
New Books in Public Policy
2,137 episodes — Page 28 of 43
Ep 25Jeanne Shea et al., "Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies" (Berghahn, 2020)
Known for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies (Berghahn, 2020) explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East Asia. Questioning romantic visions of a senior’s paradise, chapters examine emerging cultural meanings of and social responses to population aging, including caregiving both for and by the elderly. Themes include traditional ideals versus contemporary realities, the role of the state, patterns of familial and non-familial care, social stratification, and intersections of caregiving and death. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 239Jarvis R. Givens, "Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. On today’s podcast, I am interviewing Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Givens joins us to discuss Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by our friends at Harvard University Press in 2021. In our discussion we chopped it up about Carter G. Woodson, Black educational history, the origin story behind "fugitive pedagogy" as a term, his journey from grad school at Berkeley, to his post at Harvard, and much much more. Enjoy the conversation family! Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 516Terri E. Givens, "Immigration in the 21st Century: The Comparative Politics of Immigration Policy" (Routledge, 2020)
Immigration in the 21st Century: The Comparative Politics of Immigration Policy (Routledge, 2020) is an excellent primer for those looking to understand the complexities of immigration not only as a policy arena, but the study of immigration and migration, and to get a sense of the different approaches to immigration from a variety of kinds of countries. Terri Givens, Rachel Navarre, and Pete Mohanty have written a sophisticated and accessible text that would be of interest to anyone who wants to learn a bit more about immigration. The authors explain the different approaches to immigration taken by different countries, depending on the historical and political contexts of those countries. They group countries together into categories, with defining characteristics that contribute to the form and shape of the immigration policies that have been implemented. Attention is paid to the post-World War II European shifts in immigration and policies that provided avenues for workers to help with the rebuilding of places like Germany and France. There is also a discussion of the way that globalization has contributed to the evolution of immigration processes, and how migration is also participating in the shape of newer policies and political responses. In our conversation, Givens explains the way that sovereignty and nation building provide the framing for immigration policies and how nations think about those whom they allow to become citizens. Immigration in the 21st Century provides an understanding of immigration from a practical perspective, contextualizing it in the world that came out of World War II. This book also integrates the role that the Cold War played in both immigration and migration during the period of tension between the East and the West, and then what happened after the end of the Cold War. In our conversation, Givens notes the differences between immigration, which is generally a public and political policy that a nation puts into place, and migration, which follows the flow of people from one place to another place, often because of a triggering event, like war and conflict, or climate change. We also discuss the different policies that govern the trade of goods across borders and the more complicated nature of implementing policies that govern the movement of people across borders. Immigration in the 21st Century is a useful and thoughtful analysis of the complexities of immigration in the modern world. Terri Givens also has a website devoted to the book itself and updating information about immigration. Here is the link to that website, which also includes a coupon for a discount on the book: https://www.terrigivens.com/immigration/ Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 125Carolyn J. Heinrich, et al., "Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2020)
The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic. Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University. Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 31Rachel Z. Friedman, "Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
The emergence of individual and commercial insurance in Early Modern Europe required an understanding of probability. In Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rachel Friedman highlights the political thinking that developed side by side with the advances in statistical methods. By the 20th century, small scale, group insurance had become national programs with profound political implications. Friedman's work traces how what she calls probabilistic social insurance played a key role in the emergence of the modern welfare state. And we discuss where we go from here, post-pandemic, when all insurances systems have been put to the test. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 8Postscript: Biden's First 100 Days
Much has long been made of the bold legislative action that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt marshalled forward in his first 100 days in office in the midst of the Great Depression. To take stock of the Biden presidency, Lilly and Susan asked three thoughtful political scientists—Dr. Jonathan Bernstein (Bloomberg Media), Dr. Nadia E. Brown (Purdue University), and Dr. Jane Junn (University of Southern California) to interrogate the early days of the Biden Administration. They not only provided keen observations about the Executive Branch, but also about Congress and state governments. The lively discussion shifted quickly from the arbitrary marker of the first 100 days to what is necessary to move policy forward in the closely divided U.S. House and Senate, and what the legislative agenda may look like going forward. We chat about the apparent pause in the swift swirling of our politics—though we debate whether the new administration is a return to normalcy and if it is possible, post Trump, to return to normalcy. In this context, there was a discussion of competence, expertise, intelligence, rationality, preparation, and integrity. We pay close attention to the political parties, with specific focus on the internal tensions in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Our guests also spend time framing the political landscape with an understanding of the role and place of news media and social media. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 62Matthew O. Jackson, "The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors" (Vintage, 2019)
Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy. Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields. Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more than the book can cover, he offers a free online course on the topic. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 83Graham Smith, "Can Democracy Safeguard the Future?" (Polity, 2021)
Our democracies repeatedly fail to safeguard the future. From pensions to pandemics, health and social care through to climate, biodiversity and emerging technologies, democracies have been unable to deliver robust policies for the long term. In Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? (Polity Press, 2021), Graham Smith, a leading scholar of democratic theory and practice, asks why? Exploring the drivers of the short-termism that dominate contemporary politics, he considers ways of reshaping legislatures and constitutions and proposes strengthening independent offices whose overarching goals do not change at every election. More radically, Smith argues that forms of participatory and deliberative politics offer the most effective democratic response to the current political myopia as well as a powerful means of protecting the interests of generations to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 79Johana Londoño, "Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities" (Duke UP, 2020)
The rapid gentrification of Black and brown neighborhoods in urban areas by predominantly upper-class white and other white-adjacent peoples is largely facilitated by urban redevelopment and revitalization projects. These projects often usher in aesthetics that seek to attract those understood as desirable populations. But what happens when the aesthetics of poor Black and brown neighborhoods themselves become the vehicle for gentrification and urban renewal? As Johana Londoño writes, “the aesthetic depiction and manipulation of Latinx urban life and culture as a way to counteract the fear that Latinxs and their culture were transgressing normative expectations of urbanness” (ix). In her new book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (Duke University Press, 2020), Dr. Londoño traces how Latinx people are targeted as problems in urban areas that need to be addressed. Simultaneously, architects, urban planners, policymakers, ethnographers, business owners, and settlement workers – all of whom Londoño refers to as “brokers” – were carefully pulling into their projects the visual aesthetics of barrios which would at once produce a Latinized space while simultaneously “not interfere in the economic and cultural interests of normative urbanity” (xvii). There was danger in representing barrios because it threatened urban normativity. For Londoño, “Because barrios in US cities are largely the result of unequal forces, reproducing barrio culture and spatial layouts, besides being parodic, would make plain the failures of liberalism to treat all individuals equally” (9-10). Representing barrios in full would reveal the unequal relations of power, state and federal disinvestment in Black and brown neighborhoods, and the economic and material realities of these neighborhoods that go into the formation of barrios. Abstraction but not disruption, however, seems to be have been the goal. By making Latinxs legible in a normative sense, their aesthetics then became implicated in the capitalist spatial order. “I argue that Latinx visibility has been made key to the cyclical nature of U.S. capitalist urbanism: its decay and the reconstitution of its normativity,” writes Londoño (5). The aesthetics found in barrios became abstracted enough to appeal to urban capitalism and thus became implemented onto the gentrifying urban landscape. By writing the history of barrios and the marginalization of Latinxs in urban spaces, and by focusing on the brokers who manipulate Latinx urban culture to make it visible in mainstream spaces, Johana Londoño underscores how the built environment as a racial project continues to build on racial hierarchies to maintain structures. She covers instances of manipulation of barrio aesthetics in New York, Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and concludes in her hometown of Union City, New Jersey. Londoño’s skill of highlighting the ways barrio aesthetics play out on the gentrifying landscape of the modern renting market seamlessly brings into focus all at once the racialized and spatial histories of a neighborhood, the decisions by brokers on how to target Latinx consumers, and implications of barrio aesthetics in an increasingly segregated urban landscape. Abstract Barrios is a book that should be read across ethnic studies, urban studies, and in the fields of art and architecture. Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 103Charley E. Willison, "Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States" (Oxford UP, 2021)
If health policy truly seeks to improve population health and reduce health disparities, addressing homelessness must be a priority. Homelessness is a public health problem. Nearly a decade after the great recession of 2008, homelessness rates are once again rising across the United States, with the number of persons experiencing homelessness surpassing the number of individuals suffering from opioid use disorders annually. Homelessness presents serious adverse consequences for physical and mental health, and ultimately worsens health disparities for already at-risk low-income and minority populations. While some state-level policies have been implemented to address homelessness, these services are often not designed to target chronic homelessness and subsequently fail in policy implementation by engendering barriers to local homeless policy solutions. In the face of this crisis, Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2021) seeks to understand the political processes influencing adoption of best-practice solutions to reduce chronic homelessness in US municipalities. Drawing on unique research from three exemplar municipal case studies in San Francisco, CA, Atlanta, GA, and Shreveport, LA, this volume explores conflicting policy solutions in the highly decentralized homeless policy space and provides recommendations to improve homeless governance systems and deliver policies that will successfully diminish chronic homelessness. Until issues of authority and fragmentation across competing or misaligned policy spaces are addressed through improved coordination and oversight, local and national policies intended to reduce homelessness may not succeed. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 29Anita Hardon, "Chemical Youth: Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
Anita Hardon's Chemical Youth: Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores how young people engage with chemical substances in their everyday lives. It builds upon and supplements a large body of literature on young people’s use of drugs and alcohol to highlight the subjectivities and socialities that chemical use enables across diverse socio-cultural settings, illustrating how young people seek to avoid harm, while harnessing the beneficial effects of chemical use. The book is based on multi-sited anthropological research in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US, and presents insights from collaborative and contrasting analysis. Hardon brings new perspectives to debates across drug policy studies, pharmaceutical cultures and regulation, science and technology studies, and youth and precarity in post-industrial societies. This book is available open access here. Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 124Morten T. Korsgaard, "Bearing with Strangers: Arendt, Education and the Politics of Inclusion" (Routledge, 2018)
Bearing with Strangers: Arendt, Education and the Politics of Inclusion (Routledge, 2018) looks at inclusion in education in a new way. By introducing the notion of the instrumental fallacy, it shows how this is not only an inherent feature of inclusive education policies, but also omnipresent in modern educational policy. It engages with schooling through an Arendtian framework, namely as a practice with the aim of mediating between generations. It outlines a didactic and pedagogical theory that presents inclusion not as an aim for education, but as a constitutive feature of the activity of schooling. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a novel and critical perspective on inclusive education, as well as a contribution to a growing literature re-engaging didactic and pedagogical conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher. Schooling is understood as a process of opening the world to the young and of opening the world to the renewal that the new generations offer. The activity of schooling offers the possibility of becoming attentive towards what is common while learning to bear with that which is strange and those who are strangers. The book points to valuable metaphors and ideas - referred to in the book as 'pearls' - that speak to the heart of what schooling and teaching concerns, such as exemplarity, judgement, and enlarged thought. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 114Allison B. Wolf, "Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression in immigration structures, policies, practices, and norms. In contrast to most philosophical work on immigration (which begins with abstract ideas and philosophical debates and then makes claims based on them), this book begins with concrete cases and immigration policies from throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia to assess the nature of immigration injustice and set us up to address it. Every chapter of the book begins with specific immigration policies, practices or sets of immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Latin America and then explores them through the lens of global oppression to better identify what makes it unjust and to put us in a better position to respond to that injustice and improve immigrants’ lives. It is one of the first sustained studies of immigration justice that focuses on Central and South America in addition to the U.S. and Mexico. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 102Karen Petrou, "Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America" (Wiley, 2021)
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead of proposing legislation that would never pass Congress, the author provides an insider's look at politically plausible, high-impact financial policy fixes that will radically shift the equality balance. Offering an innovative, powerful, and highly practical solution for immediately turning around the enormous nationwide problem of economic inequality, this groundbreaking book: Presents practical ways America can and should tackle economic inequality with fast-acting results; Provides revealing examples of exactly how bad economic inequality in America has become no matter how hard we all work; Demonstrates that increasing inequality is disastrous for long-term economic growth, political action, and even personal happiness; Explains why your bank's interest rates are still only a fraction of what they were even though the rich are getting richer than ever, faster than ever; Reveals the dangers of FinTech and BigTech companies taking over banking; Shows how Facebook wants to control even the dollars in your wallet; and Discusses who shares the blame for our economic inequality, including the Fed, regulators, Congress, and even economists. Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America (Wiley, 2021) should be required reading for leaders, policymakers, regulators, media professionals, and all Americans wanting to ensure that the nation’s financial policy will be a force for promoting economic equality. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 126Alexandra Kemmerer, "Human Dignity in Context" (Nomos/Hart, 2018)
Human dignity is the key term that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights placed at the center of legal discourse on a global level. In 1949, Germany incorporated the concept of human dignity in its Basic law. Human Dignity in Context (Nomos/Hart, 2018), edited by Dieter Grimm, Alexandra Kemmerer, and Christoph Möllers, provides a contextual analysis of human dignity, exploring its legal and political implications and reflecting current debates on human dignity in multiple disciplinary fields. In our interview, Alexandra and myself speak about the definition, benefits and challenges of the term, about Covid 19 as a case study of how we can use Human Dignity to make decisions about the contradicts needs and wishes of communities and people during the pandemic, we speak about the debate around human dignity and technology and more. Alexandra Kemmerer is senior research fellow and academic coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Berlin. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 514Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, "America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights" (U Missouri Press, 2020)
The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrated into the Voting Rights Act in 1964 because President Lyndon Johnson wanted it to be included in that landmark legislation, in part because Johnson, as an adept politician and negotiator, saw the importance of establishing a means for mediation and negotiation on the local level in many places throughout the United States. The initial portfolio of the CRS was focused solely on issues around race and racial disputes, though it has since been formally extended to include issues around ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The CRS is housed in the Department of Justice, but operates as an independent entity, and does not work as part of the FBI or the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. Grande Lum, who is currently provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Menlo College, had served as the Director of the CRS from 2012-2016, and he has taken the original edition of America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (U Missouri Press, 2020), written by Bertram Levine, and updated it with another twenty years of the history of the CRS. This is a fascinating history of this often- overlooked governmental institution, and in our podcast conversation, Grande and I also discuss the process of updating the book itself, since he had made such great use of the original edition when he first became Director of the CRS. In taking the original text and adding in another two decades of history, Grande Lum worked with Bertram Levine’s children to make sure his work was also in the spirit of their father’s work, since Levine had written the original edition of the book. This podcast is an engaging discussion about the history of the Community Relations Service itself, the book that incorporates that history, highlighting the many successes of these domestic mediators and peacemakers, and the process for collaboratively updating this kind of a book. Lum also discusses some of the projects that have come out of the CRS, including the Divided Community Project at the Moritz School of Law at the Ohio State University (https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/dividedcommunityproject/), and other community mediation centers in different states and localities around the United States. These local and national organizations, along with the CRS, have been pursuing many of the ideas that are currently being discussed about law enforcement reform. America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, co-authored by Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, is a fascinating history of the organization that has, for more than fifty years, been working to bring divided communities together, in peaceful dialogue, in an effort to defuse situations without violence or indictments. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 3Stuart P. Green, "Criminalizing Sex: A Unified Liberal Theory" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Starting in the latter part of the 20th century, the law of sexual offenses, especially in the West, began to reflect a striking divergence. On the one hand, the law became significantly more punitive in its approach to sexual conduct that is nonconsensual, as evidenced by a major expansion in the definition of rape and sexual assault, and the creation of new offenses like sex trafficking, child grooming, and revenge porn. On the other hand, it became markedly more permissive in how it dealt with conduct that is consensual, a trend that can be seen, for example, in the legalization or decriminalization of sodomy, adultery, and adult pornography. This book explores the conceptual and normative implications of this divergence. At the heart of Stuart P. Green's book Criminalizing Sex: A Unified Liberal Theory (Oxford UP, 2020) is a consideration of a deeply contested question: How should a liberal system of criminal law adequately protect individuals in their right not to be subjected to sexual contact against their will, while also safeguarding their right to engage in (private consensual) sexual conduct in which they do wish to participate? The book develops a framework for harmonizing these goals in the context of a wide range of nonconsensual, consensual, and aconsensual sexual offenses (hence, the "unified" nature of the theory) -- including rape and sexual assault in a variety of forms, sexual harassment, voyeurism, indecent exposure, incest, sadomasochistic assault, prostitution, bestiality, and necrophilia. Intellectually rigorous, fair-minded, and deeply humane, Criminalizing Sex offers a fascinating discussion of a wide range of moral and legal puzzles, arising out of real-world cases of alleged sexual misconduct - a discussion that is all the more urgent in the age of #MeToo. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 101Cristina V. Groeger, "The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Education is thought to be the route out of poverty, but history disagrees. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard UP, 2021) returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger's test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences--both intended and unintended--for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 55Stuart Rees, "Cruelty or Humanity: Challenges, Opportunities and Responsibilities" (Policy Press, 2020)
Stuart Rees's Cruelty or Humanity: Challenges, Opportunities and Responsibilities (Policy Press, a Bristol University Press imprint, 2020) exposes politicians' fascination with cruelty in their deliberations about policies. Through empirical analysis, human stories and poetic commentary, he identifies non-destructive exercise of power, courageous public action and compelling humanitarian alternatives as the key to achieving a future in which dignity and equality flourish. Documenting case studies from around the world, the book exposes politicians’ cruel motives and the resulting outcomes. Using first-hand observations and insights from international poets, the work argues for courageous action to support non-violence in every aspect of public and private life for the survival of people, animals and the planet. Stuart Rees is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and a human rights activist in several countries. He is regarded as one of Australia’s most consistent campaigners for justice. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 100Chuck Collins, "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions" (Polity, 2021)
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defense Industry. These ‘agents of inequality’ are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%. In The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (Polity, 2021), inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to create and entrench hereditary dynasties of wealth and power. He exposes the inner workings of these “agents of inequality”, showing how they deploy anonymous shell companies, family offices, offshore accounts, opaque trusts, and sham transactions to ensure the world’s richest pay next to no tax. He ends by outlining a robust set of policies that democratic nations can implement to shut down the Wealth Defense Industry for good. This shocking exposé of the insidious machinery of inequality is essential reading for anyone wanting the inside story of our age of plutocratic plunder and stashed cash. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 144Aaron Griffith, "God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America" (Harvard UP, 2020)
The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policies. Religious leaders from Billy Graham to David Wilkerson found growing concerns around juvenile delinquency and general lawbreaking as strategic connection points for their evangelistic message and ministries. In God's Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America (Harvard UP, 2020), Aaron Griffith explores the rhetoric of crime and punishment in the postwar Evangelical movement. The rhetoric of law and order became deeply enmeshed with religious conservatism, but not without attending efforts at criminal justice reform as growing number of Americans, disproportionately from urban and minority populations, spent years in state incarceration. In this expertly researched volume, Griffith presents a complex and important investigation into a timely subject in the recent past of the history of religion in politics in American society. Find out more about Aaron on his website or follow him on Twitter (@AaronLGriffith). Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 12Dying from Despair in the USA: A Discussion with Anne Case
Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they’re still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 122Melissa Moschella, "To Whom Do Children Belong?: Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy" (Cambridge UP, 2016)
The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton, which ruled that the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, may imperil the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in line with their values. This right is examined brilliantly in the 2016 book, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by scholar Melissa Moschella. Given the rise of the transgender movement and other aspects of wokeism, this book has only increased in importance. It is a rare combination of a serious scholarly work and a book that general audiences, particularly and crucially, the parents of school-age children should read. Moschella addresses timely questions such as, “Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society?” and draws upon psychological and social scientific research to make a compelling philosophical argument for the right of parents to determine fundamental questions of morals when it comes to their children. And this is not only a matter for philosophers. Moschella makes clear that under the cover of such seemingly innocuous verbiage as “diversity education” and “education for citizenship,” public schools are engaging in outright indoctrination of children in left-wing social justice and libertarian moral views. Moreover, progressives are increasingly targeting even private schools and some are even calling for an outright ban on homeschooling. Moschella’s book is eerily prescient in the way she was able to predict that parents who seek to pass on a traditional understanding of sexuality find their efforts directly undermined in ever more public schools. Many parents cannot afford private schools or are unable to home school—and, as noted, even those refuges are under threat. Moschella foretold in her book that if the views of the progressive scholars whose arguments she delineates with scrupulous fairness prevail, parents will have no choice but to send their children into an educational environment that may sow damaging confusion about the basic truths of human identity. Readers of this book need not even be religious but simply parents and other readers who worry that children will be stigmatized and parents’ rights erased if children are forced by schools to deny that maleness and femaleness are grounded on objective biological reality rather than subjective self-image, or that the purpose of human sexuality is not merely pleasure or self-expression, but to unite a man and woman in marriage and enable them to form a family. This is not solely a question of religious liberty but of conscience rights more broadly, which she discusses both authoritatively and movingly. Moschella examines the arguments for expanding school choice, vouchers and granting exemptions when educational programs or regulations threaten parents' ability to raise their children in line with their values and moral codes. The questions raised in this important book have become even more salient in the era of the Biden administration. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 930Kara M. Schlichting, "New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do just that in her recent book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book shifts our gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City. Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another. Residents of the Bronx in the nineteenth century organized groups like the Department of Street Improvements to ensure that their vision of urban expansion was realized, including implementing the grid-system to attract public and private investors from the urban core. Individuals along the East Bronx waterfront in the early-twentieth century similarly redefined the area according to their own wants and needs, converting temporary summer camp colonies into permanent bungalow communities outside, yet within reach, of Manhattan. By the 1930s, Robert Moses’ powerful State Parks Department, bolstered by New Deal and World’s Fair preparation funds, filled the natural marshlands of Flushing Meadows, connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx by constructing the Triborough Bridge, and lined area with new ‘modern’ recreational facilities. While differing in size and scope, each aforementioned case contributed to New York City’s conceptual and physical transition into a truly regional city. Garrett Gutierrez is a Ph.D. Candidate of United States History at New York University. His research interests include urban/suburban history, race & ethnicity, informal economy, and youth subcultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 927Gabriel Winant, "The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America" (Harvard UP, 2021)
In his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021), Gabriel Winant explains how the social reproductive labor sustaining the US's industrial economy was institutionalized in response to steelworker layoffs, aging, and sickness beginning in the 1960s. The result was a recomposition of the American working class, from a predominantly white male industrial one, to a meagerly paid and socially devalued pool of care workers comprised mostly of women, and especially women of color. Neoliberalism's insecure labor regime is not a reversion to an earlier period of inequality but a consequence of midcentury welfare policy, the partial security it offered and the race and gender hierarchies it remade. Patrick Reilly studies history at Vanderbilt University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 20Tom Philpott, "Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) is an unsettling journey into the disaster-bound American food system, and an exploration of possible solutions, from leading food politics commentator and former farmer Tom Philpott. More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of "quiet emergency," from dangerous drought in California--which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat--to catastrophic topsoil loss in the "breadbasket" heartland of the United States. Whether or not we take heed, these urgent crises of industrial agriculture will define our future. In Perilous Bounty, veteran journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores and exposes the small handful of seed and pesticide corporations, investment funds, and magnates who benefit from the trends that imperil us, with on-the-ground dispatches featuring the scientists documenting the damage and the farmers and activists who are valiantly and inventively pushing back. Resource scarcity looms on the horizon, but rather than pointing us toward an inevitable doomsday, Philpott shows how the entire wayward ship of American agriculture could be routed away from its path to disaster. He profiles the farmers and communities in the nation's two key growing regions developing resilient, soil-building, water-smart farming practices, and readying for the climate shocks that are already upon us; and he explains how we can help move these methods from the margins to the mainstream. Jenny Splitter is an independent journalist covering food, farming, science, and climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 80Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)
Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet. In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century. On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic privacy policies, the internet’s immense carbon footprint, and the importance of data privacy law, among other topics. John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 22Exploring STEM, Insulin Research, and Why We Get Sick
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: about Dr Bikman’s unconventional path to pursuing degrees in science, why scientists need to do a postdoc, what it means to have your own lab, the important role of insulin in the body, and a discussion of the book Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease--And How to Fight It (Benbella Books, 2020). Our guest is: Dr. Benjamin Bikman, associate professor of Physiology & Developmental Biology at BYU, where he has his own lab and is currently exploring the contrasting roles of insulin and ketones as key drivers of metabolic function. He frequently publishes his research in peer-reviewed journals and presents at international science meetings. He lives in Utah with his wife and children, and strongly believes in the importance of a work-life balance. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in 19th-century America. She supports her work-life balance by taking long walks, and making time for her loved ones. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Why We Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz Getting the Most Out of Your Postdoc Determine Whether A STEM Major Is The Right Choice Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 121Enrico Bonadio, "Protecting Art in the Street: A Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti" (Dokument Forlag, 2020)
There has recently been a sharp increase in cases where corporations have been sued by street and graffiti artists because their artworks had been used and exploited without the artists’ authorization, for example in advertising campaigns, as backdrops in promotional videos, or as decorating elements of products. This trend shows and confirms that these forms of art are vulnerable. They are actually more exposed to unauthorized exploitation (and destruction as well) than works of fine art, because they are placed in the public eye. Protecting Art in the Street: A Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Dokument Forlag, 2020) explains, with words and images, how copyright laws apply to street art and graffiti, and how they can be of help to creators within these artistic communities. Knowledge about these issues does matter. There has recently been a spike in legal actions or complaints against corporations and individuals that have tried to exploit commercially street artworks without the artists’ consent; and more importantly without sharing with them any profit. Also, legal actions have been brought by street artists to fight the destruction of their pieces. By adopting a simple language, Protecting Art in the Street constitutes an easy-to-understand guide aimed at navigating street artists and graffiti writers through otherwise difficult and intricate legal issues concerning the protection of their artistic outputs. Nick Pozek is Assistant Director at the Parker School of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 171Gary Alan Fine, "The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Most of the time, we believe our daily lives to be governed by structures determined from above (e.g., laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay employees wages, climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live). In contrast, social organization is often a feature of local organization. While those forces may seem beyond individual grasp, we often come together in small communities to change circumstances that would otherwise flatten us. In The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Gary Alan Fine emphasizes and describes the meso-level collectives, the organizations that bridge our individual interests and the larger structures that shape our lives. Fine describes the meso-level social collectives as “hinges” or groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the individual and the broader society. Fine argues that understanding hinges in society is crucial to explaining how societies function – creating links between the micro- and macro-orders of society. Fine draws on historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine provides reader with new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of the social worlds. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. He is currently working on a research project about obituary writing as an art world. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 98Anthony Warner, "Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World without Destroying It" (Oneworld, 2021)
Nutritionists tell you to eat more fish. Environmentalists tell you to eat less fish. Apparently they are both right. It's the same thing with almonds, or quinoa, or a hundred other foods. But is it really incumbent on us as individuals to resolve this looming global catastrophe? From plastic packaging to soil depletion to flatulent cows, we are bombarded with information about the perils of our food system. Drawing on years of experience within the food industry, Anthony Warner invites us to reconsider what we think we know. In Ending Hunger: The quest to feed the world without destroying it (Oneworld, 2021), he uncovers the parallels between eating locally and 1930s fascism, promotes the potential for good in genetic modification and dispels the assumption that population growth is at the heart of our planetary woes. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People's History of Poverty (New Press, 2008), Ghettos, Tramps & Welfare Queens (Oxford, 2017), and Politics for Social Workers (Columbia, forthcoming 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 27Ray Ison and Ed Straw, "The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency" (Routledge, 2020)
The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in Climate Emergency (Routledge, 2020) is a persuasive, lively book that shows how systems thinking can be harnessed to effect profound, complex change. In the age of the Anthropocene the need for new ways of thinking and acting has become urgent. But patterns of obstacles are apparent in any action – be they corporate interests, lobbyists, or outdated political and government systems. Ray Ison and Ed Straw show how and why failure in governance is at the heart of our collective incapacity to tackle climate and biodiversity emergencies. They suggest the need for a ‘systemic sensibility’ as a first step in breaking these models, and encourage a reimagining of governance – with the biosphere situated at the center. They go beyond analysis of problems, providing actionable guidance for incorporating systems thinking in practice (STiP) into every level of governance, and provide the reader with 21 actionable takeaway principles for systemic governance. The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking will be inspiring reading for students of systems thinking that want to understand the application of their methods, specialists in change management or public administration, activists for 'whole system change' as well as decision-makers wanting to effect challenging transformations. This book is for anyone with the ambition to create a sustainable and fair world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 112Mical Raz, "Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way" (UNC Press Books, 2020)
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. In Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way (University of North Carolina Press Books, 2020), Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies--as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender--played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 20The Role of Community Colleges in Higher Education: A Discussion with Penny Wills
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the role of community colleges in higher education and in their local communities, the Rural Community College Alliance, and being a first generation college student. Our guest is: Dr Penny Wills, the President of Rural Community College Alliance. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 101Tony Tekaroniake Evans, "Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond" (Washington State UP, 2020)
In 1877, Eloosykasit was on his way Tolo Lake, a gathering place frequented by the Nez Perce, when he heard news of the Wallowa band's flight from the U.S. Army. Only seventeen at the time, Eloosykasit elected to remain with the migrant Nez Perce, arming himself with a rifle abandoned at White Bird Canyon, and following Chief Joseph on toward Montana. Over a century later, in the summer of 1989, Eloosykasit's descendant, Josiah Pinkham, traced the same path as part of an immersive summer program organized entirely around the Chief Joseph Trail. The trip was but one of many ways that the Upward Bound Program - based out of University of Idaho and known regionally as "the Indian Program" - provided Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike with experiences that recentered Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) and Skitswish (Coeur D'Alene) history and culture. Well-known across the Nez Perce Reservation, Coeur D'Alene Reservation, and nearby communities, Idaho's Upward Bound Program serves as the focus of journalist Tony Tekaroniake Evans' latest book, Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond (Washington State University Press, 2020). Drawing on dozens of interviews with former Upward Bound participants and instructors, Evans traces the development of the program under longtime coordinator Isabel Bond, who has spent decades working to support local Indigenous youth through education. Evans weaves historical narratives both old and recent into a story of community-building and cultural appreciation. Though situated deeply in Nez Perce and Coeur D'Alene history and homelands, Evans' Teaching Native Pride shows the ways that Bond's Upward Bound Program, in many ways, serves as a model for educational experiences that highlight the importance of Indigenous pasts, persistence, experiences, and expertise. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 20B. Kilpatrick and M. Patel, "Estate Regeneration: Learning from the Past, Housing Communities of the Future" (Routledge, 2020)
One hundred years ago, the Addison Act created the circumstances for the large scale construction of municipal housing in the UK. This would lead to the most prolific phases of housing estate building the country has ever seen. The legacy of this historic period has been tackled for the last twenty-five years as these estates began to suffer from misguided allocation policies, systemic building and fabric failure and financial austerity. A series of estate regeneration programs sought to rectify the mistakes of the past. Estate Regeneration: Learning from the Past, Housing Communities of the Future (Routledge, 2020) describes 24 of these regeneration schemes from across the UK and the design philosophy and resident engagement which formed each new community. A number of essays from a wide range of industry experts amplify the learning experience from some key estate regeneration initiatives and provide observations on the broader issues of this sector of the housing market. Regeneration is inevitable; it is a matter of the form which regeneration should take. The information presented here is a guide to an intuitive approach to estate regeneration which commences with the derivation of strong urban design principles and is guided by real community engagement. The experience presented seeks to learn from the mistakes of the past to create the best possible platform for regeneration of the housing estates of the future. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 110T. Maschi and K. Morgen, "Aging Behind Prison Walls: Studies in Trauma and Resilience" (Columbia UP, 2020)
Today, more than 200,000 men and women over age fifty are languishing in prisons around the United States. It is projected that by 2030, one-third of all incarcerated individuals will be older adults. An already overcrowded and underserved prison system is straining to manage the needs of incarcerated older adults with growing frailty and health concerns. Separated from their families and communities despite a low risk of recidivism, incarcerated older adults represent a major social-justice issue that reveals the intersectional factors at play in their imprisonment. How do the people aging in prison understand their life experiences? In Aging Behind Prison Walls, Tina Maschi and Keith Morgen offer a data-driven and compassionate analysis of the lives of incarcerated older people. They explore the transferable resiliencies and coping strategies used by incarcerated aging adults to make meaning of their lives before, during, and after imprisonment. The book draws on extensive quantitative and qualitative research as well as national datasets. It features rich narrative case studies that present stories of trauma, coping, and well-being. Based on the data, Maschi and Morgen present a solution-focused caring-justice framework in order to understand and transform the individual- and community-level structural factors that have led to and perpetuate the aging-in-prison crisis. They offer concrete proposals--at the community and national policy levels--to address the pressing issues of incarcerated elders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 120Barbara Dennis, "Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise" (Peter Lang, 2020)
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Barbara Dennis of Indiana University on her new ethnography, Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise, published in 2020 by Peter Lang Press. Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise features the IU-Unityville Outreach Project and tells the story of a 4-year-long participatory, critical ethnography in a local United States school district. The book speaks into the contemporary conversations around immigration, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the experiences of Dreamers. The project involved a multilingual team of graduate students, educators, community members, and students who together aimed to transform school practices in order to bring about more success with transnational students who were enrolling in the district at an increasing rate. Over the span of several years, what began with a simple request for help, morphed into a rich ethnographic understanding of the complex tensions produced by monocultural and assimilationist ideals when juxtaposed with strangers. A unique and innovative feature about the book lies in that it seamlessly weaves together substantive discussions, methodological practices, and ethical challenges revolving around a transformative, social justice project. Walking with Strangers has made significant and much-needed contributions to the field of critical and social justice oriented educational research. In particular, it zooms into the complex and localized dynamics among immigrant families and students, predominantly white communities, public schools structured by white culture, and teachers unprepared for educating transnational children. The book not only sheds light on the innovative approaches through which educational researchers and educators could bring positive changes to the school life of marginalized and disadvantaged students, but also candidly reflects on the places where such efforts failed when confronting white privilege and gender oppression. Barbara Dennis is a peace and social justice activist, and critical educational ethnographer. She is a professor of qualitative inquiry in the Inquiry Methodology program at Indiana University’s, School of Education. She regularly publishes on feminist ethnography, critical participatory ethics, and methodological theory. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 66K. M. Broton and C. L. Cady, "Food Insecurity on Campus: Action and Intervention" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
The new essay collection Food Insecurity on College Campuses edited by Katharine M. Broton and Clare L. Cady explores the widespread problem of food insecurity among college students and the overlapping and compounding issues that lead students to choose between getting enough to eat and paying the costs of a college education. As the editors make clear in the introduction to the collection, today’s college student has changed significantly from the expected “young adult, attending college full-time immediately after high school,” and the economic landscape they are dealing with is far different from what many administrators and faculty assume. Students are more likely to delay college or enter as part-time students while taking care of families or working. The essays throughout the collection describe students’ barriers to graduation as interlocking and compounding, and none of them academic. In the example of “Amarillo College: Loving Your Student from Enrollment to Graduation,” the authors concluded the top 10 reasons that students failed to complete their degrees were all financial in nature, not related to academic preparedness or ability to learn. Michael Rosen‘s essay reveals that even very small amounts of money for textbooks, car repairs, security deposits, utilities, and lab fees may derail students. The essays in the collection describe a wide range of solutions that have been tested in a variety of institutions and locations. to food insecurity from food pantries and partnerships with campus dining services to wrap-around services with social workers and emergency financial support. The editors acknowledge that supplying students with food may temporarily provide them with a meal, but these do not solve the ongoing problems of poverty. Throughout the collection, authors point time and again to the need to direct students to multiple services and resources, not just food or a check. Without significant reform in the structural inequities that keep people in poverty, these are all stop-gap measures. Katherine Broton is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies and (by courtesy) the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Clare Cady is the cofounder of the College and University Food Bank Alliance and Director of Research and Innovation at Single Stop. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 115Michael Kagan, "The Battle to Stay in America: Immigration's Hidden Front Line" (U of Nevada Press, 2020)
The debate over American immigration policy has obsessed politicians and disrupted the lives of millions of people for decades. In The Battle To Stay in America: Immigration's Hidden Front Line (University of Nevada Press, 2020), Professor Michael Kagan focuses on Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas is a city where more than one in five residents was born in a foreign country. It's a city dependent on its immigrant population, but one where the community is struggling to defend itself against the federal government’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Professor Kagan tells this story not just as a front-line immigration lawyer, but also as a citizen, as a friend, and a parent. His intensely personal account converts headlines, complicated and punitive legal processes, and unjust bureaucratic procedures into the personal stories of the struggles to survive the severe immigration policing of the current administration. This is the immigration story that needs to be told: the disappearances of neighbors, the breaking up of families, the parents who are forever relegated to working jobs below their potential because immigration laws prevent them ever being free and equal. Kagan explains how American immigration law often gives good people no recourse. Under President Trump complex bureaucracies that administer immigration law have been re-engineered to carry out a relentless but often invisible attack against people and families who are integral to American communities. Professor Kagan tells the stories of people desperate to escape unspeakable violence in their homeland, children separated from their families and trapped in a tangle of administrative regulations, and hardworking long-time residents suddenly ripped from their productive lives when they fall unwittingly into the clutches of the immigration enforcement system. He considers how the crackdown on immigrants negatively impacts the national economy and offers a deeply considered assessment of the future of immigration policy in the United States. Kagan also captures the psychological costs exacted by fear of deportation and by increasingly overt expressions of hatred against immigrants. The Battle to Stay in America could not be more timely; with a changing Administration it's time not just to rethink America's immigration policy, but change how we think about immigration entirely. Professor Michael Kagan is the director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, which defends children and families fighting deportation in Las Vegas, and is a Joyce Mack Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was a plaintiff that prevented the Trump administration from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. He has written for The Washington Post, Salon.com and The Daily Beast, and is a leading national scholar of immigration and refugee law. He is one of the most widely cited immigration scholars in the United States, and his work has been relied on in courts in the United States and beyond. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in human rights law at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she follows the Hong Kong protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 113Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars, "Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights" (Harvard UP, 2020)
In the United States, gun violence is in a state of national crisis, yet efforts to reform gun regulation face significant political and constitutional barriers. In this innovative book, Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars put forward creative and practical solutions, proposing legislative reform which will reduce gun deaths. Theirs is a libertarian 'bottom-up' approach which seeks to empower those most at risk by allowing individuals a choice to opt in to common-sense gun regulation for themselves. At the same time, the genius of Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights (Harvard University Press, 2020) is that the proposals do not infringe the individual freedoms of gun ownership protected by the second amendment. Ayres and Vars put forward practical solutions which, where adopted, will cause an immediate reduction in lives lost as a result of gun violence. Their work is empirically grounded and provides a roadmap for legislators and policy makers who wish to keep people safe by reducing gun deaths. Ian Ayres is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller Super Crunchers. He is a contributor to Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and the New York Times. Fredrick E. Vars is the Ira Drayton Pruitt, Sr., Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in mental health law. He works with numerous suicide-prevention organizations and is a member of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Gun Violence. Jane Richards is in the final stages of completing her doctoral thesis on the application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the insanity defence and its disposition orders at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 112Kimberley Brownlee, "Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Kimberley Brownlee, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, has written a monograph addressing her argument in favor a right against social deprivation. In Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford UP, 2020), Professor Brownlee contends that all humans have basic needs for human interaction. Since such needs are fundamental for survival, they should be regarded as a human right. Social interaction is not a right to “love” or “friendship”, but rather a right to basic opportunities to interact with other humans. Although Professor Brownlee’s argument is most easily applicable to institutional settings wherein people are frequently deprived of human interaction, such as solitary confinement in prisons or isolation in hospitals, this right is generally applicable to a wide array of contexts in which people find themselves isolated from others. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 269O. Carter Snead, "What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard UP, 2020)
At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent possible and with the least intrusion by either the state or “outdated” social mores? But there is a dark side to expressive individualism when one enters the realm of public bioethics. In his 2020 book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2020), O. Carter Snead defines for us what the term “public bioethics” encompasses and provides a much-needed genealogy of the field. He profiles key players in many of the most momentous bioethics-related developments of the post-WWII era from physicians such as Henry Knowles Beecher to jurists like Harry Blackmun and influential scholars in fields such as philosophy and sociology like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah. Snead chronicles how the field of bioethics came to be shaped by shocking revelations of cases of inhumanity many of which are well-known (such as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study) but many of which are rarely discussed such as medical experiments performed on near-term alive aborted babies. Such cases shocked the public and led to legislation creating commissions and other bodies designed to prevent such horrors. But Snead argues that much of the action on the public policy front failed for multiple reasons and left vulnerable groups (e.g., the aged, the cognitively disabled, the unborn) outside a legal regime built upon the precepts of expressive individualism. And even those who were supposedly able to express their wishes were often harmed by the expressive individualism paradigm and its legal framework. Snead gives examples of the many actors in the area of assisted reproduction and assisted suicide whose rights can be trampled in the name of a notion of personal liberty that does not account for changes of mind. He also demonstrates that regulation and oversight was often, for all intents and purposes, absent in many cases. Snead’s book is a clarion call for what he calls “remembering the body.” This is an important book for anyone who may at some point become ill or disabled or who will end up caring for someone who is. That is, it is a book for everyone. It is by a leading scholar, but its readership is anyone with a body and who loves other people—or at least has some control over them. Give a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 198Ashley E. Lucas, "Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
The world of theater performances is often thought of as being composed of wealthy persons who received elite educations at art institutions all so they could be observed by a small, wealthy elite at exclusive and expensive gatherings. Theater is seen as an insular, elitist practice, for and by a select few. However, this image of theater is deeply misleading, especially as more performances are available for download, and many smaller more open institutions invest more in theater productions. One place that might surprise a lot of people is the popularity of performances staged by incarcerated persons, and presented in behind the walls of prisons. Theater is a social, communal practice, so making it happen within an institution that is not only isolated from the outside world, but is designed to isolate those within, will naturally come with various challenges, and also raises various questions on the nature of both theater and the carceral system. These are the questions Ashley Lucas addresses in her recent book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, 2020). Featuring a combination of her own firsthand experience as a director of prison theater, interviews with those involved in the world prison theater and scholarly research, the book is a unique combination of genres that occupies some very interesting intersections, and is able to explore some very difficult topics, from questions of artistic expression, the nature of community and what hope in a hopeless situation looks like. Ashley Lucas is an associate professor of Theatre and Drama and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is also the former director of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 105Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
Reducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management, to drug use. Nancy Campbell’s important new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020) explores how a therapy that can stop an accidental drug overdose, called Naloxone, emerged in the American mainstream in the early years of the new millennium—despite existing in some form for nearly a century. What are now called “opioid antagonists” were used, not to save lives, but deployed by the carceral state to police drug users in the early twentieth century; sequestered within bioscience laboratories to build molecular theories of how the brain worked at midcentury; approved by the FDA in 1971 for the treatment of overdose only by physicians; and illicitly administered and widely shared in the 1980s and 1990s among drug-user-led activist organizations and communities, who created their own troves of training protocols, peer-education networks, and experiential evidence of its effectiveness. In the twenty-first century, Naloxone appeared on public policy agendas around harm reduction and arrived legally in the hands of the people best situated to intervene when an overdose was underway—but only in some US states and some countries. Campbell tunes readers’ ears to the politics of evidence, the health effects of stigma, and the racism of false medical claims as she listens, amid a century of contention, to the quietness of “undone science.” As evidence, this intrepid book uses visual culture, vernacular documents, oral histories, and (expertly explained) scientific publications. It connects American histories at federal and local levels with the UK and especially Scotland. And it relates medical communities and activist networks without imposing false divides or drawing caricatures of either. The book builds on Campbell’s four previous books on the history of addiction, gendering knowledge, and social theory from the position of Science and Technology Studies. The interview was a collaborative project among participants in the Vanderbilt University course, American Medicine & the World. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 166Claire Herbert, "A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality" (U California Press, 2021)
Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality (University of California Press, 2021) examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Dr. Claire Herbert, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewed various groups, followed scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visited squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that new residents with more privilege often have their back-to-the-earth practices formalized by local policies, whereas longtime, more disempowered residents, usually representing communities of color, have their practices labeled as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how these divergent treatments reproduce long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 118Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, and how the prevalence ed tech can reinforce existing social heirarchies. His recommended books included the following: Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban (Teachers' College Press, 1986) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis and Stanley Aronowitz (Columbia University Press, 1981) Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White: Why School Success Has No Color by Prudence L. Carter (Oxford University Press, 2005) Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 30Amy Bucher, "Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change" (Rosenfeld Media, 2020)
In her new book Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change (Rosenfeld Media, 2020), Amy Bucher analyzes both the barriers and levers to achieving behavioral change. Among the barriers are cognitive biases, like a Status Quo Bias, as well as growing both emotionally and mentally exhausted by changes that require too much willpower on behalf of the user. Opportunities to promote change include having accountability buddies to help guide you, and avatars that have proven highly effective in providing information in a trust-building, nonjudgmental manner. Amy Bucher, PhD, works in Behavior Change Design at Mad*Pow and previously worked at CVS Health and Johnson & Johnson. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her M.A. and PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 164Jennifer M. Randles, "Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering" (U California Press, 2020)
In Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering (University of California Press, 2020), sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Ep 27Michael Mascarenhas, "Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More" (Sage, 2020)
Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the works of individuals who are creating a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice scholarship. methodology, and activism. The 18 essays in this collection explore a wide range of controversies and debates, from the U.S. and other societies. An important theme throughout the book is how vulnerable and marginalized populations—the incarcerated, undocumented workers, rural populations, racial and ethnic minorities—bear a disproportionate share of environmental risks. Each reading concludes with a suggested assignment that helps student explore the topic independently and deepen their understanding of the issues raised. Stentor Danielson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy