New Books in Public Policy

Over the past decade, effective prevention and treatment policies have resulted in global health organizations claiming that the end of the HIV/AIDS crisis is near and that HIV/AIDS is now a chronic but manageable disease. These proclamations have been accompanied by stagnant or decreasing public interest in and financial support for people living with HIV and the organizations that support them, minimizing significant global disparities in the management and control of the HIV pandemic. The contributors to David A. B. Murray's  Living with HIV in Post-crisis Times: Beyond the Endgame (Lexington Books, 2021) explore how diverse communities of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and organizations that support them are navigating physical, social, political, and economic challenges during these so-called “post-crisis” times.Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why have conservatives decried 'activist judges'? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts, but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.Adam Bonica is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and JAMA Internal Medicine.Maya Sen is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics, and has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, National Public Radio, and other outlets.Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Father Steve Katsouros, founder and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, shares the inspirational story of the founding of Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago which has been recognized as a national model for increasing the college graduation rates for low-income students of color. Arrupe operates as a two-year, liberal arts college within the University that has been able to quadruple the national graduation rate for high-need students to obtain an associate’s degree by integrating a set of best practices: a year-round cohort, intensive faculty advising, wraparound support services and building a strong sense of community. Fr. Katsouros left Arrupe last year to found the Come to Believe Network that is now seeking to replicate the Arrupe model nationally with partner universities. He is also the author of Come to Believe: How Jesuits Are Reinventing Education (Again) (Orbis, 2017).David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. 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 majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale talked with people across Appalachia, at the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations, and in the bustling city of Oakland, California. Their voices offer a wide range of experiences that complicate dominant national narratives about economic struggles.Yet Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life (Polity Press, 2021) is about more than individual experiences. It's about a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. It's about the long-standing collusion between government and corporations that prioritizes profits over people, over the environment, and over the nation's well-being. It's about how racism, sexism, violence, and the pandemic shape daily experience in struggling communities. And, ultimately, it's a book about hope that lays out a vision for the future as honest as it is ambitious.Most people in the book are not progressives; none are radicals. They're hard-working people who know from experience that the current system is unsustainable. Across the country people described the need for a living wage, accessible health care, immigration reform, and free education. Their voices are worth listening to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese's Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work (Routledge, 2020) explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices.The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work.Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations.An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.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

What does ‘sexual citizenship’ mean in practice for people with mobility impairments who may need professional support to engage in sexual activity? Sexual Citizenship and Disability: Understanding Sexual Support in Policy, Practice and Theory (Routledge, 2021) explores this subject through empirical investigation based on case studies conducted in four countries – Sweden, England, Australia and the Netherlands – and develops the abstract notion of ‘sexual citizenship’ to make it practically relevant to disabled people, professionals in disability services and policy-makers. Through a cross-national approach, it demonstrates the variability of how sexual rights are understood and their culturally specific nature. It also shows how the personal is indeed political: states’ different policy approaches change the outcomes for disabled people in terms of support to explore and express their sexualities. By proposing a model of sexual facilitation that can be used in policy development, to better cater to disabled service users’ needs as well as furthering the theoretical understanding of sexual rights and sexual citizenship, this book will be of interest to professionals in disability services and policy-makers as well as academics and students working in the following subject areas: Disability Studies, Sociology, Social Policy, Sexuality Studies/Sexology, Social Work, Nursing, Occupational Therapy and Public Health.Julia Bahner is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden, and was formerly Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the Centre for Disability Studies, School of Sociology, University of Leeds, UK. She holds a PhD in social work and has worked extensively with disabled people’s organisations, sexual rights organisations and disability service organisations to develop better policies and practices around sexuality, disability and support.Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

