A Harvard Kennedy School professor, Ayushi Roy, is using Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” to teach future policymakers why good intentions in government programs so often fall short of delivering real help.
As theGrio previously reported, “Cowboy Carter” won Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys, with critics noting how intentional every element of the album was in challenging who gets recognized and why, and the album’s cultural and economic footprint has become the subject of much discussion.
The Harvard Gazette reported that the adjunct lecturer teaches a course called “American Requiem: Beyoncé, Benefits and the Gap Between Promise and Delivery,” which uses the framework to examine how programs like Medicaid and SNAP fail the people they are designed to serve.
Roy said the connection took shape after she saw the star perform live and recognized a deeper argument in the album’s framing. “She frames the album as a conversation about the erasure of African American people from country music,” Roy said. “You realize that she’s actually making a commentary about Black erasure from ‘country,’ the body politic, not country as a genre of music, and that really inspired me.”
The course asks students to go deep inside the social safety net and identify the specific points where well-designed policies break down during implementation. In one recent class session, students heard from practitioners, including a former California health and human services secretary, about the state’s child welfare system. A student team then built a simulation program that walks users through the conflicting demands facing families trying to reunite with children removed from their care, including court hearings that can cost parents their jobs and parenting class requirements at inconvenient times or distant locations.
The connection may sound unconventional, but Roy argues it addresses a real gap in how the Kennedy School trains its students.
“A lot of the way the Kennedy School teaches policymaking is based on economics classes, econometrics classes, statistics classes,” she said. “What is often unspoken is that data, when aggregated and anonymized, isn’t really capturing both the commonplace as well as distinct experiences of the American public. And that is really what makes the difference between [delivering] good policy and standard policy.”
Roy, who served in government for over a decade before joining Harvard, says the solution is not more technology but better-prepared practitioners. “The building of technology is the easy part; managing the political feasibility and the implementation is the hard part,” she said.
