“I’ve always loved political theory,” says Emma Ebowe, a PhD candidate in government at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, “and I’ve always found it beautiful and important to think through ethical questions about how we live together.” After graduating high school, Ebowe worked on welfare reform in the United Kingdom. Her job took her around the UK, connecting her with civil servants, consultants, and computer programmers. But amongst all the important work she saw, Ebowe noticed how few of her colleagues talked about values. “Meeting the many challenges of implementing policy reform was so hard, there seemed to be little space to talk about the vision of well-being and justice these reforms were trying to support.” These questions led Ebowe to the academic study of government, and she began her PhD with the broad goal of studying the idea of the welfare state and its impacts on families and communities in the US and UK.
Ebowe’s research interests quickly took on timely importance. Soon after starting her PhD program in the fall of 2019, Ebowe witnessed how the COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted social and community life. She saw how the pandemic revealed social inequities––especially for marginalized communities and families with children––and, in the 2020 protests following George Floyd’s murder, she welcomed the emergence of new public discourses about the role of government agencies. Social movements that called to “Defund the Police” sparked widespread conversations about the intended goals of public institutions. But Ebowe noticed that there was relatively less discussion about the values expressed by other kinds of welfare infrastructure.
“People were calling to ‘defund the police’ and ‘fund social work,’” she reflects, “but there were still ethical questions missing from the conversation, like: what kind of social work to support, what social work should aim to do, and what moral problems are associated with contemporary social work.” Ebowe herself grew up in the UK as the daughter of a single parent. Her childhood experiences with her own social worker were her first introduction to the welfare state. “I learned a lot about how the system functions,” she says. “It left me with the sense that state agents can pry and intrude into people’s lives in ways that are unfair, even as they also provide deeply important forms of material support.”
Today, these personal experiences inspire Ebowe’s dissertation research on the contemporary foster care system and her broader interest in studying how government institutions impact families and children. Her work challenges common assumptions by uncovering and critiquing ethical issues in government institutions designed to protect child welfare in the United States and United Kingdom. Through her critical study of the foster system, Ebowe also addresses larger questions about the role of the state in intimate family life, how to best support those in need, and how social service institutions could better work toward social justice.
