2021 Spring Edition: The Inequality Pandemic

Letter from the Editor
May 10, 2021

This has been a tumultuous year – especially when it comes to public policy. We started working on this edition not knowing if we’d ever meet in person, or if we’d ever even attend another Georgetown class in person. 

Outside of the classroom, the coronavirus pandemic has been devastating: it’s added a burden on top of the already stressful environment of graduate school. During the past year, police brutality and systemic racism have come to the forefront of the American conversation.  The election of Joe Biden, and subsequent riot on the capitol, have highlighted the divisions that still exist in our country. 

While the circumstances were far from ideal, I’m proud of what all GPPR teams have accomplished. This year meant being flexible and adaptable, and recognizing when approaches or methods had to change. 

At its heart, GPPR has always been about adapting to trends in society & the environment, and that has not changed with our latest spring edition. 

Over the years, GPPR has rethought governance, analyzed power in the 21st century, and considered disruptions to public policy. This year, our spring team decided to do something new. We published our call for papers without a theme, allowing us to expand our outreach and publish research that focuses on our current policy reality and beyond. Each piece provides meticulous and well-reasoned analysis of the major issues of our time. Our authors have researched a variety of topics from economic equity, inmate reentry, rebuilding our education system to approaching healthcare in a pandemic. We realized that all of our articles center around the theme of an Inequality Pandemic.

We hope that this years’ Spring Edition encourages our readers to think critically about the most pressing issues of our time and how we can resolve them in an equitable and just way. 

Nicole Dan

Editor-in-Chief