New Books in Public Policy

What is intersex and why does it matter? What is the power of law to disrupt dominant narratives? I had a fascinating conversation with authors Dr Fae Garland and Dr Mitchell Travis about their book, Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder (Bristol UP, 2023). We got into detail about these groundbreaking human rights issues. We spoke about the very real challenges faced in conducting legal research that has meaningful impact for social change. In research spanning many years, Garland and Travis worked directly with intersex people and their parents to produce this nuanced, sensitive and extensively researched book. Their's is a monograph that challenges dominant medical narratives, particularly with regard to the way that gender binaries are demarcated and identities are constructed. The book has power both beyond its subject matter and beyond the academy: it will bring pause for reflection as to the role of researchers and the work that lawyers can do in the pursuit of the acceptance and emergence of difference, and especially with regard to the enforcement of human rights. Dr Fae Garland is a Senior Lecturer in Law at The University of Manchester Dr Mitchell Travis is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Social Justice at The University of Leeds.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.  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

Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method for thinking about the arts, and uses this as a starting point to understand what various political philosophies might tell policymakers and the public today. A rich and deep intervention on a pressing social and governmental question, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and cultural policy. Prof Rushton blogs at both Substack and Artsjournal and you can read open access papers covering some of the key ideas in the book here and here.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Each One Teach One: Parental Involvement and Family Engagement in Jamaica’s Education System (University of the West Indies Press, 2022) is a collection of research studies and essays across multiple educational fields: leadership, psychology, special education, early childhood, literacy studies, mathematics and teacher education. The contributors to this collection provide empirical evidence on the state of parental involvement and family engagement in Jamaica. A team approach has been used in completing the various chapters in which graduate researchers collaborated with lecturers in their areas of specialization. The different voices and data from the participants along with relevant literature shape the dialogue on the importance of home and school collaboration in students’ overall outcomes. Each One Teach One provides critical onto-epistemological frameworks grounded within the Jamaican context to examine the scope, prevalence, and effects of parental involvement and family engagement in schooling. The findings, implications and recommendations can guide policymakers in the formulation of strategies compatible with the needs of the schools, students and families and provide indispensable data on how to effectively work together to optimize students’ success.Saran Stewart is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs and Director of Global Education, Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.Sharline Cole is Lecturer in Educational Psychology and Research, the School of Education, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.Yewande Lewis-Fokum is Lecturer in Literacy and Language Education, the School of Education, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.Madden Gilhooly is a humanities public-school teacher and casual academic based on Gadigal land in so-called-Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In rural northern Idaho in the winter of 2013-2014, Syringa Mobile Home Park’s water system was contaminated by sewage, resulting in residents’ water being shut off for 93 days. By summer 2018 Syringa had closed, forcing residents to relocate or face homelessness. In Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities (Rutgers UP, 2023), Dr. Leontina Hormel chronicles how residents dealt with regulatory agencies, frequent boil order notices, threats of closure, and class-based social stigma over this period. Despite all this, what was seen as a dysfunctional, ‘disorderly’ community by outsiders was instead a refuge where veterans, women heads of households, and people with disabilities or substance use disorders were supported and understood. The embattled Syringa community also organized to defend the rights and dignity of residents and served as a site for negotiating with local government, culminating in a class-action lawsuit that reached the federal level. The experiences Syringa residents faced in this conservative, predominately white region of the United States are emblematic of the growing national and global crisis in affordable housing and home ownership, with declining work conditions and incomes for the working-class.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Motivated by compassion and hope, and the shared desire to make the world a better place, the immense amount of charitable giving stands as a testament to the humanity's collective generosity. From aiding those in need to supporting noble causes in art and science, culture and religion, the act of giving has the power to transform lives and shape a brighter future.But amidst the goodwill, there lies a shadowy underbelly that seeks to exploit our altruistic impulses. The landscape of charitable giving is not without its challenges, as scams and deceit work to dilute the noble intentions of well-meaning donors.We sit down with philanthropy consultant and advocate for responsible giving, Arnie Draiman, to learn how to be better and more effective givers. With his keen eye honed through years of experience, Draiman unveils the intricacies of donating wisely while illuminating the potential pitfalls that challenge even the most benevolent intentions.Arnie Draiman heads The Draiman Consulting Group, which serves individual donors and philanthropists, family foundations, charity funds – anyone interested in giving his or her money away wisely. The Group takes personal responsibility for doing the necessary due diligence and for maintaining constant contact with recipients.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Decentering Whiteness in Libraries: A Framework for Inclusive Collection Management Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a "how to" guide for evaluating and crafting collection development policies that will help create equity in library collections. In this book, Andrea Jamison not only contextualizes the need for inclusive collection development policies but provides user-friendly tables, guides, and sample policies.This episode discusses why the history of inequality in libraries matters to our work today and what we can learn from it; how the Library Bill of Rights can be used as an advocacy tool; how we can evaluate and create diverse collection management policies; where to get started with putting policy into practice; and more.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. 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, public schools have become one of the central battlegrounds of American politics. Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) lucidly explores how schools acquired such a critical role in the United States and its nation-building projects. Its author, Cody Dodge Ewert, illustrates how school reformers in the Progressive Era celebrated public education’s unique capacity to unite a diverse and diffuse citizenry while curing a broad swath of social and political ills. Pitching the school as a quintessentially American institution, these reformers’ lofty visions and nation-building projects inspired a historic expansion in public schooling, laying the groundwork for contemporary struggles over the structure and curriculum of public schools.Making Schools American carefully historicizes this varied progressive movement, examining case studies in New York, Utah, and Texas which all shed a unique light on the development of American education and the broader debates of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States concerning what it meant to be an American.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, education, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as the political tides have changed, and what this has meant for energy policy in Japan in the past dozen years. Koppenborg’s history of nuclear power regulation in Japan also seriously considers the implications of this dramatic break for regimes in other countries. This case study provides a complex and thought-provoking contribution to discussions of the role of nuclear power and independent regulation in global efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Princeton University Press’ Our Compelling Interests series focuses on diversity, in racial, gender, socioeconomic, religious, and other forms. Some of the titles in this series so far include The Walls around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education by Gary Orfield, Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise By Eboo Patel, and The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy, by Scott E. Page.Earl Lewis is the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of history, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy and director of the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan. From March 2013-2018, he served as President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Nancy Cantor is Chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Medicine, she previously led Syracuse University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was provost at the University of Michigan, where she was closely involved in the defense of affirmative action in 2003 Supreme Court cases Grutter and Gratz.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy