself as a global tech hub, proud of the legions of start-ups and tech workers who have made its economy the envy of cities around the country. Yet vestiges of Boston’s analog past can still be found, if you know where to look—such as in the long, brick-fronted building that sprawls over much of a block along Massachusetts Avenue in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood. From the building, which houses the city’s Inspectional Services Division (ISD), the sounds of aging IBM Wheelwriter 1500 electric typewriters, which until recently filled the ISD offices. used to be heard as permit-seekers hunched over its well-worn keys typing out applications for zoning variances.  

For two months during the fall of 2016, the darkest corners and forgotten spaces in Albany, New York, were brought shining back to life. Thousands of abandoned buildings can be found in New York’s capital city, emptied in the wake of a manufacturing exodus from the region. But, for a short period, hundreds of buildings were transformed at night as gentle pulsing lights, mimicking the soft rhythm of human breath, shone through the windows. 

The Ash Center sat down with Kimberlyn Leary, an Ash Center faculty affiliate and key member of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative’s leadership team, to discuss how she is leveraging her background in public health and negotiation to help equip mayors and senior city leaders from around the world to lead high-performing, innovative cities. Leary, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a senior vice president of the Urban Institute, joined the Ash Center in fall 2019. 

The Ash Center sat down with HKS Senior Lecturer Jorrit de Jong, an Ash Center resident faculty member and the faculty director of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. The Initiative has been at the forefront of training mayors in management and leadership techniques since its establishment four years ago. de Jong has led numerous seminars for mayors with leading public health and crisis response experts from Harvard and around the country since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic early this year and recently. de Jong recently published a compendium on COVID-19 Crisis Leadership Essentials for Mayors. 

The Ash Center sat down with Zach Graves, a 2019 Technology and Democracy Fellow, head of policy at the Lincoln Network, and author of “Science, Technology, and Democracy: Building a Modern Congressional Technology Assessment Office,” a new paper offering recommendations and a road map for resurrecting a technology assessment capability in Congress.

Over the past year, the Ash Center community has been actively convening leading experts, releasing new research, and sparking novel ideas

Introducing new Ash Center community members, initiatives, resources, commentary, and courses