New Books in Public Policy

A pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumental train stations, one in Buffalo, the other in Detroit. These once noble sites have since fallen from their towering grace. As local elected leaders did everything they could to destroy what was left of these places, citizens saw beauty and utility in these industrial ruins and felt compelled to act. Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons (Fordham UP, 2023) tells their story. The culmination of over a dozen years of on-the-ground investigation, ethnography, and historical analysis, author and urbanist Daniel Campo immerses the reader into this postindustrial landscape, weaving the perspectives of dozens of DIY protagonists as well as architects, planners, and preservationists. Working without capital, expertise, and sometimes permission in a milieu dominated by powerful political and economic interests, these do-it-yourself actors are driven by passion and a sense of civic duty rather than profit or political expediency. They have craftily remade these sites into collective preservation projects and democratic grounds for arts and culture, environmental engagement, regional celebrations, itinerant play, and in-the-moment constructions. Their projects are generating excitement about the prospect of Rust belt life, even as they often remain invisible to the uninformed passerby and fall short of professional preservation or environmental reclamation standards. Demonstrating that there is no such thing as a site that is "too far gone" to save or reuse, Postindustrial DIY is rich with case studies that demonstrate how great architecture is not simply for the elites or wealthy. The citizen preservationists and urbanists described in this book offer looser, more playful, and often more publicly satisfying alternatives to the development practices that have transformed iconic sites into expensive real estate or a clean slate for the next profitable endeavor. Transcending the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, historic preservation, city planning and landscape architecture, Postindustrial DIY suggests new ways to engage, adapt and preserve architecturally compelling sites and bottom-up strategies for Rustbelt revival.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What (and why) can and can't we say? What do empirical examples both at home and abroad tell us about how we should protect freedom of speech? How do we create an environment where speech is not only permitted but encouraged? Does freedom of speech bring people together or sow discord? Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and Professor Emerita at New York Law School, brings her decades of expertise to bear explaining why freedom of speech is foundational to so many other fundamental rights.Nadine Strossen is Professor Emerita at New York Law School, and was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-2008. She is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford UP, 2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2023). She is the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series released in October. You can also find her remarks "Current Free Speech Controversies" with the Madison Program here.Here are some examples of studies, referenced at the end of the episode, demonstrating links between words a language has for colors and how those colors are perceived by speakers, for Russian and for Chinese and Mongolian.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines the role of migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food access among rural households. Migration forms a key component of livelihoods for an increasing number of rural households in many developing countries. Importantly, there is now a growing consensus among academics and policymakers on the potential positive effects of migration in promoting human development. Concurrently, the significance of food security as an important development objective has grown tremendously, and the Sustainable Development Goals agenda envisages eliminating all forms of malnutrition. However, the academic and policy discussions on these two issues have largely proceeded in silos, with little attention devoted to the relationship they bear with each other. Using the conceptual frameworks of 'entitlements' and 'sustainable livelihoods', this book seeks to fill this gap in the context of India - a country with the most food-insecure people in the world and where migration is integral to rural livelihoods.Chetan Choithani is an Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India. The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan's work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context. Chetan has done extensive fieldwork in remote parts of India, and his research uses primary, field-based insights to engage with and inform larger issues of development. Chetan has published two authored books and several articles in leading peer-reviewed journals. His latest book-length publication is Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today I talked to Nettrice R. Gaskins about Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom (MIT Press, 2021).The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked.TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guiding readers from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong. Students who remix computationally, for instance, have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to STEAM subjects; reappropriation offers a way to navigate cultural repertoires; improvisation is firmly rooted in cultural and creative practices. Finally, Gaskins explores an equity-oriented approach that makes a distinction between conventional or dominant pedagogical approaches and culturally relevant or responsive making methods and practices. She describes TVC habits of mind and suggests methods of instructions and projects.Mentioned in this episode: “Underwater Dreams,” 2014 film directed by Mary Mazzio Dr. Gaskins’ collages, generative AI portrait of Greg Tate, links to Romare Bearden, and more Nettrice Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. She is currently the assistant director of the STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance (Routledge, 2023) explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field.Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy.The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance is essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners of public policy, public administration, governance, public management, information technology and systems, innovation and democracy as well as more broadly for political science, psychology, management studies, public organizations and individual policy practitioners, public authorities, civil society activists and service providers.Visit the handbook's dedicated website, Smarter Together, for complementary material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Civics textbooks focus on how Congress makes policy through the legislative process, but the reality is that members of Congress have limited opportunities to advance their policy priorities. In fact, less than five percent of the bills that are introduced in Congress become law. Even the most tenacious legislators are confronted by bicameralism, partisan gridlock, chamber procedures, leadership's control of the agenda, and the diverse interests of 534 other members of Congress. What strategies do lawmakers have for navigating these challenges?In Backdoor Lawmaking: Evading Obstacles in the US Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melinda N. Ritchie reveals how members of Congress use the federal bureaucracy as a backdoor for policymaking. Today, more law in the United States is made by unelected bureaucrats through federal agency regulations than with congressional statute. Ritchie argues that the bureaucracy's growing role in policymaking offers lawmakers a discreet way to represent controversial interests outside of the formal constraints of Congress. Lawmakers overcome obstacles in the legislative process by substituting agency regulations for legislation and pressuring agencies to make policy changes that would not pass Congress.Drawing on an original dataset constructed from records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. Ritchie traces the interactions between members of Congress and federal agencies to illustrate how these communications function as part of a lawmaker's overarching strategy for policymaking. Original and timely, Backdoor Lawmaking explains how members of Congress exploit the separation of powers and evade the lawmaking process established in the US Constitution.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. Julian Go tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use. Go reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the "imperial boomerang." Policing Empires thereby unlocks the dirty secret of police militarization: Police have brought imperial practices home to militarize themselves in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this episode of High Theory, Angela Hume tells us about Self Help, not the neoliberal strategy of self-actualization through consumer choices, but the radical political movement of gynecological self-help, that flourished in the late twentieth century and created a set of portable political tactics based in anarchist feminist philosophy.In the episode, she references Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota UP, 2013); Michelle Murphy’s Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Duke UP, 2012); and several health activist organizations, including the Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland, CA; AidAccess which provides mail order medication assisted abortion; and MYA Network, a group of clinicians seeking to expand abortion access in primary care settings.Angela suggested we include three links that everyone should have at their fingertips, PlanC (plancpills.org) which helps people access abortion pills, AidAccess (aidaccess.org) the pill fulfillment service described above, and I Need an A (ineedana.com), a clinic locator.In our longer conversation, she also named the Keep Our Clinics campaign, a fundraising effort to support independent abortion clinics, to which pre-sales of her book contributed. We’re sorry we didn’t get this up early enough for you to participate in the pre-sale! But now the book is out in the world, you can even read a review of it in The Guardian.Our conversation is based Angela’s new book, Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open(link is external) (AK Press, 2023). A work of public scholarship and a history of medicine, the book tells a story of Bay Area abortion defense—from feminist clinical practice, to underground abortion provision, to street politics and clinic defense—from the 1970s to 2000s. You can read an excerpt from the book in the Post45 contemporaries collection “Abortion Now, Abortion Forever,” which was the starting point for our conversation on High Theory.Angela Hume is a feminist historian, critic, and poet, who teaches at UC Berkeley. Her creative and expository writing classes address environmental and health justice, working-class and multiethnic American literatures, feminist and queer storytelling, and more. Beyond Deep Care, Angela is co-editor of Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field(link is external) (U of Iowa P, 2018). Her full-length books of poetry include Middle Time(link is external) (Omnidawn, 2016) and Interventions for Women (Omnidawn, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (ILR Press, 2018), James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not.Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.James a Chamberlain is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mississippi State University, where he specialize in political theory. Chamberlain engages with both ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ traditions of political philosophy, as well as relevant work in the social sciences and humanities. Building on the work we will discuss today his current and recent research focuses on migration and borders.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy