New Books in Public Policy

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford UP, 2021) examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people-or refusing to connect people-to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or anti-racist ideas. Typically, housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank-order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Taking a multidisciplinary perspective (including public health, sociology, criminology, and political science amongst others), and using examples from across the globe, Alison Ritter's Drug Policy (Routledge, 2021) provides a detailed understanding of the complex and highly contested nature of drug policy, drug policy making and the theoretical perspectives that inform the study of drug policy. It draws on four different theoretical perspectives: evidence-informed policy, policy process theories, democratic theory, and post-structural policy analysis.The use and trade in illegal drugs is a global phenomenon. It is viewed by governments as a significant social, legal, and health problem that shows no signs of abating. The key questions explored throughout this book are what governments and other bodies of social regulation should do about illicit drugs, including drug policies aimed at improving health and reducing harm, drug laws and regulation, and the role of research and values in policy development. Seeing policy formation as dynamic iterative interactions between actors, ideas, institutions, and networks of policy advocates, the book explores how policy problems are constructed and policy solutions selected, and how these processes intersect with research evidence and values. This then animates the call to democratise drug policy and bring about inclusive meaningful participation in policy development in order to provide the opportunity for better, more effective, and value-aligned drug policies.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of drug policy from a number of disciplines, including public health, sociology, criminology, and political science.Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021) by Dr. Davarian Baldwin examines the political economy of the American university over the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. He brings a Black Studies lens to interrogate the ways that universities hide behind the notion of administering public goods to protect their tax-exempt status while generating astronomical profits off of the backs of working-class people, graduate student teachers and researchers, and underpaid and contingent faculty. We discuss the securitization and development implications of growing university wealth and how it engenders forms of radicalized plunder, racist policing, gentrification, and exploitation by the 1%. With a focus on this and more, we talk about what it means to live in the shadow of ivory tower.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. In How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America (Little Brown Spark, 2021), we get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself.Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty 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

In this Postscript, Susan Liebell and Lilly Goren review this morning’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas SB-8, the oral arguments in last week’s Mississippi abortion case, and the wider issues of the Court’s legitimacy, electoral backlash, ripple effects beyond abortion to marriage equality or protection of sexuality, the effect of a ruling on electoral politics, and the effectiveness of grassroots organizing. We are joined by Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dr. Andrew R. Lewis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver).Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 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

What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, personnel, and skills needed to get a job done. Noémi Tousignant’s book, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal (Duke UP, 2018), feels its way into the experience of capacity to observe a crucial characteristic. Capacity has “temporal qualities.”Waiting, interrupting, prolonging, repairing: these processes show that the elements of lab science and public health called “capacity” operate with different rhythms that often fail to synchronize or to be formally acknowledged. Yet the material world of capacity also implies a direction, which orients scientists to (im)possibilities for better futures, “to moral imaginations of responsibility and commitment.”The book won the 2020 Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. The award signals the book’s broad relevance for anyone interested in critical studies of science, technology, and health; intrigued by the phenomenology of time; keen to combine training in history with ethnographic methods; or interested in postcolonial studies, especially Africa.The book is based on Tousignant’s field work in Senegal from in 2010 and 2011 studying professional toxicologists across three institutions as they “improvised and imagined a more capacious and protective toxicology.” In terms of empirical content, this work is important for anyone interested in environmental contamination and the politics of poisoning lands, waters, and bodies.The interview also refers to the work of Gabrielle Hecht on exposure and imaginaries of Africa, Julie Livingstone on improvisation and slow risks, Joanna Crane on commodification of global health, and Monika Krause on how NGOs perform worthy projects. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (Oxford UP, 2021) is a unique retelling of the history of temperance and prohibition. Rather than focusing on white, rural, conservative American bible-thumpers, Mark Lawrence Schrad contends that the temperance movement was a progressive, international, and revolutionary movement of oppressed-peoples fighting the liquor traffic, through which states and rich capitalists combined to get the lower classes addicted to drink for profit. Schrad shows that the temperance movement was in fact a global pro-justice movement that had an impact in nearly every major country in the world, both developing and developed. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in the Indian City (Northwestern UP, 2021) follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life.Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press, 2021), by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a broad spectrum of issues and raises larger questions about who controls the public things we all rely on, exposing the hidden crisis of privatization that has been slowly unfolding over the last fifty years and giving us a road map for taking our country back. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty 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

The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (U Chicago Press, 2020), David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer's Heroin to Purdue's OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate "goof balls," amphetamine "thrill pills," the "love drug" Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls "white markets," where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele.These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy