New Books in Public Policy

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country's landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America's landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt (Viking, 2025) offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation's true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely. Find Professor Weathersby at his website, where you can order In Open Contempt, check out his other writings, and attend upcoming events. Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Professor Weathersby continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren't used more broadly. That's when she found Dr. Marie Nyswander.In the 1960s, Nyswander defied the DEA and medical establishment to co-develop methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction. According to some addiction specialists, its discovery could be considered as monumental as the discovery of penicillin. Yet, it still carries a stigma today.Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander's important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back decades in our understandings of opioids.With Nyswander as her guide, Glenn also shares her journey through addiction medicine as she confronts her own personal and philosophical quandaries around bias, ambition, and saviorism in the medical field.As the US continues to struggle with opioid and fentanyl use in communities, Mother of Methadone is a powerful reminder of the ways biases have prevented doctors from saving countless lives. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her second book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications. Hear from the author himself as he reflects on the historical roots of disaster policy, the political forces that shape emergency response, and the enduring implications for governance today. Timothy W. Kneeland is a Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at Nazareth University. He writes on American politics and disaster policy, American science, and psychiatry. ABOUT THE BOOK: On Friday, January 28, 1977, it began to snow in Buffalo. The second largest city in New York State, located directly in line with the Great Lakes' snowbelt, was no stranger to this kind of winter weather. With their city averaging ninety-four inches of snow per year, the citizens of Buffalo knew how to survive a snowstorm. But the blizzard that engulfed the city for the next four days was about to make history. Between the subzero wind chill and whiteout conditions, hundreds of people were trapped when the snow began to fall. Twenty- to thirty-foot-high snow drifts isolated residents in their offices and homes, and even in their cars on the highway. With a dependency on rubber-tire vehicles, which lost all traction in the heavily blanketed urban streets, they were cut off from food, fuel, and even electricity. This one unexpected snow disaster stranded tens of thousands of people, froze public utilities and transportation, and cost Buffalo hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses and property damages. The destruction wrought by this snowstorm, like the destruction brought on by other natural disasters, was from a combination of weather-related hazards and the public policies meant to mitigate them. Buffalo's 1977 blizzard, the first snowstorm to be declared a disaster in US history, came after a century of automobility, suburbanization, and snow removal guidelines like the bare-pavement policy. Kneeland offers a compelling examination of whether the 1977 storm was an anomaly or the inevitable outcome of years of city planning. From the local to the state and federal levels, Kneeland discusses governmental response and disaster relief, showing how this regional event had national implications for environmental policy and how its effects have resounded through the complexities of disaster politics long after the snow fell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today we're continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt's seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can't, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshit in AI as AI Snake Oil takes on the ridiculous hype ascribed to the promise of AI. AI chatbots often hallucinate and many of the promoters of AI engage in the art of bullshit when selling people on wild and crazy AI applications. Arvind Narayanan is professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection, archives, regulatory frameworks, and urban planning. Busking also responds to underlying questions on the boundaries of the rights to the city, and who has a voice in shaping how our cities are planned and governed.A transnational exploration of street performance, Urban Music Governance examines the intricate limits of legality, data visibility, and resistance from the perspective of those working at the social and regulatory margins of society. Based on a decade of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and Montreal, this book offers a lively account of why such an often-overlooked practice matters today.By investigating the role of busking in contemporary society, Urban Music Governance presents an original interdisciplinary study that exposes how power dynamics in policymaking decide issues of access—and exclusion—around us, above and below ground. Jess Reia is an Assistant Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia, USA, working on data justice, technology policy, and urban governance. Alex Hallbom is a Registered Professional Planner in British Columbia, Canada. He sits on the editorial board of Plan Canada, the professional publication for planners in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in law enforcement initiatives—transformed Detroit, long considered the nation's symbol of racial inequality and urban crisis, into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters to police brutality and repression. In response, young people in the 1970s and 1980s drew on the city's storied history of labor radicalism as well as contemporary shopfloor struggles to wage a “wildcat of the streets,” consisting of street disturbances, decentralized gang activity, and complex organizations of the informal economy. In this revelatory new history of the social life of cities, Michael Stauch mines a series of evocative interviews conducted with the participants to trace how Black youth made claims for political equality over and against the new order of community policing. Centering the perspective of criminalized and crime-committing young people, Wildcat of the Streets is an original interpretation of police reform, the long struggle for Black liberation, and the politics of cities in the age of community policing. Guest: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo. He historian of the modern United States with a focus on policing, politics, and the intersection of race, labor, and youth in social movements. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government's largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans' use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they've been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today. 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, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe?The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random House, 2025) offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.“Nearly two hundred fifty years ago, the men who founded America made a fundamental break not just from their old country but from the past—casting off an order that had subjugated them with worn and weak ideas for the promise of true self-governance and greater prosperity in a new republic,” Nwanevu writes. “With exactly their sense of purpose and even higher, more righteous ambitions for America than they themselves had, we should do the same now⁠—work as hard as we can in the decades ahead to ‘institute new Government' for the benefit of all and not just the few.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the standoff makes explicit a longstanding truth: borders are religious as well as political objects. In this book, Hurd argues that Americans share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces, and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics, and public life. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. This episode's host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.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

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous nonfiction books and numerous articles in outlets like the Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, Westhoff's fourth book, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for the Truth comes out this spring. 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, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the U.S. Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press, 2022). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems. Dr. Bowen Matthew describes her personal relationship with the concepts of structural inequality and racism in the public health system, opening with a heart-wrenching ode to her father's experience with poverty and prejudice, which ultimately led to his premature death. Through her family's story, she explains how structural inequality is perpetuated on a large-enough scale and with a powerful-enough scope so as to virtually guarantee social outcomes that reflect predetermined hierarchies based on race and/or class, hierarchies that remain consistent across generations. These disproportionate outcomes are often dismissed as due to comorbidities without the attention paid to social factors are the primary cause of comorbidities, because oppression in its many forms blocks equitable access to the social determinants of health. These social determinants include, but are not limited to, clean and safe housing, adequate education, nutritious food and fresh water, access to recreational spaces, and mental health services. Individuals who lack these, through no fault of their own, are then obligated to accept disproportionate care, illness, and disturbingly shorter life spans then are the norm for many Americans and are much closer to life spans in impoverished countries. Dr. Bowen Matthew presents evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, detailing how law has played a central role in erecting disproportionate access to the social determinants of health, and therefore is a requisite tool for dismantling it. She provides a clear path to undoing structural racism and providing an equitable society to all, encouraging health providers, law makers, and citizens all to fight to dismantle the hurdles that many patients face because of the zip code in which they live. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Systemic sexual violence by the Myanmar army and proxies began to be widely reported in the 2010s, in the course of genocidal violence against Rohingya in the country's west. At the same time, the Myanmar government, which was then a military-civilian hybrid, negotiated with international organisations to set up a mechanism to monitor and deal with the violence. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Phyu Phyu Oo discusses her research on this violence, and attempts to deal with it through the United Nations system, published as Conflict-related Sexual Violence in Myanmar: The Role of the State (De Gruyter, 2025). In the course of the interview she explains what Conflict-Related Sexual Violence is, efforts to address it through international agreements and law, and the conditions in Myanmar, where CRSV has a long history, and has been documented by women's and right's groups since the 1990s. She also reflects on the current conditions and future prospects for addressing CRSV in Myanmar. For more on the work of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in which Phyu Phyu is a research fellow, visit the CEVAW website. Like this interview? You might also be interested in Elliot Prasse-Freeman discussing Rights Refused, Ken MacLean on Crimes in Archival Form, and Lynette Chua talking about The Politics of Love in Myanmar This interview summary was not synthesised by a machine. Unlike that machinery, the author gave thought to its contents. And unlike the makers and owners of those machines, he accepts responsibility for those contents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift.Examining the conditions that have led to and define this new era, Dr. Dawson reveals that these interventions are as indebted to the monumental tradition as they are to representational strategies that grew out of twentieth-century social justice efforts, from the Civil Rights movement to queer organizing during the AIDS crisis.Since 2014, a new generation of artists has established a groundbreaking role for monuments, calling into question the very notion of what a monument is through novel investigations of how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. This book tells the important story of that sea change. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today. Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past—but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy. Elizabeth Popp Berman is Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How has the digital revolution transformed criminal opportunities and behaviour? What is different about cybercrime compared with traditional criminal activity? What impact might cybercrime have on public security? In this updated edition of his authoritative and field-defining text, cybercrime expert David Wall carefully examines these and other important issues. Incorporating analysis of the latest technological advances and their criminological implications, he disentangles what is really known about cybercrime today. An ecosystem of specialists has emerged to facilitate cybercrime, reducing individual offenders' level of risk and increasing the scale of crimes involved. This is a world where digital and networked technologies have effectively democratized crime by enabling almost anybody to carry out crimes that were previously the preserve of either traditional organized crime groups or a privileged coterie of powerful people. Against this background, the author scrutinizes the regulatory challenges that cybercrime poses for the criminal (and civil) justice processes, at both the national and the international levels. This book offers the most intellectually robust account of cybercrime currently available. It is suitable for use on courses across the social sciences, and in computer science, and will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

EPISODE SUMMARY: What becomes visible when you shift the lens away from Beijing to how China's Belt and Road projects unfold on the ground? Seeing China's Belt and Road, edited by Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey, answers this question by reorienting conversations on China's global infrastructure development to their “downstream” effects. Instead of analyzing the BRI through grand geopolitical narratives or a national strategic lens, the book draws on fieldwork across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to show how local actors—mayors, contractors, migrant workers, and residents—shape and contest projects in practice. Contributing authors challenge simplified portrayals of the BRI as either neocolonial domination or benevolent development, instead revealing its fragmented, improvised, and negotiated nature. Our conversation touches on themes including the visual politics of infrastructure, how power flows through projects, and the agency of local people in shaping global connectivity. We also look ahead to emerging frontiers of China's influence, including digital corridors and cleaner energy, offering a view of China's evolving global presence. GUEST BIOS: Dr. Edward Schatz is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is interested in identity politics, social transformations, social movements, anti-Americanism, and authoritarianism with a focus on the ex-USSR, particularly Central Asia. His publications include Slow Anti-Americanism (Stanford UP, 2021), Paradox of Power (co-edited with John Heathershaw, U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017), Political Ethnography (edited, U. Chicago Press, 2009), Modern Clan Politics (U. Washington Press, 2004), as well as articles in Comparative Politics, Slavic Review, International Political Science Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and other academic journals. Current projects include a collaborative effort (with Rachel Silvey) to understand the downstream effects of China's Belt & Road Initiative, as well as a book about the rise of shamelessness in global politics. Dr. Rachel Silvey is Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is a Faculty Affiliate in CDTS, WGSI, and the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a dual B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Professor Silvey is best known for her research on women's labour and migration in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia.LINKS TO RESOURCES Seeing China's Belt and Road: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/seeing-chinas-belt-and-road-9780197789261?cc=us&lang=en& Overview with contributing authors on Seeing China's Belt and Road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuHvAhUV_4 The Rise of the Infrastructure State How US–China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-rise-of-the-infrastructure-state Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from around the world. The chapters use the latest findings from the natural and social sciences to identify key interactions shaping current climate-related migration, displacement, and immobility; predict future changes in those patterns and methods used to model them; summarize key policy and governance instruments available to us to manage the movements of people in a changing climate; and offer directions for future research and opportunities. The book provides insights into how migration responses differ for slow- and rapid-onset climate-related hazards (including sea level rise, drought, flooding, tropical cyclones, wildfires, and others) It contributes to ongoing international discussions on the topic, which in recent years have emerged as key to UNFCCC negotiations and the UN Human Rights tribunal, and the subject of a special white paper commissioned by the White House in 2021 Finally, the book provides the most current synthesis of the state of knowledge in areas of theory, methodology, and policy considerations for climate-related migration and displacement, and will serve as a go-to resource on the subject This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Margaret Andersen explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one's fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As the crisis of democratic capitalism sweeps the globe, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes the controversial argument that what democracies require most are stronger political parties that serve as intermediaries between citizens and governments. Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. Parties now rank among the most unpopular institutions in society--less trusted than business, the police, and the media. Identification with parties has plummeted, and even those who are loyal to a party report feeling that parties care more about special interests than about regular citizens. What does a "good" political party look like? Why do we urgently need them? And how do we get them? The Great Retreat explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on mass parties, and the ways they served as intermediaries that fostered ties between citizens and governments. While parties have become professionalized and nationalized, they have lost the robust organizational density that made them effective representatives. After the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus, changes to campaign finance, and shifting party priorities weakened the party systems of Western democracies. As Didi Kuo argues, this erosion of political parties has contributed to the recent crisis of democratic capitalism, as weak parties have ceded governance to the private sector. For democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, Kuo makes the case that we need strong intermediaries like mass parties--socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens. Parties are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth, while the breakdown of party systems, on the other hand, has historically led to democratic collapse. As trust in political parties has plummeted, The Great Retreat provides a powerful defense of political parties--for without parties, democratic representation is impossible. Didi Kuo is Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Bruce Harvey is a historian and photographer based in Syracuse, NY, who works at the intersection of memory, place, and public history. As an independent consultant, he helps both public and private clients document historic sites--shaping how we remember, preserve, and sometimes say goodbye to the built environment. In this episode, Bruce reflects on what drew him to historical consulting, the art of managing complex projects, and the deeper philosophical questions that animate his work: What do we choose to remember? And why? We discuss the beauty and impermanence of old buildings and landscapes, Bruce's social mission of preserving memory for future generations, and the unique challenges of working in a field where history, economics, and policy meet. Along the way, he shares insights from his work with the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), programs with their own rich histories rooted in New Deal ideals of public service and economic recovery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become Great Again (Routledge, 2025) identifies those organizations, institutions, politicians and prominent characters in the forefront of the economic and social policies - ultimately asking who is responsible. While the period from the late 1970s to 2020s became the best of times for America's corporate class, as profits grew along with the wealth and income that they delivered for their stockholders and management, their goal was to set new rules for the rest of us to live by, not as special interests but with a clear class agenda - for which institutions have been organized, government policies reoriented, economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted. And so it has not been the best of times for working families as inequality, stagnant wages, debt, and ever longer working hours became their fate. This book critically analyses those who very deliberately set out to implement policies enacted at the state and federal level in order to redistribute wealth and income upwards and change the balance of power in the United States in response to the class, gender and racial challenges that resulted in compressed income and wealth differentials. An essential book on contemporary inequality in America, Why America Didn't Become Great Again surveys the past near half century that have resulted in American economic instability and inequality, environmental crisis, a crumbling physical and harmful social infrastructure, among the very worst health outcomes, child poverty, food insecurity and social mobility of the industrialized countries culminating in a Trump regime and the road to further ruin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the United States played in the origins of the Second World War. It synthesizes recent scholarship about interwar international politics while also presenting an original interpretation of the sources of American policy. The book shows how the drive for international reform, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, reflected both America's unusual power and its fears about maintaining its domestic freedoms in a world dominated by arms races and the threat of war. The American desire to reform or to escape from the existing international system reshaped Europe's balance of power from 1914 to 1929, leaving it precarious and unlikely to produce lasting stability. America's power continued to loom globally in the 1930s, as first its isolationism and, after 1938, its open hostility toward Germany and Japan influenced the policies of the West and of Hitler. The coda at the end of the volume analyzes how the United States affected the strategic choices made by Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan from 1939 to 1941 that globalized the conflict. This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in history and political science, especially courses focused on World War II and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Guest: Ross A. Kennedy (he/him), is a Professor of History and Chair at Illinois State University. He is the author of The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's Strategy for Peace and Security (2009) as well as numerous other publications on the First World War. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Michael Grunwald is a well renown journalist, who over the last thirty years has focused on public policy and national politics, with the last fifteen years having him zeroing in or climate-related issues. His current book, which he wrote this after six years of research. It was a passionate journey to understand, not to advocate for any position. Because of his reporting for such publications as the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and Politico magazine, Michael won the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, as well as being honored with many other journalism honors. This is Michael's third book, and like the previous two, his journalistic research and writing states the major challenges to the feeding the world's population, but also provides a visionary path forward. This book not only delves into agriculture practices and consumers' choices about food, but the focus is on the immense climate impact from poor land land-use decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. What's more, tariffs and trade wars threaten to accelerate inflation again. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis. Leading political economists Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli reveal why inflation really happens, challenge how we think about it, and argue for fresh approaches to combat it. With accessible and engaging commentary, and a good dose of humor, Blyth and Fraccaroli bring the complexities of economic policy and inflation indices down to earth. Policymakers around the world may have pulled off a so-called "soft landing," but Inflation warns they must update their thinking. Now tariffs, climate shocks, demographic change, geopolitical tensions, and politicians promising to upend the global order are all combining to create a more inflationary future, making a new paradigm for understanding inflation urgently necessary. Astute, timely, and engaging, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our economy and politics. Mark Blyth is a political economist whose research focuses upon how uncertainty and randomness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013, and The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (Oxford University Press 2015). Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph by Albert O. Hirschman The Rhetoric of Reaction by Albert O. Hirschman Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century by Helen Thompson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024) by Dr. Elena Jackson Albarran explores how and why culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In his new book, The Community College Reform Movement: Contentions and Ideological Origins (Routledge, 2025), political scientist Milton Clarke critically examines the rise of the higher education reform movement, often referred to as the “completion agenda,” which, since the early 2000s, has sought to restructure core aspects of the community college experience. Drawing on community colleges from across nine U.S. states as practical examples, this exploration examines the major higher education reforms, including dual enrollment, guided pathways, the demise of developmental education, corequisites, and performance-based funding. Against the popular view that support for such policies is tied to neoliberalism, this book argues for a more nuanced understanding of the complicated and often indistinct ideological foundation of the reform movement, demonstrating that supporters and detractors alike draw on similar concepts of equity, student success, and affordability. This complication is further clarified through an account of the history, process, functions, and institutions that paved the way for the advent of the higher education reform movement. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in the future of community colleges and higher education. A special resonance is expected among researchers, scholars, and educators working in higher education, educational reform, and educational policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Claire Pierson sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Dr. Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that challenged many institutions, including large for-profit companies, to reflect on how to address racial inequality. Large corporations began making systematic public statements to show alignment with causes that impact people of color. These statements were also used to protect corporate reputations against claims that their businesses may perpetuate racial inequality. Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues that this process and others - including corporate rhetoric that leaves out past involvement in racial inequality, using disclosures about race as evidence of action, or pulling back on disclosures about race in response to conservative pushback - constrain true racial progress. Even when corporations make pledges to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes through philanthropy, the book demonstrates how these pledges function to limit corporate responsibility. Critical and corrective, Disclosureland calls on the federal government and corporate stakeholders to regulate corporate race-conscious words. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region--Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development. In placing health at the center of political and social change, this book weaves the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into global circulations of commodities and movements of people. As a collection of institutions and infrastructures, pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations. As a set of practices seeking to manipulate the natural world, health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. And, as a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Disorder and Diagnosis examines how Gulf residents, through their engagements with health, fiercely contested and actively shaped state and societal interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help -- and how to fix it As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025), Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight. From First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the controversial city planner Robert Moses, many well-known historical figures made a convincing case for affordable housing in America. Despite the movement's lofty ideals, the creation of the Projects led to the destruction of low-income communities across the country. From the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Black Bottom in Detroit, predominantly Black neighborhoods were judged only by the quality of their housing. Husock looks beyond these neighborhoods' physical conditions to their uncounted riches, from local artists like August Wilson to vital community institutions. As he shares residents' stories, he honors what they crafted through their own plans, rather than those of city planners. Husock traces the history of public housing to contemporary debates on the government's role in the housing market. Through interviews with residents, he reveals how public housing transformed the lives of Americans and the physical faces of cities and towns. He ultimately critiques "repair and reform" efforts, making policy recommendations that address the core failings of public housing for the people it was once designed to help. Mapping out a better path for policy-makers, he lays a new foundation for upward mobility in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions triumph while others fall short? In Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, Maraam A. Dwidar documents the vital role of social and economic justice organizations in American politics and explores the process by which they strategically build partnerships to advance more effective and equitable advocacy. Using original data tracking the collaboration patterns of more than twenty thousand nationally active advocacy organizations, Dwidar evaluates the micro- and macro-level conditions surrounding these groups' successful efforts to collectively shape public policy. Power to the Partners reveals that while organizational advocates for social and economic justice are at a disadvantage in the American lobbying landscape--financially, tactically, and politically--coalition tactics can help ameliorate these disparities. By building and sustaining coalitions with structures and memberships that facilitate clarity, learning, and diverse perspectives, these advocates can successfully--and uniquely--make their mark on American public policy. Dwidar's work offers critical insights for scholars and practitioners alike--from groundbreaking academic findings to evidence-based lessons for political organizers. Maraam A. Dwidar an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care. With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other. Jonathan Tarleton is an urban planner, designer, and writer based in Washington, DC. This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherited flaws of ability and character used to explain a remarkably wide variety of inequalities. Providing an important critique of that biodeterminist history and how the Human Genome Project has inspired some contemporary scientists and economists to follow a similar path of ascribing socioeconomic outcomes to genetic inheritance, The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines (Routledge, 2025) details new research that suggests that the social and economic environment can affect how genes express themselves in specific human traits and social outcomes. Using the three cases of the American white working class, Black Americans and American women, the authors demonstrate that relying on nature as an explanation is seriously flawed - showing that the socioeconomic inheritance created by the conditions in which these populations worked and lived offer a far better explanation than nature for the stratified results. This book is the story of an American history rife with unnecessary misery and the waste of human potential, along with the liberating effect of understanding the degree to which its citizens are the product of social inheritance and the potential power of a nurturing economy and society that equality promises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy (Columbia University Press, 2025) explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties amid the chaos of the first Trump administration, drawing on in-depth interviews with senior officials in the most contested agencies over the course of a tumultuous term. A revealing investigation that is now more relevant than ever. Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Our impact on future generations has never been greater, and the challenges we face are increasingly long-term. Future-Generation Government proposes ways that we can reward our governments for making durable policy decisions that anticipate future crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day. Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland's past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History (John Donald, 2024) by Dr. Catriona MacDonald investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history's pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced women writers and the interests of ‘average' Scots. Integrating historical fiction and popular histories in its appreciation of the Scottish historical imaginary, it most importantly tells the story of why, despite the interests of politicians and others, a truly British history has never emerged. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Hali Lee's The Big We (Zando, 2025) offers a compelling counterpoint to traditional billionaire-driven philanthropy (which she dubs "Big Phil"). Instead of logic models and donor-centric metrics, Lee champions giving circles—groups of everyday people who pool resources to support causes they value while building genuine community connections. Drawing from her experiences founding the Asian Women Giving Circle and co-creating the Donors of Color Network, Lee showcases giving circles making tangible impact: Seiji's neighborhood-focused Radfund in Brooklyn, Lily's youth philanthropy group in Arizona, and Lisa's circle that's moved over $1 million to progressive state legislative candidates. These stories illustrate how small, collective actions can drive significant change while fostering belonging and joy. The book's "Me to We to Big We" framework guides readers from personal reflection on values toward collective action and ultimately toward strengthening democracy itself. Lee argues that giving circles aren't merely funding mechanisms—they're antidotes to loneliness, laboratories for civic engagement, and bridges reconnecting us to cultural traditions of generosity. By democratizing philanthropy, these circles transform not just how we give, but how we relate to each other and engage as citizens in an increasingly fragmented society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

We've been focusing on the dynamics of democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond. In this episode of Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, Susan talks the co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, Dr. Robert Blair about how the Consortium offers FREE resources to teachers, students, journalists, policy makers, and any interested person – including shared syllabus, readings, assignments, YouTube virtual roundtables, and policy briefs. Rob defines democratic erosion and offers critical insights on the importance of interdisciplinarity, calibrating outrage, and distinguishing between policy disputes and the erosion of democracy. He offers a clear-headed analysis of what is legal v. what breaks down democracy that is not to be missed. We conclude with thoughts on what everyone can do protect democracy. Dr. Robert Blair is Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium. He studies the consolidation of state authority after civil war, with an emphasis on rule of law and security institutions, as well as the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding. His book, Peacekeeping, Policing, and the Rule of Law after Civil War, was published in 2020 with Cambridge University Press and his articles appear in political science outlets such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and International Organization but also science journals such as Science, Nature Human Behaviour, or Current Opinion in Psychology. Mentioned: Inside Higher Ed piece on grants terminated by the Trump administration, including one that funded the Democratic Erosion Consortium “An Events-Based Approach to Understanding Democratic Erosion,” P/S Political Science & Politics by Rob, Hannah Baron, Jessica Gottlieb, and Laura Paler summarizes their data collection efforts on democratic backsliding A special issue of P/S Political Science & Politics on the study of democratic backsliding An academic article on combatting misinformation from Current Opinion in Psychology by Rob, Jessica Gottlieb, Brendan Nyhan, Laura Paler, Pablo Argote, and Charlene J. Stainfield Democratic Erosion Project website and data set Chris Geidner, Law Dork: Supreme Court, Law, Politics, and More Substack Center for Systemic Peace's Polity Project coding authority characteristics of states in the world system University of Notre Dame's V-Dem Project measuring democracy Rob mentioned Brazil as a fruitful comparison for the US. He is particularly focused on how the courts can defend democratic institutions and processes – and how hard it can be to know where to draw the line between courts protecting vs. assailing democracy, and to know when the line has been crossed. Two gift articles from The New York Times here and here. Contact info for Rob: robert_blair@brown.edu Follow Rob and Democratic Erosion Consortium on social media: @robert_a_blair on X, @DemErosionDEC on X, @robertblair.bsky.social on BlueSky, @demerosiondec.bsky.social on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly precarious times. Tamara Lea Spira's Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (U California Press, 2025) traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late twentieth century to today. With this book, Spira highlights the growing embrace of normative family structures by LGBTQ+ movements--calling into question how many queers, once deemed unfit to parent, have become contradictory agents within the US empire's racial and colonial agendas. Simultaneously, Queering Families celebrates the rich history of queer reproductive justice, from the radical movements of the 1970s through the present, led by Black, decolonial, and queer of color feminist activists. Ultimately, Spira argues that queering reproductive justice impels us to build communities of care to cherish and uphold the lives of those who, defying normativity's violent stranglehold, are deemed to be unworthy of life. She issues the call to lovingly wager a future for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly perilous times. Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship and more recently, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin and Care (co-authored withe Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport (University of California Press, 2025) Dr. Dionne Koller sets the stage for a different approach by illuminating the law and policy assumptions supporting a model that puts children's bodies to work in an activity that generates significant surplus value. In doing so, she identifies the wide array of beneficiaries who have a stake in a system that is much more than just play—and the political choices that protect these parties' interests at children's expense. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system. Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education's First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay's first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy