New Books in Public Policy

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective way to treat drug addiction. Their best idea–Federal “narcotics farms,” one in Kentucky and one in Texas–kept junkies clean, but only by keeping them away from the drugs those junkies craved. In that sense, they were no more effective than prisons, though in fairness drug farms offered various treatment regimens that enabled some addicts to get and stay clean. Other than locking them up, the medical establishment had no good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Essentially, then, junkies (who could not spontaneously “kick,” and a lot do) usually ended up in one of three places: on the street, behind bars, or dead. Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-drug addict, decided that addicts should take their treatment into their own hands, much like Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had done with AA in the late 1930s. He took what he learned in AA, adapted it, and created a long-term residential “therapeutic community” expressly for addicts and run by addicts. He called it Synanon, and with it he started what Claire D. Clark calls “the recovery revolution.” In her terrific book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2017), Clark tells the story of Dederich and those who followed him (literally and chronologically) in trying to find a way to treat narcotics addiction. It’s a tale of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, enthusiasm and exhaustion lasting sixty years. Clark makes clear that the “recovery revolution” is not over by any means–we are still groping toward a good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number of people faced long-term unemployment, especially in the manufacturing sector. Jobs that were once the picture of stability and security, and that helped form a vibrant post-war middle class in the United States, disappeared as companies downsized, outsourced, and retooled. In his book, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (University of California Press, 2015), Assistant Professor of Sociology Victor Tan Chen examines former autoworkers—perhaps the most iconic of blue-collar American jobs—and their experiences with long-term unemployment. Upon getting laid off from their jobs, these workers confront a completely different labor market from what they were used to. No longer can they succeed based solely on hard work—the idea of meritocracy that they have all embraced as an ideal. They learn about the higher education they need, the soft skills many jobs require, the social networks they lack, and the constant self-branding workers must now do. Believing in meritocracy, and in society’s widespread culture of judgment, these workers come to blame themselves for their shortcomings and failure to adapt to the realities of today’s economy. Their lives spiral downward as they cope with strained familial relationships, personal mental illness, and a society that has tossed them aside while simultaneously saying they are to blame for their own problems. Fascinatingly, Chen finds that these conditions and consequences mostly hold true for autoworkers in Canada, which is often lauded for its stronger and broader social safety net, as it does in the United States. With great empathy and astute analysis, Cut Loose shows the human side of economic transformations bereft of sound public policies and collectivist strategies Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in northern Ethiopia. Focusing on the juxtaposition of culture, religion and medicine, Hannig turns the heroic narrative of surgery on its head to expose the realities of life for women treated in, and living at the centers. Utilizing first-person interviews, she show the human face to the surgery and its aftermath. Moving beyond the easy and cathartic narrative promulgated by the media and non-profit fundraisers, Hannig shows the complex reality of life post-surgery. Hannig’s book is a testament to the importance of good, long-term research in the arena of public health in the developing 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

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility, once America’s largest producer of plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. government spends around $2 billion a year on cleanup efforts at Hanford, which have been the sole focus at the site since its reactors were shut down at the end of the Cold War. Melvin R. Adams was one of the first environmental engineers hired at Hanford as part of a small team focused on environmental issues. Beginning in 1979, his 24-year career at Hanford progressed alongside increasing government investment in more responsible management of nuclear waste and its disposal. In Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Washington State University Press, 2016) Adams recounts engineering efforts to mitigate and control radioactive contamination and offers amusing anecdotes of the characters tasked with cleaning up the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. He also captures the paradox of Hanford, an artifact of the atomic age surrounded (and sometimes invaded by) wild terrain, natural beauty, and flourishing biodiversity. Atomic Geography offers personal and poetic insight into a complex, contested landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others, due in large part to experiences in utero and during the first year of life. My guest, psychologist Dr. Daniel Keating, explores these biological and genetic mechanisms in his new book, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity–and How to Break the Cycle (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). His many years of research inform his ideas about the role of social inequality in elevated stress levels, and the impact of stress and adversity on gene expression and manifestations of anxiety. In our interview, we talk about the implications of these findings for understanding why some people perpetually feel tightly-wound and easily triggered. He also shares his suggestions for breaking this cycle and reducing our proneness to anxiety. Daniel P. Keating is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He has conducted research at leading North American universities, at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, and with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, where he was a fellow for two decades and led the program in human development. His research focuses on developmental differences–cognitive, social, and emotional and in physical and mental health. Listen to our interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Llana Barber explores the transformation of Lawrence into New England’s first Latina/o-majority city during the second half of the twentieth century. As with other industrial cities throughout the Rust Belt, Lawrence encountered an urban crisis via the processes of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and suburbanization in the decades following World War II. During this period, the city also experienced a continuous influx of imperial migrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Interweaving the narratives of urban crisis and Latina/o migration from the Caribbean, Barber examines the experience of Latinas/os in Lawrence through the lenses of imperialism, displacement, and exclusion. Whereas existent scholarship on the urban crisis has primarily focused on the 1960s and 1970s, Latino City pushes this discussion into the 1980s and 1990s, while also illuminating its effects on second tier cities like Lawrence. As she details the similarities and differences between African American and Latina/o experiences during the crisis era, Barber adeptly explains how Latinas/os revitalized Lawrence’s failing social, economic, and political institutions, and in the process, saved the city from the abandonment of white residents and capital. David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 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

Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic or unaesthetic annoyances to be eliminated, Lacey instead suggests ways in which they can be creatively harnessed to give new expression to urban life. Featuring expansive theoretical discussions and detailed analysis of Lacey’s own work as a sound artist, the book proposes the 5 element sonic rupture model as a way to diversify our experiences of city life. New Books in Sound Studies is a collaboration between the Centre for Media Data and Society at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of them. Mainstreaming Black Power (University of California Press, 2017) upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. Mainstreaming Black Power shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The author emphasizes that Black Power’s reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community. Author Tom Adam Davies is a lecturer and a school visits representative in American History at the University of Sussex. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds and is a specialist in twentieth-century postwar political and social American history, with a particular focus on the history of race in the United States and the relationship between public policy and mainstream political institutions and movements for social, economic and political change. Davies has also written and recorded a six-part podcast lecture series on the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements for Massolit, a company which produces audio-visual online educational content primarily for A-Level students across the United Kingdom. Mainstreaming Black Power is his first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry, you won’t need calculus to enjoy and appreciate this book. Its actually an intriguing way to introduce some of the precalculus topics that will later be needed in a calculus class, through the examination of some of the basic mathematical ideas that can be used to analyze the problems of how to attain relationship bliss, live long, and prosper and all without being a Vulcan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy (Sydney University Press, 2016), Peter John Chen, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Sydney, explores the issue of animal welfare in Australia through the lens of political science. He examines how the media, interest groups, government officials, and the Australian public engage in debate and construct policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interests that pushed for a new constitution, from the League of Women Voters to the new residents in the emergent southern coasts of Florida in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the process of reforming a constitution that was rooted in the traditional rotten borough politics of 19th-century Florida. She analyzes the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that forced states to reapportion their legislatures, contending that Florida’s districts were so malapportioned that without the Court’s decisions there might not have been any constitutional revision. Adkins also discusses today’s constitutional revision process, which is ongoing every 20 years and is occurring in 2017. Florida’s political context has always been an amalgam of traditional Southern politics and the emergent commercial and tourism-based economy of a coastal state. Adkin’s book illuminates how these conditions produced political conflict and constitutional change. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political 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

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization, suburbanization (or “white flight”), gentrification, and postindustrial/neoliberal growth policies, among others. In Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (New York University Press, 2017) , Associate Professor Christopher Mele shows readers the more granular details of this history. Focusing on growth, decline, and revitalization of Chester, a small city in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, Mele specifically reveals how race, or an ideology and discourse of racial blindness, have been used as a strategy of exclusion since World War I. Proceeding chronologically, the book examines how the politics of growth in Chester have revolved on ideas of race, from housing segregation to civil rights clashes. It culminates with the present-day realities of life in Chester, in which the city boasts a casino, a soccer stadium, and a redeveloped waterfront, mainly for visitors, while its majority population of low-income minorities get labeled as either compliant participants in (e.g. as low-wage workers) or obstructions to (e.g. as criminals or deviants) this image and growth. The imagery ignores the structural conditions that create their poverty. Mele provides a new, fascinating lens for looking at the relationship between race and space in the city. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection, Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lexington Books, 2017), brings together authors in a variety of fields within the humanities to reconsider the arguments that have been made in support of the humanities over the past decades, even as these disciplines have declined in terms of majors and faculty appointments across the United States. Kirk Fitzpatrick, James W. Harrison, Nozomi Irei, David Lunt, Kristopher G. Phillips and the collection editor, Lee Trepanier, represent perspectives from philosophy, literature, history, languages, political philosophy, while also engaging the question of what constitutes a liberal education in the 21st century, especially given the role of education within society. This text, which provides some thoughtful considerations beyond the often-given reasons for why the humanities are fundamentally important, is a kind of starting point for dialogue across disciplines, within colleges and university, but also among the public in considering the role of higher education in our contemporary democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland, author of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) , a whirlwind tour of the welfare state, past and present. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society 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 in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated, and specifically focuses on what transpired over the past fifteen years that shifted attitudes around the issue of LGBT rights. Grounded in multiple dimensions of Political Science, Political Psychology, Political Theory, Communications Studies, and LGBT Studies, Harrison and Michelson examine, through randomized experiments done in collaboration with a variety of LGBT advocacy groups, their theory of dissonant identity priming. This theory, as they note in their work, provides an understanding of the shift in acceptance of LGBT rights. The book explores the experiments that were done across the United States to test the hypothesis and determine the validity of the theory. Following the discussion of the theory itself, the grounding in political science, political psychology and political communications, and the experiment, the book also discusses how the information learned through the experiments may be put to use in politics. The book speaks to political science scholars and researchers while also addressing pracademics, activists, and advocacy groups. The authors also argue that Political Science, as a discipline, has come late to the understanding and incorporation of LBGT Studies as a legitimate dimension of the political science discipline, noting that rights of citizens denied or abrogated because of sexual orientation are still rights denied, and positioning their research within the mainstream of political science while integrating the study of rights of a group that has often been on the edges of political science scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies: the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims–legal, economic, cultural–compete to shape taxpayer behaviour. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016), about their decade-long research project tracking the ambitions and activities of 150 black Baltimore youth born in the 1980s and 1990s to parents living in high-rise public housing. The results — and the implications — will likely surprise you as much as it did them. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society 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 Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics. For Muslim communities in the US and beyond, few expectations and pressures have carried more weight and urgency than that to pass the test of moderation. In her brilliant new book, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy (Stanford University Press, 2016), Rosemary Corbett, Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative, interrogates the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the moderate Muslim discourse. Far from an exclusively post 9/11 phenomenon, she presents the long running historical and political forces that have shaped the demand for moderation, especially in the equation of Sufism with moderate Islam. The strength of this book lies in the way it combines a deep knowledge of American religious history with the historical narrative and contemporary dynamics of American Islam. Written with breathtaking clarity, this book will spark important conversations in multiple fields including the study of Islam, American Religion, and secularism studies. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Hudak unpacks and explains the historical place of marijuana in the United States, and the way that marijuana is situated within the criminal justice system, and how it is understood within our cultural vernacular and moral perspectives of what is right and wrong, legal and illegal. As marijuana now seems to be on a journey towards decriminalization or legalization in a number of states in the U.S., Hudak explores the way in which marijuana became an illegal substance, and how it is connected to the demonization of others–most specifically Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and the American counter-culture of earlier decades. The history of marijuana is fascinating because it highlights the evolution of various forms of regulation in the United States; and, as marijuanas classification in some states is changing (in terms of the legal access to medical marijuana or the legalization of recreational marijuana), Hudak examines the constraints within the regulatory system that make those changes more difficult to execute. This text weaves together a variety of analytical perspectives, from political science, public policy, public administration, cultural studies, sociology, and criminal justice, in exploring marijuana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 2016), Hale, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, argues that we ought to act in environmentally friendly ways because it is the right thing to do. On his view, environmentally friendly action is motivated by reflecting on our reasons for acting, guided by a concern that our actions be acceptable to a wide range of parties. In this accessible discussion intended for a wide audience, Hale provides a fresh philosophical grounding for thinking about human action and inaction regarding the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finland’s educational system resulting from its success on international assessments and explains how policy translates into classroom routines and structures as well as what American teachers can learn from their Finnish counterparts. We discuss how the two countries take different views on what makes good teachers and learning outcomes as well as ways teachers can promote well-being in any school context. He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation: Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley The Well-Balanced Teacher: How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside the Classroom and Out by Mike Anderson Walker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @timdwalk. 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

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what culture you were born and raise in. Alcoholism and treatments for it in Country A might be very different from alcoholism and treatments for it in countries B, C, and D. Alcoholism is, well, relative. This is one of the many thing I learned from reading Eugene Raikhel‘s fascinating book Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016). An anthropologist, Raikhel tells us the tale of how the Soviet discipline of “narcology”–the diagnosis and treatment of addiction– evolved during Soviet times and how it adapted after the USSR fell. I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that Russians treated and continue to treat alcoholism quite differently that we do in the U.S., though that’s changing (AA has arrived in Russia, something we also discuss). Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Psychological and psychoanalytic principles are often associated with individuals and therapist-client pairs, though they have plenty to bear on understanding and helping organizations in trouble. In particular, a psychoanalytic lens can uncover unconsciously-held beliefs members hold, about one another and about the organization as a whole, that impede effective functioning. In his new book, Discovering Organizational Identity: Dynamics of Relational Attachment (University of Missouri, 2016), organizational consultant and researcher Michael Diamond explores the complex role of organizational identity in the life and success of organizations. In our interview, he explains what an organizational identity is and how its identification and articulation can help heal long-standing splits and enhance reflection and communication in even the most troubled organizations. His wisdom from 35 years of experience in this field is relevant for anyone who starts, leads, or works in an organization. Dr. Michael Diamond is Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Organization Studies, University of Missouri, Columbia. His more than 35 years of writing and research are focused on the nexus of psychoanalysis, organizational politics, and culture. His prior books include The Unconscious Life of Organizations: Interpreting Organizational Identity (1993, Praeger) and Private Selves in Public Organizations (2009, Palgrave Macmillan). Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (ILR/Cornell University Press, 2017) Dr. Michael A. McCarthy takes the reader through the historical background of the U.S. pension system. He breaks down the development of the current system into three parts: the spread of employer based private pensions, the financialization and investment of pension funds into the stock market, and the replacement of traditional pension plans with 401(k) retirement plans. McCarthy argues that pensions have moved from being solidaristic, or relying on social systems, to increasingly being tied to risky capitalist markets. Using a rich set of historical archives, he explains how changes in the pension system usually came about in response to economic pressures, for example the end of World War II. By providing examples throughout the book, he delves deeper into how the current pension system developed within a capitalist context, noting how many of the changes to the system were unintentional or secondary to other factors at hand. One of the key pieces of the book that makes this a clear example of Sociology is the important attention McCarthy pays to the fact that the pension system has become a system of social stratification, meaning those who need pensions the most are the least likely to have them. This book would be good for a variety of audiences including sociologists broadly, policy makers, historians, and political scientists. By providing a historical frame to the current U.S. pension system, McCarthy helps the reader understand how we got here and where we might be headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain people both do and believe others should do. When confronting real-world cases where groups act in ways that are problematic and harmful, it matters a great deal which kind of mechanism underlies the behavior. This is especially the case for those who seek to change the groups’ behavior. In Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms (Oxford University Press, 2017), Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) lays out a nuanced theory of group behavior, establishes means for measuring individuals’ sensitivity to social norms, and explores the ways in which interventions can be designed to change social norms. The book grows out of her collaboration with UNICEF and other NGO’s devoted to initiating social change in the developing world. The details of Bicchieri’s theory of social norms are explored in her Coursera courses on “Social Norms, Social Change I” and “Social Norms, Social Change II.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis. Assistant Professor Michaela DeSoucey takes readers to the farms in southwest France, where ducks are force-fed with tubes placed down their throats, and into the high-end restaurants in Chicago, where foie gras was temporarily banned in the 2000s and made an object of fascination. Her aim is to show how we could use what she calls gastropolitics, or the conflicts over food and culinary practices that get branded as social problems and lie at the intersection of social movements, cultural markets, and government regulation, to understand the implications and impacts these contestations have for social life in a variety of contexts. The result is a highly informative and entertaining journey through the social and symbolic terrain surrounding foie gras. Readers will truly learn a lot from liver. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this episode, I speak with Pat Farenga about the new edition of John Holt’s Freedom and Beyond (HoltGWS LLC, 2017). This book offers a broad critique of traditional schooling and its capacity for solving social problems. We discuss John Holt’s transition from classroom teacher to public intellectual as well as the broader implications of schools prioritizing job training over citizenship and self-actualization. He recommends the following books for listeners interested in Holt’s work and our conversation: The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology by Jean Hendrick Van Den Berg Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl Farenga joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @patfarenga. 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

Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as high-modernist attempts to industrialize, urbanize, bureaucratize, and centralize. Indeed, modernization and development have almost come to be synonymous in our historical imaginations. Daniel Immerwahr’s Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2015) shows that this is not the whole story. Immerwahr, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, writes communitarianism back into the history of development. He traces a troubling history of how social scientists, policymakers, and civil servants were enamored of ideas of community development and how they tested these ideas in Indian villages, counterinsurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia, and the US war on poverty. Daniel makes important arguments about the mid-century ambivalence towards modernity, the global dimensions of domestic policy formation and the problematic appeal of community. Taking this story to the present, Daniel shows the limits of contemporary localist approaches to global inequality and makes his own profound and persuasive policy prescriptions. This fascinating book should be of interest to intellectual historians, diplomatic historians, historians of the global south, as well as development workers and anyone else engaged in debates about global poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A number of recent events (the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign) have brought inequality and poverty into national conversation. In an age of economic uncertainty and a declining social safety net, understanding the lives of people dealing with impoverished conditions has been a key task of social scientists. Focusing on people living below the poverty line and struggling to survive, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor (NYU Press, 2017) is an excellent addition to this literature. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork, Assistant Professor Joan Maya Mazelis examines the important role of what she calls “sustainable social ties” for alleviating poverty among the poor. Comparing members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a grassroots organization operated by and for the poor, with non-members, she learns about the value of social networks for helping poor people’s daily survival. Along with advocating on their behalf, the organization also mitigates the negative feelings of reciprocity that often leads poor people to refrain from asking others for help. Readers will hear an array of rich, personal stories about the struggles of living in poverty, and learn some of the strategies poor people use to survive. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a unemployed, rail thin degenerate with bad acne, no teeth and a penchant for child abuse. In these depictions, all meth users are “tweekers,” that is, very bad people who are addicted to speed (here, meth) and who can’t take care of themselves or others. But it just ain’t so, as Travis Linnemann points out in his thought-provoking book Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power (NYU Press, 2016). The image we get from the media and the law enforcement of meth use is as cooked as Walter White’s meth. In actual fact, very few peoples use meth (even in “Methland,” aka the Midwest) and most of those who do are not dysfunctional “tweekers.” This is not to say that meth isn’t a problem; it is, just like cocaine, heroin, abused prescription medications, and, above all, alcohol. But it isn’t as different from these “normal” drugs as the media and authorities would have us believe. It’s a powerful stimulant. It’s used for a variety of purposes, some of them having nothing to do with getting high (as a stimulant, meth is especially attractive to those who work long, hard hours). Some people can use it without acting like or appearing to be “tweekers.” The typical meth user is employed, acne-free, has a mouth full of teeth and takes care of his or her children. Just like the typical user of Adderall or any number of legal and widely prescribed amphetamines. Yet, according to the media and authorities, there is a “meth epidemic” that we should all fear as if it were something absolutely unprecedented. And, because meth is so particularly dangerous (so the line goes), we should throw all the meth users in jail forthwith. No thought is given to harm-reduction. As Linnemann shows, our twisted, distorted understanding of meth is beyond hypocritical; it’s positively harmful, particularly for the users and their families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. What happens to the basic services of government after democratic institutions take hold? Specifically, when do elected officials relinquish the clientelistic approach to the provision of water services? In Water & Politics, Herrera shows that middle-class and business interests play an important role in generating pressure for public service reforms. Based on extensive field research and combining process tracing with a subnational comparative analysis of eight Mexican cities, Water & Politics constructs a framework for understanding the construction of universal service provision in these weak institutional settings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social justice” language is employed. But what if these are, in fact, conservative programs at their heart, ones that, in the context of the corporatized university, are furthering the neoliberal project and inhibiting the development of better social welfare policies? Listen to our interview with Randy Stoecker as he discusses his book, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (Temple University Press, 2016), for a first-hand critique as well as some thoughts on how we might all better serve our students — and the communities they would engage with. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society 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 in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, and are there actually lessons that traditional higher ed institutions can learn from them? Join us as we speak with Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society 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 Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, the author argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education may in fact reinforce the race and class hierarchies that they purport to alleviate. As their voices reveal, the teachers and students on the receiving end of such a system can be critically conscious and ambivalent participants in a school’s racialized marketing and image management. Timely and provocative, this nuanced work exposes the unintended consequences of an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice. Amy Brown is an educational anthropologist and a faculty member in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research she often explores how the increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. Another area of focus for Brown is how “philanthrocapitalism” and reliance on private sector funding influence constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-wave survey methodology delves into the gendered psyche of elections by analysing the public attitudes and voter choice of over 3000 individuals. Finding that gender stereotypes in voter consciousness are present but not determinative, Dolan rewrites the conventional wisdom that stereotyped attitudes are detrimental to a woman’s electability. However, in forcing the reader to acknowledge the nexus between voter and candidate, Dolan’s data analysis extends to campaign strategy. Based on the 2010 races for Congress and Governor, When Does Gender Matter? builds on the work of other political scientists that have found evidence of candidate emergence being gendered (Lawless and Fox 2010), and analyses every televised campaign ad of the candidates for whom the 3000 survey participants voted. In the gendered terrain between attitude and action, for both voter and candidate, Dolan’s scholarship provides a roadmap for its multi-disciplinary readership into the gendered psyche of American elections. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonc’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Find her on twitter @TaylorFoxSmith3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Harris Beider is the author of White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change (Policy Press, 2015). Beider is chair in Community Cohesion at the Center for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. Many of the same socio-economic changes that scholars have associated with the rise of President Donald Trump in the US have been associated with recent political events in Great Britain. The white-working class has been at the center of many of these debates, but often based on limited empirical evidence of their beliefs and attitudes. Based on over 200 interviews in multiple sites in the UK, Beider challenges conventional notions of the white working-class. Especially on issues of race and multiculturalism, the book adds nuance and detail to the ways white working-class people have reacted to de-industrialization, the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the country, and the strategies taken by major political parties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program, and offers a fascinating story of unexpected policy origins and of the interplay between psychiatric theory, race, and U.S. social welfare policy. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society 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 in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, joins the New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled The Civic University: The Policy and Leadership Challenges (Edward Elgar Pub 2016). She is the co-editor of the book, along with John Goddard, Louise Kempton, and Paul Vallance. The book explores the new challenges that universities face in this era defined by globalization and internationalization, but also by the consequences of funding shortages and slashed budgets. The authors of the book look at ways institutions can better embed themselves into their surrounding cities or environments to have greater meaning and connection, instead of becoming separate Ivory Tower islands. While the focus is on the management of solutions to these issues and challenges, the target audience for this book is anyone interested in education, civics, or policy. Ellen Hazelkorn previously joined the New Books Network to discuss Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is the role of evidence in the policy process? In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2016), Justin Parkhurst, Associate Professor of Global Health Policy at the London School of Economics, maps the history of evidence based policy making and offers a new model for the good governance of appropriate evidence in policy. The book is both agenda setting and a detailed and insightful overview of evidence in policy. Moreover, the range of examples shows the importance of understanding the norms and values shaping politics and thus setting the circumstances for evidence use. In the complex and contested current context for evidence in policy, the book makes an important intervention charting the possibility of a more transparent form of decision making and a more evidence informed approach to policy. The book is available as an open access version here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The 9/11 attacks revealed a breakdown in American intelligence and there was a demand for individuals and institutions to find out what went wrong, correct it, and prevent another catastrophe like 9/11 from ever happening again. In Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown Publishers, 2016) Karen J. Greenberg discusses how the architects of the War on Terror transformed American justice into an arm of the Security State. She tells the story of law and policy after 9/11, introducing the reader to key players and events, showing that time and again, when liberty and security have clashed, justice has been the victim. Expanded intelligence capabilities established after 9/11 (such as torture, indefinite detention even for Americans, offshore prisons created to bypass the protections of the rule of law, mass warrantless surveillance against Americans not suspected of criminal behavior, and overseas assassinations of terrorism suspects, including at least one American) have repeatedly chosen to privilege security over the rule of law. The book addresses how fear guides policy and the dangers of indulging these fears. Karen concludes that “[t]he institutions of justice, caught up in the war on terror, have gone rogue.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, political theory, and political science, Democracy Against Domination reinterprets Progressive Era economic thought for the challenges of today. The book offers a new approach to regulation and governance rooted in democratic theory and the writing of Louis Brandeis and John Dewey. In order to oversee complex economic activities and financial markets, Rahman argues for more democracy, not less, more participation by citizens and more participatory institutions established to facilitate this aim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways. These have included belief in divine origins, biological causation, and environmental influences. And treatments for mental illness have undergone a similar evolution. In his book Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity (Princeton University Press, 2015), Andrew Scull offers an important and timely examination of this complicated history. And in our interview, he talks about what motivated him to take on such an ambitious and important project and his hopes for the future of psychiatry and psychology. Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His prior books include Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (2016); Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (2015); and The Insanity of Place / The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry (2015). Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D.is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Pope said that Donald Trump wasn’t much of a Christian if all he can think about is building walls. Trump replied that it was “disgraceful” for a any leader, even the Pope, “to question another man’s religion or faith.” I imagine that many Americans agreed with Trump on this score. But is Trump’s “radical tolerance” position really sensible? Can’t someone reasonably and respectfully say to another “Gee, I think you’ve got that particular point of scripture wrong” or even “I think your faith is, well, misguided for reasons X, Y an Z”? In his thought-provoking book The Limits of Religious Tolerance (Amherst College Press, 2016), Alan J. Levinovitz argues that we can and indeed must question religion, both our own and everyone else’s. How else, he asks, are we to understand why we and our fellow citizens believe what we say we believe? To be sure, Levinovitz advises that we only engage in critical discussions of religion in certain, well-defined contexts: churches, synagogues, mosques and such are good places to practice religion, not debate it. In contrast, Levinovitz proposes, universities–places defined by rational investigation and (in theory) civil discussion–are perfect for debates about religion. And, Levinovitz continues, institutions of higher education should do everything in their power to encourage it. Thanks to Amherst College Press, Levinovitz’s wonderful book is available free for download here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why? In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Rebecca S. Natow, Senior Research Associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, joins New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled Higher Education Rulemaking: The Politics of Creating Regulatory Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). In the book, she explores what happens after higher education legislation becomes law, specifically focusing on implementation of programs and rules in the sector. For the study, in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals from the US Department of Education, congressional staffers, representatives from higher educational institutions, both student and consumer representatives, mediation experts, state government officials, and representatives from the lending industry. Professor Natow previously joined New Books Network to discuss The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) offers a detailed examination of how the reform regimen of incarceration developed as the new American nation was experiencing deep social and political transformation. The place of women, African-Americans, immigrants and the poor was recast by new attitudes toward maintaining the social order through the patriarchal family, heterosexual regulation and the property system. Penitentiaries were designed to replace harsh British methods of corporal punishment with republican reform for those accused of property crimes, vagrancy, and public disorder. Reform was imposed through a system of work and submission to disciplinary authority. Within the walls of the prison, women approximated the model of domesticity and submission, while men faced the challenge of demonstrating manly responsibility within a system of denigration. Both men and women charged with crimes resisted the imposition of gender expectations and social hierarchies making their own claims to liberty. Manion not only looks at the gender dynamics but also how race and ethnicity shaped the experience of prisoners as potentially good citizens. By examining the social history of a failed penal system, Liberty’s Prisoners offers a window into the gender and race system of the new republic. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Misunderstanding Terrorism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Marc Sageman provides an important reassessment of the global neojihadi threat to the West. He argues that inaccurate evaluations of the threat and overreactions to a limited threat have transformed U.S. society. By constructing a model to explain the turn to political violence, Sageman shows how a misunderstanding of terrorism in the West has dramatically inflated fear of the actual danger posed by neojihadis. This has led to overreaction of the counterterrorist community, which has resulted in threats to fundamental civil liberties. Sageman makes the distinction that the vast majority of political protestors are not violent and he expands on the conditions that may turn some members of an imagined community from talking about violence to engaging in violence. The book brings realistic numbers into the assessment of the threat facing the West and concludes with straightforward policies to end the threat instead of perpetuating it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world.Canada was once a leading producer of asbestos and home to the worlds largest chrysotile asbestos mine, located in the Town of Asbestos in the province of Quebec. This is the subject of a new book by Professor Jessica van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (UBC Press, 2016), is a thoroughly researched and thoroughly shocking account of the history of asbestos mining, environmental health, and resistance in this small, Quebec resource town. How did the people of the Town of Asbestos respond to the growth of asbestos mining, the knowledge of the harmful health effects of asbestos, and the consequence for their own bodies? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Jessica van Horssen about her new book. Crossposted with permission from Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he means that policy should be decoded so its secrets can be laid bare, rather than treated as an impenetrable mystery. To this end, in the book, as well as in the interview, Gros uses a variety of methodological approaches to explain/explicate the relative roles of agency and institutions in the history of healthcare policy in Africa. The book’s central thesis is that healthcare policy does not take place in a vacuum and it fills an important gap in the scholarship by examining the impact of factors including debt relief, conflict, humanitarianism, brain drain and globalization on policy affecting and affected by the health and wealth of Africans. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She 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