On Saturday, April 12, nine students and practitioners presented about the role of law in social change. Their topics covered a range of issues, each brought together by a common thread—improving the understanding of how Harvard students can be agents of social change.
The event was hosted by the HLS Law and Social Change Program, which seeks to foster a strong community of public interest students while challenging the ways students use their law degrees to implement social change in the real world.
“We wanted to showcase the wealth of perspectives and experiences of Harvard students and Boston practitioners with using law to shape social change,” said Scott Hochberg, Law and Social Change student fellow. “Each speaker went through a lengthy application and audition process, and we were able to include talks that covered a wide range of topics and perspectives. We hope the conference will spark discussions that challenge the traditional thinking about how law is related to social change.”
TEDx Harvard opened with a presentation by 1L Zoe Bedell, who discussed gender discrimination in the military during her talk “Women in Combat.” Before coming to Harvard, Bedell served in the U.S. Marine Corp for four years, and completed two deployments in Afghanistan. She ran a program called the Female Engagement Team, where she realized that the military is one of the last places in American society where gender discrimination is institutionalized. Bedell eventually joined an ACLU lawsuit challenging policies that limited women’s abilities to serve in combat. While the Secretary of Defense repealed the policy, Bedell noted there is still work to be done throughout the military.
“I think this was a great opportunity for students and community members to share their diverse experiences,” Bedell said. “Not many people have military experience, or even know people who have served, so I appreciated the chance to talk about my experience and our effort to change things I found wrong.”
1L Louis Fisher gave the next talk, “Bull and Bear Classrooms? Markets, Morals, and Education Reform.” Fisher, a former Teach for America corps member, critiqued market-based education reform proposals. Fisher warned that markets could crowd out preexisting moral norms, induce good teachers to leave, and undermine teacher-student relationships. He advocated a focus on school culture rather than profits, and closed with a quote from Stan Karp: “These policies undermine public education and seek to replace it with a market-based system that will do for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and the labor market, produce fabulous profits and give opportunities for a few and unequal outcomes and access for the many.”
“I think the event is important because it gives HLS students, who bring a wide variety of backgrounds, skills, experiences, and interests, an opportunity to remain engaged with some of the passions that brought them to law school in the first place,” Fisher said. “This is why I chose my topic: I am interested in it from an academic perspective but I also care deeply about it as it is based in personal experience to a degree.”
In “The Art of Social Change,” Fatima Hassan, 3L, focused on media and imagery.
“I wanted to share my vision with the HLS community because I think storytelling and media are extremely important tools for advocates,” Hassan said. “My vision is to marry powerful stories with new technologies for an increasingly globalized audience. I want to explore how new models of media can incorporate the rich tapestries of different cultures to have impact and foster global citizenships.”
The impressive lineup also included Kate Aitken (HBS/HKS) giving a talk on “The Power of Social Intrapreneurship: How to Successfully Drive Change Inside the System,” Sean Arthurs (HGSE and former Georgetown Street Law Clinician) speaking about “Getting it Right: Education and our Criminal Justice System,” Christina Ho (HLS ’14) discussing “Love and Social Change,” Lisa Fitzgerald (HLS ’16) on “Restorative Justice: Crime as the Violation of Relationships,” Lisa Marrone (HLS/HBS) on “The Boston (Food Truck) Marathon: A Case Study of Law and Social Change,” and Thomas Smith (Executive Director of Justice at Work) speaking on “Community Lawyering and Workers’ Rights.”
“We rarely get the chance to engage with these issues during class, and we can sit next to a classmate all semester and never know what inspires them,” said Ho, whose talk discussed a topic not often covered in the classroom—love. ”The TEDx conference brought members of the HLS community together to learn from each other and to energize each other.”
Videos of the talks will be available on the TEDx website in the upcoming weeks.