New Books in Public Policy

Pepper Glass’s new book Misplacing Ogden, Utah: Race, Class, Immigration, and the Construction of Urban Reputation (University of Utah Press, 2020) evaluates the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems.Glass uses Ogden, Utah as a case study to argue that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between the reputations of members of a community.As a working-class city, Ogden, Utah has long held a history of racial and immigrant diversity. Among many Utahns this community gained a reputation as a "sin city" in the middle of an entrenched religious culture.Glass blends ethnographic research with historical accounts, census reports, and other secondary sources to provide insight into Ogden’s reputation, past and present.This book captures the perception of residents of the entire city as opposed to only a sector of the community. Glass’s unique approach suggests that we can do a better job at confronting urban problems by rethinking the assumptions we have about place and promoting interventions that breakdown boundaries.Pepper Glass, Ph.D. is associate professor of sociology at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He has published his research on racial inequality, social movements, and youth culture in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mobilization, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is assistant professor of sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him 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

One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating social and economic costs of job insecurity. It is also false.In this The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020), Pavlina R. Tcherneva challenges us to imagine a world where the phantom of unemployment is banished and anyone who seeks decent, living-wage work can find it - guaranteed.This is the aim of the Job Guarantee proposal: to provide a voluntary employment opportunity in public service to anyone who needs it. Tcherneva enumerates the many advantages of the Job Guarantee over the status quo and proposes a blueprint for its implementation within the wider context of the need for a Green New Deal.Pavlina Tcherneva is Associate Professor at Bard College and Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). 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 episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020).In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change.Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as “slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook UniversityThis episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.In The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford UP, 2020), Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US.A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia.In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies and institutions in Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, explores challenges to crafting and enforcing policies and aiding victims, and evaluates best practices based on country-to-country comparison.We discuss common misconceptions about human trafficking, the impact of institutionalized gender inequalities on efforts to combat labor and sexual exploitation, the mixed results of United States and Western European involvement, the challenges of controversial fieldwork as an American scholar in Eurasia, and the book’s key takeaways for policy makers and activists.Dr. Dean also introduces the Human Trafficking Policy Index - her new, innovative tool for measuring the scope of human trafficking policy.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Natalie Kimball is the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia, out this year from Rutgers University Press.An Open Secret argues that, despite stigma and continued legal prohibitions, practices and attitudes surrounding abortion have changed in urban Bolivia since the 1950s. Kimball shows how women have pushed for and enacted changes in policy and services relating to unwanted pregnancy and abortion in Bolivia.In particular, they argue that since the 1980s, women have opened space for themselves to be able to terminate pregnancies with more options and more safety, even as abortion remains illegal. In order to tell this story, Kimball conducted over 100 interviews with women and maternal health practitioners in both La Paz and El Alto, and their stories offer a history not only of policy change, but of transformations in official and unofficial attitudes.An Open Secret tells these stories while remaining attuned to the specific contexts of urban Bolivia, where women and men navigate overlapping medical systems not reducible to western science alone. Their book also centers women’s affective responses to pregnancy and the structures that factor into decisions about care. In this interview, we talk about oral history practices as well as the challenges of rights and choice base frameworks for maternal health activism in postcolonial contexts.An Open Secret is essential reading for anyone interested in women’s health or the practice of oral history in Latin America.Natalie Kimball is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of Staten Island, which forms part of the City University of New York.Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militarization of police, concerns about the rise of the private security industry, and the long-standing belief that policing should be controlled by municipal governments suggest that police should be civilians who defend the public interest, and that they should be accountable to the communities that they serve.In Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018), Micol Seigel exposes the mythical nature of the civilian/military, public/private, and local/national/international boundaries that supposedly delimit the legitimate sphere of policing in a liberal democratic society. Focusing on the employees of the Office of Public Safety, a branch of the State Department that provided technical assistance to police forces in developing countries from 1962 until it was closed amid controversy over its role in aiding despotic governments in 1974, Seigel follows their careers as these violence workers put their knowledge of counter-insurgency to use in US police forces, pursued opportunities working for private security firms protecting the oil industry in places like Alaska and Saudi Arabia, and worked alongside military officers in aid missions to Cold War hotspots in the Global South. As she follows the careers of the policemen, she demonstrates that civilian policing has been militarized from the beginning, that capitalist production relies on state violence to discipline workers and dispossess groups who stand in the way of resource extraction, and that violence workers are rarely accountable to the people they supposedly serve.Violence Work is critical reading for anyone who is interested in rethinking the functions that police should perform in a democratic society. It also weakens the legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence by calling commonly-held ideological distinctions into question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing.Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process.Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future.Join us to hear them talk about the book and its implications for the 2020 election.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets―And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020) is one of the rare books written to appeal to engaged and open-minded citizens from across the political spectrum.Welfare for the Rich is the first book to describe and analyze the many ways that federal and state governments provide handouts—subsidies, grants, tax credits, loan guarantees, price supports, and many other payouts—to millionaires, billionaires, and the companies they own and run.Welfare for millionaire farmers comes to more than $50 billion annually. Subsidies to giant corporations exceeds $100 billion. This shocking waste of taxpayer money is rigorously documented in Welfare for the Rich, along with the political action committees, and special interest groups that keep this distorted system going.Many journalists, scholars, and activists have focused on one or more of these dysfunctional programs. A few of the most egregious examples have even become famous. But Welfare for the Rich is the first attempt to paint a comprehensive, easily accessible picture of a system largely designed by the richest Americans—through lobbyists, lawyers, political action committees, special interest groups, and other powerful influencers—with the specific goal of making sure the government keeps wealth and power flowing from the many to the few.Phil Harvey is an entrepreneur who has founded a thriving business, a philanthropist who has created several important nonprofit organizations, and the author of five books.Lisa Conyers is director of policy studies for the DKT Liberty Project.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy