New Books In Public Policy

It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is the subject of a wide-ranging new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary (Viking, 2018). In Temp, Louis Hyman, Professor of History at the Industrial and Labor Relations School of Cornell University, presents a detailed history of the unraveling of steady work. Hyman acknowledges that secure, lucrative, meaningful work has never been equally available to all Americans, even amidst the prosperity of the post-WWII era. He also argues compellingly that the shift toward privileging shareholders over employees and short-term profit over long-term prosperity was not inevitable, nor is it irreversible. Jobs are less secure today not because the market demanded it but because, starting as early as the 1950s, executives, consultants, and policy makers decided to make them th

A lot of politicians like to say that there are “two Americas,” but do any of them know what life is really like for the marginalized poor? We speak with journalist and photographer, Chris Arnade, about the forgotten towns and people of back row America. In 2011, Chris left a high-powered job as a bond trader on Wall Street, hit the road, and spent years documenting the lives of poor people, driving 150 thousand miles around the U.S. His new book is Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Sentinel, 2019). In his many columns in The Guardian, Chris writes about broken social systems that have betrayed poor people on the margins of society. He speaks to us about drug addicts and prostitutes he met, and their faith, resilience and ties to community. "I think if I had one suggestion to policy people, it would be get out of your bubble," says Chris. "I think when you blame a group of people for their behavior, without addressing the situation they find themselves in, then you are doing it wrong." In this epi

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with A.R. Ruis about the 2017 book Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States – published in 2017 by Rutgers University Press. Ruis narrates the development of school lunch programs from the late 19th century to the present, describing the evolution from locally organized charitable initiatives into the federally funded and managed programs that we know today. While school lunches seem almost inseparable from the American public school experience, Ruis explains that it was not clear in the 19th century whether schools had the ethical obligation or even the legal right to provide food. Ruis argues that the decision to supply lunches for students extends from constitutive moments in history when schools became a site for distributing health and wellness services of many kinds. Through case studies of Chicago, New York, and rural schools in the Midwest, Ruis demonstrates that while most schools followed a similar path to esta

Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the causes of this ongoing discrimination, the harm it does not just to women and their families but to productivity and economic growth, and what governments can do about it. Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy (Hurst, 2019) is a fresh and timely reminder that, although the #MeToo movement has been hugely important, empowerment of the mind will not achieve full power for women while there remains economic inequality. Pryce urgently calls for feminists to focus attention on this pressing issue: the pay gap, the glass ceiling, and the obstacles to women working at all. Only with government intervention in the labor market will these long-standing problems finally be conquered. From the gendered threat of robot labor to the lack of women in economics itself, this is a sharp look at an

What happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Using ethnographic methods and interviews to deep dive into the aftermath of a local immigration raid, Lopez provides the stories of community members affected by the event and how their lives are changed forever after. The book provides a robust background of information regarding policy issues relevant to the current immigration climate, like the REAL ID act, as well as experiences from a myriad of perspectives. Lopez also draws on lessons from the Black Lives Matter movement and provides a rich discussion of his positionality (called "reflexivity" in research methods). Overall, this book provides a powerful testimony to events happening in our communities and neighborhoods and is written to a wide audience. This book would align well with graduate level courses on policy, families, ra

Philip M. Napoli has been thinking about algorithmic news and social media feed curation for quite some time, as he acknowledges in his new book, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019). Initially this topic was not as pressing as it now seems to be, but Napoli has been exploring this issue and and trying to figure out how it might work in terms of regulation – self, governmental, or otherwise – for a while. Social Media and the Public Interest approaches this complex and multi-layered issue from a host of perspectives, leading the reader into the broader discussion through a history of social media, but that history itself is positioned within a brief but important history of the internet and the world wide web. At the same time, the book covers a lot of important ground in thinking about the First Amendment, how journalism operates in the age of social media and an otherwise fluid and changing environment for traditional media. Napol

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local levels to develop and implement plans to mitigate a community's greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of communities against climate change impacts. This fully revised and expanded edition goes well beyond climate action plans to examine the mix of policy and planning instruments available to every community. Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale also look at process and communication: How does a community bring diverse voices to the table? What do recent examples and research tell us about successful communication strategies? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento. American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in US democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, he examines how the student debt problem emerged and what the long-term effects of this might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors

In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully writes that, “Every once in a while, an outstanding work of scholarship comes along that transforms the way a seemingly intractable injustice is seen and, in so doing, also transforms the way it should be approached and addressed by all concerned.” In this second episode in our new series, New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, we hear from the book’s author, Sarah Marie Wiebe, about what that intractable injustice is, and why hers is one such work of scholarship, which won the 2017 Charles Taylor Book Award. Along the way she discusses environmental reproductive justice, political ethnography, her method of “sensing policy”, and her new book project, Life against a State of Emergency: Interrupting the Gendered Biopolitics of Settler-Colonialism, about which you can read and view more on the Universit

If we want children from poor families and communities to succeed in school, then we must pay attention to more than merely what happens in school. With twelve case studies highlighting an array of Integrated Student Support (ISS) strategies from throughout the U.S., Paul Reville shows us that we already know a lot about how to move toward a world in which children have genuine equality of opportunity. Join us to hear about Reville and Elaine Weiss' book Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty (Harvard Education Press, 2019). 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 y

The neoliberal 1980s of austerity and privatization may appear as a break with the past—perhaps a model of government drawn up by libertarian economists. Not so, says Amy Offner in her spectacular new book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019). Offner, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, shows how strategies such as self-help housing, for-profit privatized state-functions, and austere social programs were well-trodded decades earlier in the mid-century “mixed economy.” She also shows how these statebuilding strategies and their advocates moved back and forth between Latin America and the United States. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy brings together the history of U.S. foreign relations with that of domestic policy and of capitalism, and is therefore bound to shake up all three. Experts of each are well-advised to spend time with Offner’s provocative but wise analysis. Dexter Fergi

Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps least of all, what to do about it. Join us to hear Jonathan Rothwell talk about his new book, A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which pushes back against some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of inequality to offer his own provocative diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies for it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides concep

We Americans are defined by our Constitution and we cherish especially the First and Second Amendments. But like all texts, the Constitution can be read to empower and protect our individual rights, but it can also be used selectively, self-servingly, and in bad faith. And the Constitution guarantees two things: our own personal liberties, unfettered by threats from the government, and equal treatment before the law. So is online harassment, assault weapons in every hand, and hate speech the price we all pay for the freedoms we enjoy? Or is is the price that certain people pay and others don't? Professor Mary Anne Franks, author of The Cult of the Constitution (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an expert on the First and Second Amendments and the author of several legislative bills that now govern the nonconsensual pictures of intimacy distributed online (also called "revenge porn"). She asks whether our country's faith and belief in the Constitution amounts to something like a cult, where unquestioning bel

What is the future of the museum? In The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Johanna Taylor, an assistant professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts’ Design School at Arizona State University, explores the relationship between art museums and the contemporary city. Using a case study of Corona Plaza and Queens’ Museum in New York, the book details how museums can co-operate, collaborate and organise with and for local communities. The case study thinks through questions of power in public space, the potential tension between social, economic, and cultural goals, as well as the relationship between government, art museum, and community. As cultural institutions face a changing world and associated questions of legitimacy, the book is essential reading for public, practitioner, and academic audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes require

Presidency scholars Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige have compiled an excellent array of authors and essays in their edited volume, The Obama Legacy (University Press of Kansas, 2019). This book, with twelve chapters that explore multiple dimensions of Barack Obama’s Administration, provides readers with substantial analysis of policy, partisanship, historical and political context in considering both the administration itself and the legacy of Obama’s administration. This book is part of a series that has included retrospective evaluation and analysis of the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. While this series on individual presidential legacies was initially published by other presses, it now resides at the University Press of Kansas as part of the book series on presidential appraisals and legacies. The Obama Legacy covers the domestic and foreign policy attempts, failures, and achievements in thoughtful chapters by Alyssa Julian, John D. Graham, and

In Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close ethnographic study of its urban governance. She sheds light on the institutional classism and racism and market-orientated thinking that pervades the decisions and practices of environmentalism and economic growth in the city. Houston’s finds three major social values--social justice, sustainability, and creativity—pervade policy creation in the city and condition privileges and oppressions. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to