Humanitarian Activist and Actress Ashley Judd Appointed WAPPP Fellow

Cambridge, MA — Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program has appointed Ashley Judd, MC/MPA 2010, as a senior fellow at WAPPP.

Ashley Judd is a feminist social justice humanitarian and UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador, advocating for sexual and reproductive rights and health for girls and women worldwide. Since 2012, she has traveled to 22 countries, spending time in brothels, refugee camps, drop-in centers, and on the streets, learning directly from the most vulnerable and resilient. Her New York Times bestselling book, All That Is Bitter & Sweet, is a collection of diaries from such journeys.

As an activist, Judd was a co-founder of Time’s Up and a key figure in the #MeToo movement, notably as the first person to go on the record regarding Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual predation. She is also an accomplished actress with a film career spanning three-plus decades. She serves on several boards, has published a wide array of op-eds, and is a sought-after public speaker.

“We’re very pleased to have Ashley back at HKS this year as a WAPPP senior fellow,” said Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and WAPPP co-director. “I am especially appreciative of her work examining gender-based violence and leading conversations on this topic within our Harvard community.”

Judd earned her MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2010. She focused much of her studies on gender-based violence, human trafficking, and the power of narrative, including in her paper Gender Violence: Law & Social Justice, which received a Dean’s Scholar award from Harvard Law School. Returning to HKS this year, she said:

“I love the community at Harvard and am so grateful to be curious with, learn with, and walk beside humans from all over this planet. I am overjoyed to be integrated into my academic home, and am grateful for the hospitality that allows me to be myself, with my lived experience of male demand for female bodies in a culture that normalizes that, then distracts us through male behavior with misleading stories about women’s voluntary participation, exploitation and hurt.”

She added that, in addition to reflecting her lived experience, this topic is important to her to focus on while at HKS.

Judd will be facilitating a reading group critically examining prostitution and pornography. The group will focus on these issues through multi-disciplinary scholarship, prostituted peoples’ testimonies, and multimedia sources. She aims to have participants explore the structural forces that sustain sex-buying and the ubiquity of pornography, and their intersections with trauma, deprivation, and inequality.

In addition to facilitating the reading group, while in her fellowship, Judd plans to host leaders from the global movement of survivors of male sexual violence, to act as a guest lecturer, and to participate in numerous events across campus.