New Books in Public Policy

The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the 20th century. In the 21st, we have embraced a vast array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse. As Citron reveals, whereve...

Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism (NYU Press, 2022), Gregory Smithsimon shows us how this happened, and why it matters, unearthing the hidden role that suburbs played in establishing the Black middle-class. Focusing on...

This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations (Routledge, 2022) builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has...

Political Scientists Alison Gash and Dan Tichenor have a new book, Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency (Oxford UP, 2022), that centers children and young people within the study of democratic politics, filling in a bit of a gap in the literature, especially in political science literature. Gash and Tichenor note in their research that young people are...

Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New...

For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada. In Covid-19: A History ( McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe,...

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been one of the leading organizations in the struggle for social justice within Canada for several decades. In the brilliant Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing (Fernwood Publishing, 2021), author AJ Withers draws on their own experience as an organizer, on interviews with the people with whom OCAP campaigned and with City bureaucrats alik...

Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons.  Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing...

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—driv...

What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that rests on fine human judgment – but in fact many of tasks it involves can be performed by AI and if that is true for law then presumably it is also true for many other areas too. Daniel Susskind of Oxford University discusses his book The Future of the Profe...

In the Philippines, unknown numbers of children are in institutional care. Commonly known as residential care or orphanages, these institutions have been established to fill a social welfare gap, and to better support child welfare and protection efforts. But what are the implications for the children in these institutions, and what does this system tell us about the monetisation of their welfare?...

In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (2006), Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (2012), and Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, which won the Hillman Prize. In the...

It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree.  In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Harvard UP, 2021), Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student...

This book cuts new ground, challenging the assumption of law as an objective concept. It draws out the way that binary frameworks situate and create the notion of the individual in law, delininating responsibilities and rights between concepts such as the state / individual, public / private, care / disability and capacity / incapacity. In The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries ...

Eraldo Souza dos Santos talks about the invention of civil disobedience as a form of political action around the world, and the need for its redefinition to describe activism present and future. In the episode, he references John Rawls’s classic definition from A Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971) and Erin Pineda’s new book, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Moveme...

Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt curr...

How can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO and founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX is a major proponent, as is Elon Musk. Now, SBF and many in Effective Altruism have also embraced longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking that tells us we should worry about the in...

Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (C...

None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about the life-threatening nature of this virus as it spread around the globe. At the same time, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky ask us to reflect on our experiences and the responses to COVID-19 in the United States in...

It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of this crisis are manifold, many people have come to argue that the diminished role of public housing, which includes council estates, is a major contributing factor. Yet the bitter irony is that, at a time of such massive housing shortages, London's c...

Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. In Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti (Cornell UP, 2022), Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in g...

What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors P...

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), sc...

The liberalism that is defended here is therefore itself an object of political contestation, and not just the background against which such contestation takes place. If we can look to the past achievements of liberal polities – the widespread (but still imperfect) acceptance of religious toleration and free inquiry, the relative (but still woefully incomplete) deconstruction of class, gender, and...

There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents...