New Books In Public Policy

Authorship represents a new area of policy-related work within higher education research administration, funding agencies, and scholarly journal publishing. Developing Authorship and Copyright Ownership Policies: Best Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) by Allyson Mower offers the unique aspect of combining details on copyright ownership as well as authorship into a single volume on best practices for administrators, journal publishers, research managers, and policy drafters within and outside of higher education. Discover more about the definition of 'author'--from data gatherer to writer--to inform policy development while understanding the interconnected relationships between authorship, copyright ownership, and scholarly communication. This book will also demonstrate how to develop inclusive and equitable authorship policies that reflect the range of diversity within the research endeavor and scholarly publishing. Allyson Mower, MA, MLIS has served as the scholarly communication and copyright librarian

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choi

The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the

Addressing practice-oriented questions, this handbook engages with both theoretical and political dimensions, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research for new and established scholars alike and for movement-based as well as academic researchers across many disciplines. Divided into three thematic sections, this stimulating Handbook dives deep into discussions relating to the methodological challenges raised by researching social movements, the technical questions of how such research is conducted, and then to more practical considerations about the uses and applications of movement research. Expert contributors and established researchers utilise real-world examples to explore the methodological challenges from a range of perspectives including classical, engaged, feminist, Black, Indigenous and global Southern viewpoints.  Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements (Edward Elgar, 2024) will not only appeal to experienced researchers, but also to activists who

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing. Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs.  In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War

Today I talked to Ryan Manucha about his new book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022). In 2012, after Gerard Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into New Brunswick, police officers tailed and detained him, confiscated his haul, and levied a fine. With Comeau's story as his starting point, Ryan Manucha tells the fascinating tale of Canadian interprovincial trade. Interprovincial trade barriers and other frictions bring much-needed revenue into the coffers of provincial governments, which then can direct these funds toward various social services, but hinder the mobility of professionals, account for the different building codes imposed by Canadian provinces, and generally increase the price tag for Canadian consumers. In a candid interview, Ryan explains his interest in this topic, the backbone of his book's argument, and his efforts to make change workable. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019), Brookings Institution senior scholar William Gale tackles the challenge head on, addressing what needs to happen to healthcare spending, Social Security, individual taxes, and corporate taxes, in order to make the numbers add up. It makes for sober reading, and the longer we wait, the worse the situation becomes. And the key challenge may not even be fiscal, but political, as the disagreements in Washington over the debt are as deep as the debt is large. Gale ends by making a few simple, inside-Washington suggestions as to how he thinks the political impasse can be broken. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory. In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our re

Soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality have been documented by social scientists – but the public conversation and scholarship on inequality has not examined the role of state law and state courts in establishing policies that significantly affect inequality. Political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson analyze their original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century to demonstrate how state high courts craft policy. The fifty state supreme courts shape American inequality in two ways: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as "upperdogs").  The book focuses on court-made public policy on issues including educational equity and adequacy, LGBTQ+ rights, and worker's rights. The conventional wisdom assumes that courts protect underdogs from majorities but Gibson and Nelson demonstrate that judges most often fa

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb (U Chicago Press, 2023) tells us there's more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation--and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality. Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote l

Never have policy initiatives been so important than in today’s society. Neoliberal manifestations, climate change, civil rights movements, and governmental reactions to these issues have created a backdrop where greater education in policy analysis and development is vital. Listen to this informative interview with one of the authors, Dr. David Young, a Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of government at St. Francis Xavier University, to find out how policy is implemented and shaped by students, teachers, school board representatives, and government officials at the school, board, provincial and federal levels. While focused on the Canadian example, Policy Matters: Perspectives, Procedures, and Processes (Emerald Publishing, 2023) draws from a variety of examples and has relevance to education systems in other countries. Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a

