New Books in Public Policy

What is learning? There is a robust body of literature that seeks to tell us what the most effective classroom techniques and strategies are, but Joshua Eyler goes further. In his new book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (West Virginia UP, 2018), Eyler digs deeply into research from a broad range of disciplines to help us understand the act of learning itself, and then showing us how that deeper understanding can translate into more effective teaching and learning in our own classrooms. It’s an important book for all college instructors.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 Peoples 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

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How should we value culture? In What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture (Monash University Press, 2018), Professors Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, from Flinders University's Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture project, explore the troublesome question at the core of much contemporary cultural policy. The book charts the struggles over cultural data collection, both in the Australian setting and with implications for many more global debates. It draws on a wealth of examples from across humanities and literature, as well as cultural events. Setting out the importance of narratives, critiquing both the rise of digital platforms and the reductiveness of economic approaches, the book offers a radical alternative for those seeking to defend the value of culture in contemporary politics and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How political are private foundations? Are they good or bad for democracy? Such are the big questions taken up by Rob Reich in his new book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018). Reich is professor of political science and faculty co-director for the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University.Just Giving investigates the ethical and political dimensions of philanthropy and considers how giving might better support democratic values and promote justice. What can public policy makers do to better structure philanthropy so that it is an asset to a healthy democracy rather than an impediment? Reich offers a theoretical and practical taken on these questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming.  Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse.  With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability.  Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe.  A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice.Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Can every aspect of society be 'creative'? In Against Creativity (Verso, 2018), Oli Mould, a lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, explains the need to resist and recast the ideology of enforced creativity sweeping through societies all over the world. The book offers a wide range of critical engagements, from the idea of creative work, through the reform of public services, to engagements with space and place, with numerous examples of alternatives to the current 'creative' settlement, and how they reflect bodies, organisations, practices, and places. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary social world. You can also read more on Oli's TaCity blog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Is microfinance the magic bullet that will end global poverty or is it yet another a form of predatory lending to the poor? In her new book Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sohini Kar brings ethnography to bear on this urgent question. Drawing on fieldwork with a for-profit microfinance institution (MFI) and its intended beneficiaries in the Indian city of Kolkata, the book brings into view the perils of “financial inclusion” for the poor. Kar argues that new streams of credit are increasingly used to capitalize on poverty rather than to challenge it. Richly peopled, the book evinces a deep commitment to understanding economic life as it is lived and experienced by everyday people rather than through abstract models. We meet founders of MFIs remaking themselves with narratives of social business, loan officers trying to balance the performance of care with pressures of debt-recovery, poor women taking out consumption loans and striving for middle-class identities, and debt-ridden borrowers struggling to manage the costs of living and the pressures of repayment. The experiences of this cast of characters are framed within the larger histories of debt and power in Kolkata, in West Bengal, and in India more broadly. Financializing Poverty combines theoretical sophistication with clear and engaging prose to shed light on the ways in which profit is made off of poverty. The book will be of interest to readers in the fields of anthropology, economics, and development studies, as well as readers interested in South Asia and global poverty.Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” free time as a political good has received little attention from politicians and political philosophers. In her book, Free Time (Princeton University Press, 2018), Julie L. Rose explains that this neglect arises from the mistaken characterization of free time as a matter of personal choice and preference. The book instead argues that not only should we understand free time as a resource that is required for the pursuit of one’s chosen ends and for the exercise of formal liberties and opportunities, but also that it is a resource to which citizens are entitled on the basis of the widely held liberal principles of individual freedom and equality. The claim that the fair distribution of free time is required for justice serves as grounds for the book to interrogate a whole host of policy choices—including maximum work hours provisions, restrictions on over time, universal basic income, income subsidies to caregivers, publicly provided caregiving services and facilities for the elderly, disabled, and children, and workplace accommodations, among others. Though Rose notes that the specific choices societies make about how much free time is required and how exactly to guarantee it will vary, she ultimately argues that the just society must ensure that all citizens have their fair share of free time—time not consumed by meeting the necessities of life, time to devote to their own projects and commitments, whatever those might be. Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents. This is an understudied area of STS that Parthasarathy carefully navigates in order to understand how knowledge production interacts with law. The reader learns the differences in values, law and objects between US and European patent politics. This comparison brings into focus the role that law, biotechnology corporations, scientists, activists, and more play in deciding what knowledge deserves legal protection. Patent Politics is a fascinating read that will continue to be relevant for many years to come. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy