New Books in Public Policy
Episodes
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, "Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing" (U Texas Press, 2022)
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the ter...
Liran Einav et al., "Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It" (Yale UP, 2023)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questi...
Steffen Mau, "Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century" (Polity Press, 2022)
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of ...
Shifting Blame: What Should You "Own" and What Shouldn't You?
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly an...
How Did the Pandemic Transform Workers and Work?
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The pandemic brought to the fore a group of workers deemed “essential” – frontline healthcare workers, restaurant employees, slaughterhouse work...
Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA
14 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jesuit Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in East LA, the world’s largest and most successful gang intervention and rehabilitati...
The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage
13 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Most people in developed countries think inequality is increasing. And most would also agree that in terms of the global poor, the last 20 years have ...
Poverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” wi...
Matthew Smith, "The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2022)
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its ...
Demeritocracy: Should We Still Believe in Meritocracy?
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace...
21st Century Citizenship: What Does It Mean to be a Citizen in America?
08 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a citizen in America in 2017? Guests Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and University Profess...
Neoliberalism and Higher Education
08 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is a roundtable discussion on the influence of the neoliberal project on higher education. Our guests are Professor Emeritus Frank Fear f...
Char Miller, "Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril" (Chin Music, 2022)
07 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A collection of 42 essays meditating on both California’s natural gifts and its natural disasters, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Plan...
Bin Xu, "The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society" (Polity Press, 2022)
07 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and c...
Ellen Cassedy, "Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie" (Chicago Review Press, 2022)
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, ...
(In)efficiency: Should Efficiency be a Moral Value?
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Efficiency has moved from a technique for measuring machines to a widely held moral value. But at what cost? Guests Jennifer Alexander, Associate Pro...
Vanessa A. Bee, "Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging" (Astra, 2022)
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Vanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer with a freelancing habit. Primarily interested in inequality, corporate power, the American Left, and W...
Comedies of 'Fair Use': Lewis Hyde on Owning Art and Ideas
01 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In April 2006, The Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. In this session, Lewis ...
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
31 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in tro...
Ethical AI
31 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Alex Hanna talks with Nathan Kim about Ethical AI. Their conversation is part of our High Theory in STEM series, which...
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
30 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper mora...
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s societ...
Roger D. Blackwell and Roger A. Bailey, "Objective Prosperity: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Outcomes for You, Your Business, and Your Nation (Rothstein Publishing, 2022)
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Roger Blackwell about his new book Objective Prosperity: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Outcomes for You, Your Business, an...
Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was ...
"Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID) in Canada
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is medical assistance in dying, or MAID letting the government off the hook from providing what they should be providing? Should we respect people's c...
Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022)
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022) can be read as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against a...
Hagai Boas, "The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From?" (Routledge, 2022)
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is the story of organ transplantation, told from the organ’s point of view. Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-m...
Carl Griffin, "The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, 1750-1840" (Manchester UP, 2020)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger r...
Hester Barron, "The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London" (Manchester UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London (Manchester UP, 2022) shows why the study of schooling matters to the his...
Danielle Keats Citron, "The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age" (Norton, 2022)
17 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the 20th century. In the 21st, we have embraced a vast ar...
Matthew Hall et al., "Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations" (Routledge, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be ...
Gregory Smithsimon, "Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism" (NYU Press, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-C...
Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have...
Alison L. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor, "Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency" (Oxford UP, 2022)
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientists Alison Gash and Dan Tichenor have a new book, Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency ...
Jacalyn Duffin, "Covid-19: A History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
12 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, ...
Barbara Katz Rothman, "The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic" (Stanford UP, 2021)
11 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Kat...
Brian Daldorph, "Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
11 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at ...
AJ Withers, "Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing" (Fernwood, 2021)
11 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been one of the leading organizations in the struggle for social justice within Canada for several de...
The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind
09 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that res...
Safe and Sound? On the Intersection of Child Protection and Child and Youth Residential Care in the Philippines
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the Philippines, unknown numbers of children are in institutional care. Commonly known as residential care or orphanages, these institutions have b...
Eyal Press, "Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America" (Picador, 2022)
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Co...
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, "Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt" (Harvard UP, 2021)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generat...
Beverley Clough, "The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries" (Routledge, 2021)
03 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This book cuts new ground, challenging the assumption of law as an objective concept. It draws out the way that binary frameworks situate and create ...
Yahia Shawkat, "Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space" (American U in Cairo Press, 2020)
02 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow d...
Civil Disobedience
02 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Eraldo Souza dos Santos talks about the invention of civil disobedience as a form of political action around the world, and the need for its redefinit...
Mathematical Morality: The Ideology that Justifies Billionaires
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the ...
Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz, "The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but ...
Pierre Minn, "Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti" (Cornell UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initia...
Paul Watt, "Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London" (Policy Press, 2021)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of ...
Shana Kushner Gadarian et al., "Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about ...
The Future of Multiculturalism: A Discussion with Patti Tamara Lenard and Peter Balint
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority g...
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022)
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (wh...
Eric MacGilvray, "Liberal Freedom: Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The liberalism that is defended here is therefore itself an object of political contestation, and not just the background against which such contestat...
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Lit...
Psyche A. Williams-Forson, "Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America" (UNC Press, 2022)
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illumina...
Robert P. Crease with Peter D. Bond, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a w...
Sarah Dauncey, "Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive explorati...
Jeffrey Bellin, "Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches per...
Megan Asaka, "Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City" (U Washington Press, 2022)
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making...
The Future of Data Control: A Discussion with Sarah Lamdan
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A few big companies are selling information about us to governments and companies. But beyond a general sense of unease, what do we need to know about...
Igor Shoikhedbrod, "Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is Marx relevant today, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe? Is Marx’s political theory compatible with individual rights? You will be...
Bruce W. Dearstyne, "The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era" (SUNY Press, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders lik...
Adam Crowley, "Representations of Poverty in Videogames" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Adam Crowley's book Representations of Poverty in Videogames (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) argues that digital games address contemporary, middle-cla...
Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022)
09 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Mey...
Richard Petts, "Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers" (Routledge, 2022)
09 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of f...
Christopher Howard, "Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs ...
Dan Bouk, "Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them" (MCD, 2022)
08 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of m...
Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration" (Princeton UP, 2022)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restrictio...
June Carolyn Erlick, "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity" (Routledge, 2021)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship bet...
Mikkael A. Sekeres, "Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust" (MIT Press, 2022)
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug A...
Christopher Stuart Taylor, "Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians" (Fernwood, 2016)
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s,...
Richard V. Reeves, "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It" (Brookings Institution, 2022)
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do ab...
The Future of Money Laundering: A Discussion with Oliver Bullough
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of t...
Max H. Bazerman, "Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about t...
Elizabeth Drame et al., "The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism" (Peter Lang, 2020)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the for...
Robert Gottlieb, "Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet" (MIT Press, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This agenda-setting book presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic ra...
Nicholas Micinski, "Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration i...
Observations about the Hard-Won Wisdom of Old Age
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The world's population has just passed the 8 billion mark and an increasing proportion of those people are old, including increasingly the so-called "...
Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thi...
Tom Haines-Doran, "Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways" (Manchester UP, 2022)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and ha...
Matthias Bernt, "The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg" (Wiley, 2022)
28 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist ...
Lynn M. Hudson, "West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim ...
Dan Immergluck, "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta" (U California Press, 2022)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlan...
Sustainable Agriculture in the Global South: A Religious Response to the Global Food Crisis
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Micha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engag...
Lucy Series, "Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of the Institution" (Bristol UP, 2022)
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Lucy Series Deprivations of Liberty in The Shadows of the Institution (Bristol University Press, 2022) is one that I have long been looking forw...
Elsa Sjunneson, "Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism" (Simon Element, 2021)
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing...
Robert P. Crease, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a w...
Sherry Boschert, "37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination" (New Press, 2022)
14 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No...
The Fight to Save the Town
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why we need to write about difficult topics. Four American towns trying to save t...
Sanjeev Routray, "The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi" (Stanford UP, 2022)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but e...
Sami Schalk, "Black Disability Politics" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism fr...
P. E. Caquet, "Opium's Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The global war on drugs began some 150 years before US President Richard Nixon launched the current chapter of America’s drug war in 1971. In Opium...
M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-p...
Mark Neocleous, "A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order" (Verso, 2021)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, exa...
Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made ...
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What ...
Wendy Simonds, "Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization" (Routledge, 2016)
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalizatio...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude t...
Glenn W. Muschert et al., "Global Agenda for Social Justice 2" (Policy Press, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Global Agenda for Social Justice 2 (Policy Press, 2022) provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and pro...
Kenneth H. Kolb, "Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate" (U California Press, 2021)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by ...