Drawing from his experiences of having belonged to the faculty, administrative, and presidential circles of the university, author Nicholas B. Dirks offers his nuanced and comprehensive reflections on the solutions for the most pressing issues facing universities today. These range from issues with free speech, interdisciplinary work, budgeting costs, internal politics, and the devaluing of the liberal arts. In a time where universities face fierce attacks from the political right and left and a distrust from the general public, Dirks defends their role in society, as key institutions that guard and create new knowledge to understand the world at large and drive meaningful change. In City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dirks argues for a reimagination of the university to ensure its survival and relevance in the years to come, positioning him as a visionary leader in a time where higher education needs it the most. Nicholas B. Dirks is the current president and CEO o

Every driver in North America shares one miserable, soul-sucking universal experience—being stuck in traffic. But things weren’t always like this. Why is it that the mass transit systems of most cities in the United States and Canada are now utterly inadequate? The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Jake Berman offers a new way to consider this eternal question, with a strikingly visual—and fun—journey through past, present, and unbuilt urban transit. Using meticulous archival research, cartographer and artist Jake Berman has successfully plotted maps of old train networks covering twenty-three North American metropolises, ranging from New York City’s Civil War–era plan for a steam-powered subway under Fifth Avenue to the ultramodern automated Vancouver SkyTrain and the thousand-mile electric railway system of pre–World War II Los Angeles. He takes us through colourful maps of old, often forgotten streetcar

In Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), Calvin John Smiley explores the lives of people who were formerly incarcerated and the many daunting challenges they face. Those being released from prison must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas, in a journey that is often confusing, complex, and precarious. Calvin John Smiley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives. But a growing number of people - academic economists, business owners, policy entrepreneurs, and ordinary people - are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Though they differ in approach, all share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and account

What is the nature of grassroots activism? How and why do individuals get involved or attempt to make change for themselves, others, or their own communities? What motivates activists to maintain momentum when their efforts to redress injustices or paths toward change seem difficult or personally risky to navigate?  These questions and more are addressed in Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts (Ohio State UP, 2024). Featuring a diverse array of both local activist profiles and original scholarly essays, the collection amplifies and analyzes the tactics of grassroots activists working locally to intervene in a variety of social injustices--from copwatching and policy reform to Indigenous resistance against land colonization to #RageAgainstRape. Attuned to the demanding--and often underappreciated--work of grassroots activism, this book interrogates how such efforts unfold within and against existing historical, cultural, social, and political realities of local communities; are informed

Sabina Andron's book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2024) focuses on urban surfaces, on exploring their authorship and management, and on their role in struggles for the right to the city. Graffiti, pristine walls, advertising posters, and municipal signage all compete on city surfaces to establish and imprint their values on our environments. It is the first time that the surfacescapes of our cities are granted the entire attention of a book as material, visual, and legal territories. The book includes a critical history of graffiti and street art as contested surface discourses and argues for surfaces as sites of resistance against private property, neoliberal creativity, and the imposition of urban order. It also proposes a seven-point manual for a semiotics of urban surfaces, laying the ground for a new discipline: surface studies. Page after page and layer after layer, surfaces become porous and political and emerge as key spatial conditions for rethinking and re-practici

American households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of US debt policy with her own family story, Chrystin Ondersma debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, like the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth of a free market unhindered by government interference and accessible to all.  In Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice (U California Press, 2024), Ondersma offers a compelling, flexible, and reality-based taxonomy rooted in the internationally recognized principle of human dignity. Ondersma's new categories of debt--grounded in abolitionist principles--revolutionize how policymakers are able to think about debt, which will in turn revolutionize the American debt landscape itself. Stephen Pimpare

George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among a slew of other books, articles, and essays that he’s published over the years, and perhaps the most contrarian. In this interview, George discusses his research methods and how he came to the conclusion that the history of America’s drug war, while racially motivated, was not meant to target minorities, but protect the morals and health of America’s white youth. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book,

Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly enough urban heroin addicts in America to sustain a national war on drugs.  The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the long war on drugs has reflected both the bipartisan mandate for urban crime control and the balancing act required to resolve an impossible public policy: the criminalization of the social practices and consumer choices of tens of millions of white middle-class Americans constantly categorized as "otherwise law-abiding citizens."" That is, the white middle class was just as much a target