Counted: Reflections on the US Census

Registration is required for both online and in-person attendance: bsy.sh/q5C2d9p

Lunch 12-1pm
Panel 1-230pm

As the government prepares for the 2030 Census, this vital dataset—produced by the government for the governed—has come under scrutiny. The Office of Management and Budget is reviewing significant changes for 2030: reclassifying noncitizens as nonresident, the rollback of race/ethnicity data collection standards, and the addition of a citizenship question. Changes to privacy protection have also been proposed that would have profound effects on how much Census data can be shared. These concerns, plus a recent spate of scholarship on the Census, invite a conversation around Census data at the Harvard Law School Library.

On October 1, the Public Data Project is hosting a panel of legal, technological, and policy experts to consider how the preservation of and access to US Census data can be both appreciated and reimagined. This conversation will highlight the recent publication of danah boyd’s Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census (2026), and will lay groundwork for boyd’s upcoming conversation with Jonathan Zittrain at the Harvard Book Store.

Panelists

• danah boyd, Professor of Communications at Cornell University
• Cynthia Dwork, Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University
• Ruth Greenwood, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
• Jayshree Sarathy, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University