By Christy DeSmith, Harvard Staff Writer, Harvard Gazette, February 9, 2024.
In 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a historic speech at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park that recalled a tragic past but saw an imperative for a better future.
“He didn’t apologize for the United States’ role in nuclear warfare,” Alondra Nelson said. “What he said is that the scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well.”
Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study, was the featured speaker this month for the launch of Harvard’s Center for Race, Inequality and Social Equity Studies (CRISES). Founding members of its executive committee and supporters from various social science departments gathered at William James Hall to hear the former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) discuss how research like theirs can help shape policy and progress alike.
“The ability to start something new and to imagine how we as social scientists might do our work differently is tremendously exciting,” Nelson said.
Lawrence D. Bobo, CRISES founding director and Social Sciences Dean, opened the event with a bit of background on the new center. “As many will recognize, the name is a tip of the hat to W.E.B. Du Bois and ‘The Crisis’ magazine he launched for the NAACP,” said Bobo, who got the idea for the center in 2020 amid the pandemic’s unequal impacts and news of a Minneapolis police officer murdering George Floyd….
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