When Americans talk about guns, they often use terms like “gun rights” or “gun control.” They also tend to separate gun politics and the politics of the police. In Policing and the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race (Princeton University Press, 2021), Jennifer Carlson identifies the inaccuracies of both. She provides two alternative narratives of American “gun talk” -- gun militarism and gun populism -- that clarify the stakes in today’s gun debates.. Based on her extensive research – using local and national newspapers, interviews with police chiefs, and observations made at gun licensing boards – she insists these two discourses reveal how race shapes both how gun politics unfold and how gun policies are created to differentiate between legitimate violence and criminal violence. Coercive social control is organized by racialized understandings of gun violence. Carlson demonstrates the roles that the NRA, police chiefs, and gun administrators play in distinguishing the boundaries of legitimate violence for both private and public gun owners. For her, linking the politics of guns with the politics of the police clarifies our political and policy debates -- as well as the complex terrain negotiated each day between police and private civilians in our social lives.Dr. Jennifer Carlson is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Government, & Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her remarkable earlier book, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford, 2015), has shaped the study of how guns impact American society in multiple fields. Her public facing scholarship includes commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Clustered Injustice and The Level Green (Legal Action Group, 2020), Professor Luke Clements tackles the problem of the way in which "our legal system generates and exacerbates disadvantage." Examining the interconnectedness of disadvantage faced by many minorities - such as people who are homeless, Roma, Gypsies and Travelling people, disabled people, those within the criminal justice system, people who are chronically poor and more - he makes an argument that law segregates individuals' problems into isolated incidences, but rather than solving problems, this segregation exacerbates disadvantage. Injustice is clustered, it is interconnected and law, policy and bureaucracies'  failure to recognise this keeps people in positions of relative disadvantage and limits their opportunities to flourish in their own conception of the good life. However, it is not all bad news. building on a wealth of professional experience and theoretical insight, Luke offers a roadmap for reform. He seeks to imagine a better system which would be better not just for those who face disadvantage, but for all members of the community. Luke is the Cerebra Professor of Law and Social Justice at the School of Law, Leeds University. He practised as a solicitor between 1981 and 2021 and in that capacity had conduct of a number of cases before the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In 1996 he was the solicitor who took the first Roma case to reach the Strasbourg Court Buckley v. UK (1996)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

Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton, 2021) explores the scope and power of one of America’s most influential interest groups. Despite widespread public support for stricter gun control laws, the National Rifle Association has consistently managed to defeat or weaken proposed regulations. Firepower provides an unprecedented look at how this controversial organization built its political power and how it has deployed it on behalf of its pro-gun agenda.Taking readers from the 1930s to the age of Donald Trump, Matthew Lacombe traces how the NRA’s immense influence on national politics arises from its ability to shape the political outlooks and actions of its followers. He draws on nearly a century of archival records and surveys to show how the organization has fashioned a distinct worldview around gun ownership and used it to mobilize its supporters. Lacombe reveals how the NRA’s cultivation of a large, unified, and active base has enabled it to build a resilient alliance with the Republican Party, and he examines why the NRA and its members formed an important constituency that helped fuel Trump’s unlikely political rise. Firepower sheds vital new light on how the NRA has grown powerful by mobilizing average Americans and how it uses its GOP alliance to advance its objectives and shape the national agenda.Matthew Lacombe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. He studies American politics, with a broad focus on understanding and explaining political power in the U.S. His research and teaching interests engage with interest groups and political parties, social identity and political ideology, inequality and representation, and American political development. In addition to Firepower, he is the co-author of Billionaires and Stealth Politics, a book that details the political preferences and behavior of U.S. billionaires.Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Nada Moumtaz’s God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021) is an ethnography anchored in deep study of the Muslim scholarly tradition, the urban landscape, and Lebanon across the Ottoman, Mandate, and post-independence periods. At the center of the book is the waqf, often translated as “pious endowment.” An act and a practice exhibiting or embodying both change and stability since the nineteenth century, the waqf allows Moumtaz to reinterpret major categories in anthropology, Islamic legal studies, and history, including charity, family, the economy, the public and private, and the state. This is the second New Books Network interview devoted to this much-anticipated book, a careful, wide-ranging, and ambitious work poised to influence conversations in multiple disciplines.Interviewers: Janna Aladdin and Julian Weideman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy