New Books in Public Policy

Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems require...

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023), Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, a...

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.  In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-inco...

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. Amanda Apgar's book The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future (U Michigan Press, 2023) tracks the narratives that have emerged from t...

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former s...

In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly--dark agoras--in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to con...

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges that assessment by exploring how NIPT can actually...

The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and automation, we can harness technology to correct discrimination, historical exclusions, and subvert long-standing stereotypes. Orly Lobel is the author of The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Futur...

Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss' book The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the Third UN: the ecology of supportive non-state actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second...

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block. What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black community and the broader American education system. Riley...

Luck greatly influences a person's quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens social inequality. But societies can change their fortune. Too often debates about inequality focus on the accuracy of data or modelling while missing the greater point about ethics and exploitation. In the wake of growing disparity between the 1% and ot...

In Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores the longue durée history of birth control and abortion in China from the Republican period to the present day. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, oral histories, posters, films, novels, and...

May Hara and Annalee G. Good's Teachers as Policy Advocates: Strategies for Collaboration and Change (Teachers College Press, 2023) argues that teachers’ active participation in policy advocacy is crucial to creating a K–12 educational system that honors the needs of students, families, and communities. The authors examine obstacles to teacher involvement in policy, analyze preservice and practici...

For twentieth-century feminists, it was a rallying cry for bodily autonomy and political power. For influencers and lifestyle brands, it’s buying fancy nutrition and body products at a premium. And it has now infiltrated nearly every food, leisure, and pop-culture space as a hugely lucrative industry. What is it? To quote a million memes: it’s called self-care. In Decolonize Self-Care (OR Books, 2...

In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California’s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the patients who used this underground network and the ph...

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state...

Michael Truscello, author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, discusses the ways in which infrastructure determines who may live and who must die under contemporary capitalism. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a...

One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we wil...

Incommunicados is a collection of unanswered letters to public officials and other notable figures from iconoclasts Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein. The project was edited by Francesco Desantis, Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. This booklet and Ralph Nader’s introduction meticulously document the self-ruinous disdain by Congress and the executive branch for thoughtful cit...

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate the political and social structures that incarcerate and degrade?  In Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Farah Godrej explores the tension between narratives of quiet contemplation and social or...

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic conditions for the "pursuit of happiness." For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace--nothing more. As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation--thanks in large...

Today I talked to Eugene Lipov about his new book (co-authored with Jamie Mustard), The Invisible Machine: The Startling Truth About Trauma and the Scientific Breakthrough That Can Transform Your Life (BenBella Books, 2023) Human beings aren’t biologically build to endure sustained stress. A 30-second blast of anxiety in dealing with a threat isn’t anything likely the ongoing suffering taking plac...

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. The second episode of this series features a discussion with the author of Anti-vaxxers, Jonathan M. Berman. Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in...

As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Demo...

In this series of interviews from the MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. In this, the first episode, Robert I. Rotberg (author of Anticorruption) discusses corruption - what is it? where is it? And is it getting worse? He explains the long history of corruption in the USA, as wel...