New Books in Public Policy

Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York University. He has written for The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine.Red State Revolt explains the emergence and development of the historic wave of teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Blanc embedded himself into the organizations that helped plan the walkouts, gaining access to internal planning meetings and secret Facebook groups. The result is a rich portrait of the labor movement and contemporary political organizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, London, demonstrates the importance of South Korea is both an example in comparative cultural policy, and as a fascinating case study in its own right. The book offers historical analysis, as well as a major theoretical contribution in the form of the ‘new patron state’. The book charts the development and changes in cultural policy, from the project of national ‘modernisation’ to the Korean Wave. Thinking through questions of state theory and neoliberalism, as well as the role of culture in democracy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political parties. He ably integrates the early conservation movement into the discussion, providing foundational understandings of the distinction between the conservationists at the beginning of the 20th century and the growth and evolution of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. Red, Green, and Blue also compares the U.S. engagement with “green” politics and how environmentalism and green social movements have operated in other developed, western democracies. The thrust of this book, which is part of the Element series at Cambridge University Press, is to focus on how, where, and why environmental policy became more acutely partisan. Karol also examines the functioning of party coalitions and interest groups as they wove together around environmental issues.Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is author of Not in My District: The Politics of Military Base Closures (Peter Lang, 2003). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Black public housing complexes (caseríos) as sources of criminality and lawlessness. Using Justice Department reports, social media research, newspapers, and oral interviews to create a “police archive,” LeBrón demonstrates that while police killings, brutality, surveillance, and harassment were hallmarks of mano dura, the policy also reinvented popular understandings of the “who” and “where” of crime that endure to the present. In doing so, she shows how presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality linked to certain places (public housing, sex work neighborhoods, schools, and universities) created notions of victims and criminals who “deserved” life or death. The book’s second half explores critiques of and resistance to punitive governance by looking at underground rap, university student activism, social media debates, and non-punitive anti-violence activism. These case studies show the growing resistance to policing as policy instead of social investment, but also the tenacity of the discourses of criminality activists must wrestle with today.LeBrón is also the author of the forthcoming Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books) and the co-creator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus.Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Expansion of federal power has typically come with the consent of states, often eager to receive the funding tied to new policy priorities. Not so any more, as some states have famously rejected funding for Medicaid expansion. Was the case of Medicaid and Obamacare an aberration or part of a larger strategy? Such is the focus of Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power (University of Chicago Press, 2019).Ben Merriman’s new book explores what he calls uncooperative federalism. He finds a deliberate conservative strategy to use the courts and state executive power to resist federal influence in state affairs. He focuses especially on Kansas and the activity of far-right conservatives in the state who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid.Merriman — a sociologist by training — is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistant Professor of Women’s Leadership at Tulane University--on her judicious new book Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era from University of Massachusetts Press (2017). Mediating Morality is a contemporary exploration of the construction of teen pregnancy in legal events, activism, media campaigns, television, film, and across many domains of popular-political culture since the dismantling of the welfare state, which Daniel definitively places in the year 1996. Daniel argues that these domains of public thought have merged to reconstruct teen pregnancy as a privatized and deeply personal issue of moral failure--what Daniel, following Lauren Berlant, describes as intimate citizenship--rather than symptomatic of ineffective policies that reproduce racist, classist, and sexist structures of inequality. In addition to engaging readings of popular culture texts such as the movie The Pregnancy Pact and pregnancy prevention campaigns, Mediating Morality is also closely attuned to the legal and political events since 1996 that have authorized and capitalized upon an approach to teen pregnancy that absolves the state of responsibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Joseph C. Sternberg's book The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (PublicAffairs, 2019) is an analysis of the economic condition of the Millennial generation, which was as cohort of people born between 1981 and 1996.  This generation has experienced much trauma in the last decade, especially as a result of the Great Recession of 2008.  Sternberg reviews the economic health of this generation, covering issues such as home ownership rates, higher education, employment prospects, and consumption patterns.  He finds that although Millennials have many choices that make them the envy of much of the rest of the world, in the American context this generation suffers from bleaker prospects for wealth accumulation and security than any prior generation since the end of World War II.  Sternberg reviews the intentional and unintentional consequences of public policies supported by the Baby Boomer generation, such as investment, monetary, and housing policies at the national level.  He also reviews the lessons Europe and Japan have for how to respond to the political and economic problems presented by the demographic changes occurring as the Baby Boomers retire.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles.In The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island Press, 2019), distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the key policy debates during this period. Based on a range of evidence from the Reagan Revolution into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process.Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy