New Books in Public Policy

The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally...

Why do we protect free speech? What values does it serve? How has the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment? What has the Court gotten right and wrong? Why are current debates over free expression often so divisive? How can we do better? In this succinct but comprehensive and scholarly book, authors Len Niehoff and Thomas Sullivan tackle these pressing questions. Free Speech: From Core Val...

What if prisoners were to write the history of their own prison? What might that tell them--and all of us--about the roots of the system that incarcerates so many millions of Americans?  In Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (New Press, 2023), a group of incarcerated women at the Indiana Women's Prison have assembled a chronicle of what was ori...

Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social...

Postscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. Sh...

Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran propose that, even as events of this decade have exposed stress points in existing top-down, closed systems within education and other public institutions, they have also created prime opportunities to rethink and redesign those systems in ways that encourage civic participation and invigorate local democracy. In The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reignit...

The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underne...

An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them. Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England (MIT Press, 2023) is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them.  In t...

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and...

In examining how the veterans' movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a new history of the U.S. welfare state that highlights its longstanding connection with warfare. It shows how a predominantly white and male group such as mili...

A sweeping history of the American health care state that reveals the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government. The US government has always invested federal, state and local dollars in public health protection and prevention. Despite this public funding, however, Americans typically believe the current system is predominantly comprised of private actors with little g...

Richard Hirsh, Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about his book, Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Powering American Farms is a revisionist history of rural electrification that calls into question a long standard story that rural electrification only began through the powers of the...

Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a matter of social justice.  In The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media (Yale UP, 2023), Alice E. Marwick offers a new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities—includ...

The poor have always been with us, even in a rich country and a prosperous time. I ask Ben Metcalf, former Secretary of Housing and Community Development in California, about the challenges and successes of the government in providing shelter for its people. Our conversation recalls the question from Matthew 25:37-38, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? W...

The Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment...

Nobody who sits in traffic on Sedona, Arizona's main stretch or stands shoulder-to-shoulder in its many souvenir shops would call it a ghost town. Neither would anyone renting a room for $2,000 a month or buying a house for a half-million dollars. And yet, the people who built the small town and made it a community are being pushed further and further out. Their home is being sold out from under t...

For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gend...

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and risin...

Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him. Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out of law school for only two years. They ha...

While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat (MIT Press, 2023), S...

How should we understand contemporary migration policy? In Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration (Rutgers UP, 2022), Nour Halabi, an Interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, explores this question by blending history, media studies, and a range of critical theory to introduce the idea of radical hospitality. Using detailed historical and contemporary case stud...

Helen Redmond is a Harlem-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, licensed clinical social worker, and professor at NYU. As senior editor and a multimedia journalist at Filter, a website that covers drug news, she’s been documenting America’s addiction crisis and treatment system for years. Her new documentary, Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone & COVID-19, is currently on tour across th...

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Sm...

Each June in the United States, scholars, journalists, law makers, law enforcers, lawyers, and members of the public wait for the announcement of major decisions from the Supreme Court. Justices often read a summary of their decision from the bench dressed in their robes. Paper copies are available in a special office – and more recently on the Supreme Court website. This year, the Supreme Court o...

Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York (U Washington Press, 2023) follows them through the institutional spaces of asylum offices, law firms, and human ri...