New Books in Public Policy

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine. The book reflects on the limits of progress that legislative reform may make, and the way that increased regulation can actually limit access to rights protections. Broadly transferrable beyond its specific field, this book will be useful to socio-legal scholars, feminist scholars, trans scholars, policy makers and practitioners.Dr Chris Dietz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law & Social Justice at The University of Leeds. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Elly Fishman, author of 'Refugee High: Coming of Age in America', discusses the challenges faced by refugee high school students in America, including assimilation, gang violence, cultural identity, and an asylum case. The podcast also explores the unique experiences of Afghan refugee students at Sullivan High School and the importance of sharing stories to foster understanding within communities.

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U Illinois Press, 2023), Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin provide an edited collection of new research on this understudied workforce: Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni.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

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. She teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.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

How do individuals move from being homeless to finding safe, stable, and secure places to live? Can we recreate the conditions that helped them most? What policies are needed to support what worked―and to remove common obstacles? Addressing these questions, Jamie Rife and Donald Burnes start from the premise that the most important voices in efforts to end homelessness are the ones most often missing from the discussion: the voices of those with lived experience. In Journeys Out of Homelessness: The Voices of Lived Experience (Lynne Rienner, 2020), they gather the first-person stories of some who have not only survived, but thrived, going on to find positive home situations. Highlighting what we can learn from these personal stories, Rife and Burnes combine them with in-depth discussions of key themes and issues and point to the shifts necessary in current policy and practice that are essential if we are to effectively respond to a problem that has reached epic proportions.Jamie Rife is executive director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. Donald W. Burnes is founder of and senior adviser to the Burnes Center on Poverty and Homelessness at the Colorado Center on Law and Poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts.Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Three political theorists, Smita A. Rahman (DePauw University), Katherine A. Gordy (San Francisco State University), and Shirin S. Deylami (Western Washington University) have brought together an excellent edited volume titled Globalizing Political Theory (Routledge, 2022). And this is precisely what this book does—moving beyond theory categories like “the canon” or comparative political theory—and instead examining political theory from its local roots in different places and different spaces. The book explores political theory in a generative way, not working to reproduce a non-western canon, or to focus on geographic regions. Instead, Globalizing Political Theory includes six umbrella themes, threading chapters together within those themes, and often having chapters, authors, thinkers, and ideas in conversation with each other. The six thematic sections of the book are: Colonialism and Empire; Gender and Sexuality; Religion and Secularism; Marxism, Socialism, and Globalization; Democracy and Protest; Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity. Each section includes a rich diversity of political thinking and authorship, pushing past more traditional disciplinary confines and expectations.Globalizing Political Theory is a useful book in terms of how it is set up and how it also guides the reader, shaping the learning experience. The contributing authors all follow a template that includes spotlighting actual text by the theorists under examination, as well as discussion questions that conclude each chapter. Thus, this is an excellent text to use in classrooms to bring a variety of thinkers and ideas to students exploring political theory. This is also useful for scholars and readers who are interested in broadening their own understandings of political thought.One of the underlying themes within this collection is how political theory has been used and put into action as political activism. These debates, because they are grounded in local issues and the complexity of daily life, reflect some of the connection between theory and action and how coalitions come together within politics. Thus, Globalizing Political Theory is a teaching book, a scholarly interrogation, and a translation of ideas into action. This is an important text within political theory and political science.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

America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice.Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good.The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education--one that already has changed the future of public schooling.Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Disability, Care and Family Law (Routledge 2021) examines the issues at the intersection of disability, care and family law. Professors Beverley Clough and Jonathan Herring challenge dominant narratives in family law, which disadvantage people with disabilities. The book enables the questioning of structural norms in policy and society which situates disability as private familial concern. It calls to the forefront marginalised voices to unveil complexities in seemingly neutral laws when applied to people with disabilities. The book engages with highly topical issues - for example, mothering a child who is in prison and is disabled, children who care for their disabled parents, deprivations of liberty of children with disabilities, and more. By bringing these complex issues together, the book moves beyond the dyad between care and disability relations in the context of family law. This is an important book for disability lawyers, family lawyers and scholars of vulnerability, care theory and relational theory. It will have significant implications for policy makers and practitioners. Professor Beverley Clough is a Professor of Law and Social Justice at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also the author of The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries.Professor Jonathan Herring is the DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law, Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is the author of several monographs, including The Right To Be Protected From Committing Suicide.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Two blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how law makers, law enforcers, and federal courts have responded. They discuss differences among the conservative justices that produced this fragile holding, the growing dependence on history but disdain for historians, how the Bruen approach hurts laws involving domestic violence or controlled substances, the problem of overreading historical silences, and the ways violence may be addressed through community violence intervention, free markets, etc. – in ways SCOTUS cannot control.Jacob Charles is an Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law – a constitutional law scholar focusing on the Second Amendment and firearms law. Before joining the faculty Pepperdine, he served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law. He has a terrific new piece coming out in the Duke Law Journal called “The Dead Hand of a Silent Past: Bruen, Gun Rights, and the Shackles of History.” Jake combines ambitious academic scholarship in law journals with public facing work for outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Hill, Bloomberg Law, and other outlets. Besides being a great friend to this podcast, he has been quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and NPR.Dru Stevenson is the Wayne Fischer Research Professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. Professor Stevenson joined the faculty in 2003 after a law career that included practicing as a Legal Aid lawyer in Connecticut and serving as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Connecticut. His publications cover topics ranging from criminal law to civil procedure, with an emphasis on the intersection of law with economics and linguistic theory. His articles have been cited in leading academic journals and treatises, by federal and state appellate courts, and in recent briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Stevenson’s current research focus is firearm law and policy. His “Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates About the Second Amendment” provides a missing analyses of the debates, situating each statement in Congress within the context of the speaker’s background and political stances on issues overlapping with the right to keep and bear arms.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy