New Books in Public Policy

How can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography of a youth arts programme in the UK, along with rich and detailed comparative case studies. Drawing on a wealth of cross- and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, the book is both a critique and defence of the possibilities offered by engagement with the arts. The book will be essential reading across arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone with an interest in the arts.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These groups also share harsh histories of medical experimentation, eugenic sterilizations, and health care discrimination. Yet the similarities in inequities experienced by Black people and disabled people and the harms endured by people who are both Black and disabled have been largely unexplored. To fill this gap, Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health (Cambridge UP, 2022) uses an interdisciplinary approach, weaving health research with social science, critical approaches, and personal stories to portray the devastating effects of health injustice in America.Author Mary Crossley takes stock of the sometimes-vexed relationship between racial justice and disability rights advocates and interrogates how higher disability prevalence among Black Americans reflects unjust social structures. By suggesting reforms to advance health equity for disabled people, Black people, and disabled Black people, this book lays a crucial foundation for intersectional, cross-movement advocacy to advance health justice in America.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In a world awash in “fake news,” where public figures make unfounded assertions as a matter of course, a preeminent legal theorist ranges across the courtroom, the scientific laboratory, and the insights of philosophers to explore the nature of evidence and show how it is credibly established. In the age of fake news, trust and truth are hard to come by. Blatantly and shamelessly, public figures deceive us by abusing what sounds like evidence. In The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everything Else (Harvard University Press, 2022), preeminent legal theorist Frederick Schauer proposes correctives, drawing on centuries of inquiry into the nature of evidence. Evidence is the basis of how we know what we think we know, but evidence is no simple thing. Evidence that counts in, say, the policymaking context is different from evidence that stands up in court. Law, science, historical scholarship, public and private decisionmaking—all rely on different standards of evidence. Exploring diverse terrain including vaccine and food safety, election-fraud claims, the January 2021 events at the US Capitol, the reliability of experts and eyewitnesses, climate science, art authentication, and even astrology, The Proof develops fresh insights into the challenge of reaching the truth. Schauer combines perspectives from law, statistics, psychology, and the philosophy of science to evaluate how evidence should function in and out of court. He argues that evidence comes in degrees. Weak evidence is still some evidence. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but prolonged, fruitless efforts to substantiate a claim can go some distance in proving a negative. And evidence insufficient to lock someone up for a crime may be good enough to keep them out of jail. This book explains how to reason more effectively in everyday life, shows why people often reason poorly, and takes evidence as a pervasive problem, not just a matter of legal rules.Prof. Frederick Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.Dr. Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.David Bond is the Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action and teaches on the environment and public action. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care.Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, media and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog here where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books. 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 two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding settlements.But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects trying to address the problem. And this isn’t even the punchline. Not only do the interventions not work, nobody involved in them admits that the interventions may have been a failure.Having spent many years working in cultural policy studies and in arts practice, Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson take the arts and culture sector to task over this fiction. Their book Failures in Cultural Participation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) puts a mirror to the industry and invites cultural policymakers, organisations, and practitioners to confront their failures.David Stevenson speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the culture sector’s refusal to acknowledge failure in widening participation and moving the debate from the ‘value’ of culture to considering how policies can be designed and implemented. David argues for an honest and transparent acknowledgement of failure at individual, organisational and governmental levels. The Failspace Project tools A special issue of the Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation edited by Leila and David David’s “I hate opera” paper. Leila Jancovich is a professor of Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds. Before entering academia, she worked for many years in the arts and festivals sector as a producer, researcher, and policy maker.David Stevenson is the Dean of The School of Arts, Social Sciences, and Management at Queen Margaret University. His research focuses on relations of power and the production of value within the cultural sector.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.In this episode, Dr. Plaster references an oral history that was produced called “Polk Street Stories.” You can listen to “Polk Street Stories” here.Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as innate characteristics? What, moreover, is the role of law in shaping our answers to these questions?"These are just some of the queries explored by Dr. Zoe Adams's analysis of the legal construction, and regulation, of work, in her book The Legal Concept of Work (Oxford University Press, 2022).Spanning from the 14th century to the present day, the book explores how the role of law and legal concepts comes to consider some forms of human labour as work, and some forms of human labour as non-work. It examines why perceptions of these activities can change over time, and how legal constitution impacts the way in which work comes to be regulated, organised, and valued.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Professor Jonathan Herring makes an argument that suicidal people have a right to be protected from committing suicide, and that the state should be under a duty to take reasonable steps to protect them from killing themselves. In The Right to Be Protected from Committing Suicide (Hart, 2022) Herring takes a deep dive into ideas surrounding autonomy and capacity, to draw out the tensions between these concepts and the legal and ethical debates which provide support for non-interventionist argument based on respect for a "right" to commit suicide. Going beyond the usual concerns of Euthanasia, this book challenges readers to examine suicide as a failing of society to offer support to those who need it, as opposed to an individual choice to end one's life. Professor Jonathan Herring is a Professor of Law at Exeter College in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford. He is the author of around 50 solo authored monographs. Listener note: In this interview, we discuss suicide, which may be upsetting for some listeners. However, support is available. In the UK, call Samaritans on 11 61 23; the US, Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on 988; in Australia, Lifeline on 13 11 14; and Hong Kong, call Samaritans on 2896 0000. 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

How can cultural heritage give us the methodological tools and source material to confront climate change? How can the cultural heritage sector lead the way into a future that proactively faces the climate crisis? Who can be involved in this work—who gets to identify as a “cultural heritage expert”—and what is the work to be done?Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2022) examines the challenges that environmental change, both sudden and long-term, poses to the preservation of cultural material. But more than this, Robyn Sloggett and Marcelle Scott point out how our confrontation of the climate crisis relies on the cultural heritage sector, which makes records and narratives available to inform decisions now and into the future.Bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders who have an interest in—and responsibility for—the care of cultural heritage material and sites of cultural heritage value, the book explores thinking on and actions in relation to issues of climate change and environmental risk. Sloggett and Scott highlight stakeholders’ shared interest in drawing on collective expertise to meet the challenges that environmental change brings to the future of our cultural heritage and our cultural identity. Based on the understanding that this global challenge requires local, national and international co‐operation, the book also considers how local knowledge can have international application.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments and autocrat-wannabes are licensing and utilizing Pegasus spyware in the most vulnerable democracies in the world. Pegasus follows the personal stories of real victims--intrepid individuals who have spoken truth to some of the most corrupt, risible powers around the globe.Laurent Richard is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin. He is the founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted continuing the unfinished work of murdered reporters to ensure the work they died for is not buried with them.Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the award-winning Pegasus Project and the Cartel Project, an international investigation of assassinated Mexican journalists.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