New Books In 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 real

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 of

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

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 psycholog

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

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

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 histor

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 cha

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

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

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 t

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

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 delve

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 c

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 regulat

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, paren

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 mod

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

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

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