New Books in Public Policy

Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously.Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected.Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and is the Founding Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is also Clinical Professor of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices (Beacon Press, 2022) provides a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.Examining landmark moments such as the erection of the first American museum and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling pledge of allegiance, historian Kristin Hass explores the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure. With sharp analysis and a broad lens, Hass makes the undeniable case that understanding what cultural infrastructure is, and the deep and broad impact that it has, is essential to understanding how structures of inequity are maintained and how they might be dismantled.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S Jacobs' book Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor (U California Press, 2023) is a timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America’s most vulnerable households.Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful, and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Photos from the Front Lines follows medics from Falck Alameda County ambulance during one of the most tumultuous years in recent collective memory - 2020. From a global pandemic to demonstrations to wildfires and mass vaccinations, Photos from the Front Lines provides unequalled coverage of this year and beyond from the perspective of those on the front lines every day of the crisis, with a colossal 500 original photos! The use of the term "front line" came about this year to describe personnel who were putting their lives on the line every day during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and medics were at the absolute forefront of this fight; Photos from the Front Lines takes you there with them.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the American West. University of Idaho professor emeritus of history Adam Sowards explains why in his new book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). Sowards explains the origins of the concept of public land and how the idea has come into conflict with American's adoration for private property, as well as how different stakeholders have come into conflict over the proper use of resources on these lands. From ranching and timber cutting to tourism and wilderness, the US government has attempted to make public lands fulfill several different roles, and in doing so have turned them into something of a political football over the course of the twentieth century. But, as Sowards argues, by being such a malleable, egalitarian, and controversial project, they have come to represent the hope and inconsistencies within American democracy itself.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

If your genes make you better suited to succeed, is that fair? And if not, can anything be done about it? Kathryn Paige Harden – professor psychology at University of Texas in Austin – tells Owen Bennett Jones that we should acknowledge the difference in our genetic make ups and then set about thinking about how to make a fairer society in the light of this differences. Harden is the author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton UP, 2021).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Leigh Goodmark’s new book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (U California Press, 2023), uses the stories of individual criminalized survivors of gender based violence to illuminate the ways that the criminal legal system perpetuates violence against the very women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people it claims to protect. Leigh argues that reform is not the answer to this problem, and that instead of limiting our efforts and imaginations to the pursuit of reforms that ultimately expand the reach of the criminal legal system, we should invest in abolition feminism and a world of non-carceral supports and resources like housing, healthcare, and education instead of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China (Rutgers UP, 2022) traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.Erin Raffety is a research fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry, an empirical research consultant at Princeton Theological Seminary, and an associate research scholar at Princeton Seminary's Institute for Youth Ministry. Raffety researches and writes on disability, congregational ministry, and church leadership and is an advocate for disabled people.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (U California Press, 2023) exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations.Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson's book Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge, 2020) brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal.The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and eastern Canada, and efforts to halt the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure from North America to South Africa. They offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy.Climate Justice and Community Renewal uniquely highlights the accounts of people who are directly engaged in local climate struggles and community renewal efforts, including on-the-ground land defenders, community organizers, leaders of international campaigns, agroecologists, activist-scholars, and many others. It will appeal to students, researchers, activists, and all who appreciate the need for a truly justice-centered response to escalating climate disruptions.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy