New Books in Public Policy

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Maya Pagni Barak sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large.Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Dr. Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war.The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG, 2024) reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them--the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs--a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take.Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

When Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced by war, disaster, and oppression find new homes where they can live complete lives. However, as the historian Laura Robson argues in her book Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), the history of the international refugee regime is much less noble than the self-representation of humanitarian organizations (and the global powers that fund them) would suggest. Robson shows how imperial powers, nation-states, global corporations, and intergovernmental organizations have sought to remake refugees into disposable migrant laborers whose exploitation would advance various imperial and state-building projects.Laura Robson is a Professor of History at Yale University. Her recent books include States of Separation: Transfer, partition, and the making of the modern Middle East (2017) and The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. The incarceration of vast numbers of people, and the punitive treatment of African Americans in particular, are targets of widespread criticism. But despite the election of progressive prosecutors in several cities and the passage of reform legislation at the local, state, and federal levels, the system remains very much intact. How can the damage and depredations of the carceral state be undone? In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates —Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo—provide us with tools to move from despair and critique to hope and action. Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change (FSG Originals, 2024) surveys new approaches to confronting the carceral state in all its guises, exploring ways that police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and even life after prison can be radically reconceived. The book captures debates about the comparative merits of reforming or abolishing prisons and police forces, and introduces a host of bold but practical interventions. The contributors range from noted figures such as Angela Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner to local organizers, judges, and people currently or formerly incarcerated. The result is an invaluable guide for students, activists, and anyone who wishes to understand mass incarceration—and hasten its end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts.Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jessie Abrahams explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education.By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin considers the controversial and under-researched concern of what to do with dangerous people with severe personality disorders. She brings together scientific evidence, law and policy, to consider risk prevention, public security and human rights. This is a controversial area of law and policy, informed by ongoing debates about 'dangerous' offenders which exists at the intersection of liberal legal principles and advocates of social defence. In today's conversation, we spoke about preventative detention, the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention and risk management, gaps in human rights protections, and the assumptions that the legal principles and processes that govern this population are founded on. O'Loughlin draws out key issues for reform and calls for further evidence-based inquiry with regards to criminal defences, sentencing and dispositions. This will be an important book for policy makers, legal academics, psychiatrists and anyone who works with this category of offenders. Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School, at The University of York. Her research focuses on the intersection between mental health and criminal justice.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system--the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants.In Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America (UNC Press, 2023), Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff's offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Amy Schiller, who spent a number of years working in both political and major gift fundraising, has a new book detailing some of the fundamental problems currently afflicting American philanthropy and how to correct some of these problems. Schiller, a political theorist currently at Dartmouth College’s Society of Fellows, brings two important perspectives to her research in The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023)—combining her experience in the philanthropic world with her training and expertise in political theory, especially democratic theory. The Price of Humanity also provides the reader with a vital history of philanthropy and giving, especially in the West, and how thinking about the role of supporting others as part of the common good has shifted over the course of more than two millennia. Schiller makes an important point about how St. Augustine, in his teachings on donations and giving, shifted the framing and understanding of giving from a community-based common good to a global approach to donating, tying the act of giving to individual salvation. This approach not only highlighted suffering and need and stratified those who give from those who are in need, but it also disconnected the philanthropic experience from the immediate community while objectifying those who are in poverty or generally in need.The Price of Humanity doesn’t dwell in the past but provides this important lens that continues to apply to our contemporary thinking about giving. This more disconnected approach is also overlaid, in our current environment, with the demand that non-profits and philanthropies product quantifiable goods: how many cases of malaria have been eradicated, how much food has been provided to those experiencing scarcity, how are the dollars donated spent and by whom and in what ways? Thus, in so many ways, philanthropic organizations have to report out their successes in the same ways that private corporations need to detail their fiscal health to their boards of directors and shareholders. All of these approaches tend to disconnect the act of giving from the world in which we live, according to Schiller, and this disconnection makes the reason for giving much more attenuated, distancing us from each other, our communities, and the real role of the common good. Instead of linking individuals together in our shared love for one another and humanity as a whole—which is actually what the word philanthropy means in the original Greek—we live in a philanthropic world that separates and isolates. The Price of Humanity spotlights different approaches to giving, with discussions of the Gates Foundation, Effective Altruism, Robber Barons and the Gilded Age, and other forms of the business of giving. Schiller also focuses on modern examples of philanthropy as the common good, which brings it into the realm of democratic theory, as a means to provide the flourishing of humanity, not merely fulfilling the desperate needs of individuals. This is a fascinating and valuable interrogation of the idea of giving to others, and how we need to reconsider our thinking about the act of giving itself and the role that this act plays in our community and in our democracy.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A perfectly timed book for the educational resistance—those of us who believe in public schools Culture wars have engulfed our schools. Extremist groups are seeking to ban books, limit what educators can teach, and threaten the very foundations of public education. What’s behind these efforts? Why are our schools suddenly so vulnerable? And how can the millions of Americans who love their public schools fight back? In this concise, hard-hitting guide, journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire and education scholar Jack Schneider answer these questions and chart a way forward. The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (The New Press, 2024) explains the sudden obsession with race and gender in schools, as well as the ascendancy of book-banning efforts. It offers a clear analysis of school vouchers and the impact they’ll have on school finances. It deciphers the movement for “parents’ rights,” explaining the rights that students and taxpayers also have. And it reveals how the ostensible pursuit of “religious freedom” opens the door to discrimination against vulnerable children. Berkshire and Schneider outline the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes. In so doing, they lay out what is at stake for parents, teachers, and students and provide a road map for ensuring that public education survives this present assault. A book that will enrage and enlighten the millions of citizens who believe in their public schools, here is a long-overdue handbook and guide to action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy