New Books in Public Policy
Interviews with Scholars of Public Policy about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
Episodes
Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English, whose monograph on genocide and trauma is forthcoming, joins John to speak with the celebrated French journalist and activist Rokahya Diallo. Diouf places Diallo within a transnational black intellectual tradition, founded in the interwar period in the Negritude movement; it was then that Paulette, Jeanne, and Anne Nardal’s literary salon became a meeting ground for African, Antillean, and African-...
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April 29, 2025 • 71 mins
Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care (Abrams Press, 2025) is compelling exploration of the broken American foster care system, told through the stories of six former foster youth. This powerful narrative nonfiction book delves into the systemic failures that lead many foster children into the criminal justice system, highlighting the urgent need for reform.
Award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe brings her ex...
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April 28, 2025 • 67 mins
In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts: A Reader. I’m ...
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April 22, 2025 • 46 mins
What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police.
It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and reveal how we can make police departments obsolete.
Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues with evidence, including data and pers...
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April 21, 2025 • 46 mins
The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and e...
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In 2020, Black Americans continued a centuries-long pursuit of racial equality and justice in the streets and at the polls. Arguing that this year was not a deviation from the historic Civil Rights Movement, the contributors to this collection examine the important work of Black men and women during the previous decades to shape, expand, and preserve a multiracial American democracy.
The authors of these chapters show that Black Am...
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Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few ...
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In uncertain times, confronting pressing problems such as racial oppression and the environmental crisis requires everyday people to come together and wield political power for the greater good. Yet, as Michael Rosino shows in Democracy Is Awkward (UNC Press, 2025), progressive political organizations in the United States have frequently failed to achieve social change.
Why? Rosino posits that it is because of the unwillingness of...
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In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of ...
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Wage stagnation, growing inequality, and even poverty itself have resulted from decades of neoliberal decision making, not the education system, writes Neil Kraus in his urgent call to action, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (Temple UP, 2023).
Kraus claims the idea that both the education system and labor force are chronically deficient was aggressively and incorrectly promoted sta...
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Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists a...
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April 12, 2025 • 65 mins
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Muriel Blaive to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Pandemic Power: The Covid Response and the Erosion of Democracy - A Liberal Critique. In the podcast we talked about the (failure of the) pandemic response, the necessity of critique, being shadowbanned on Facebook, censorship, and about liberal intellectuals abandoning their core values.
Pandemic Power is availab...
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April 10, 2025 • 53 mins
Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash. In What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions (Princeton UP, 2025), Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can mo...
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Each day, every single person in the United States, all 324 million, discards about five pounds of waste. Be it a bottle that gets placed in a recycling bin or a piece of paper crumpled and tossed into the waste bin, every bit of the daily 1.6 billion pounds cast-off has a story. Everyone's Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2024) is full of those stories. It will wake you up and give you hope. A...
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The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton University Press, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, uncover...
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April 3, 2025 • 59 mins
John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions.
Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of ...
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Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities.
Joseph illustra...
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March 28, 2025 • 82 mins
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is the first book to document the experiences of those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City—disabled people. Diverse disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans f...
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Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically si...
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Most people think about abortion in the context of the country they live in. In the U.S., abortion fuels debate, elections, and legislation. In China, abortion is often treated as a settled issue. Why and how do abortion attitudes vary across the world?
In her new book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Amy Adamczyk examines the factors influencing cross-national abo...
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