The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Col...
Feb 22, 2016•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically increase funding for public schools in their current form. Whatever their positions or priorities, bo...
Feb 22, 2016•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks at the lives and work of scientists, nurses, medical researchers, lay groups, doctors, and mothers to understand the shifting meanings of breastfeeding since the 1930s. Early chapters that explore the construction of a modern ...
Feb 03, 2016•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, ...
Jan 21, 2016•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symposium Books, 2016). This edited volume provides an analysis of the global testing culture that has permeated societies throughout the world. With a diverse range of academic contributors, perspectives of this global phenomenon are thoroughly explored and problematized at various levels of societies, fr...
Jan 18, 2016•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Faricy has written Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Faricy is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Conventional wisdom says that Democrats fight to expand spending on social policy, while Republicans push to lower taxes. In Welfare for the Wealthy, we learn that the situation is a bit more co...
Jan 18, 2016•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least, for every child there are adults who should love them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many national and international charters and declarations specifically ascribe to children a right to be loved. But the idea that children have a right to be loved seems philosophically su...
Jan 05, 2016•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard U...
Dec 10, 2015•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Washington University and a member of the faculty of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Admini...
Nov 23, 2015•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Whatever its current prestige in our society, teaching is undoubtedly complex work. Like physicians and therapists, teachers work with people, rather than things. They try to help their students to improve over time, and while they have influence, they do not have complete control. Unlike these other human-centered professions, we often see teachers as being directly responsible for the success or failure of their students. It is their job to create equality of opportunity. The onus of our entir...
Nov 12, 2015•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Historic Preservation in a Nutshell (West Academic Publishing, 2014), co-authored by Sara Bronin and Ryan Rowberry provides the first-ever in-depth summary of historic preservation law within its local, state, tribal, federal, and international contexts. Historic Preservation is a burgeoning area of law that includes aspects of property, land use, environmental, constitutional, cultural resources, international, and Native American law. This book covers the primary federal statutes, and many fac...
Nov 08, 2015•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is ...
Nov 01, 2015•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the reception of Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Geary argues that the report was neither a conservative or a liberal document but rather a conflicted one whose internal contradictions reflected the breakup of t...
Oct 27, 2015•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative p...
Oct 20, 2015•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighed against the clinician’s hard-won judgment from treating hundreds of patients? These are some of the questions that are considered by Miriam Solomon in Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2015). Solomon, who is professor of philosoph...
Oct 15, 2015•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it fo...
Oct 13, 2015•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Many of us went through school not fully knowing what we were supposed to be learning or how our teachers were measuring our progress. These priorities and processes were largely hidden to us as students because they were assumed to be irrelevant or uninteresting. How much learning can happen under these conditions? What if teachers translated standards into student-friendly language and worked with students to develop personalized goals? What if teachers asked students to examine their work and...
Oct 06, 2015•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, ...
Oct 02, 2015•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage? But there are philosophical questions as well. What is the purpose of marriage? What are the goods that marriage helps individuals realize? Once marriage is no longer understood to be restricted to heterosexual couples, must we then question whether it should be restricted to c...
Oct 01, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of new media at Fordham University. Baldwin-Philippi’s book fits into a larger Oxford series on Digital Politics which has been featured on the podcast in the past. She uses an ethnographic approach focused on understanding how political campaigns in 2010 had incorporated various technologies. She al...
Sep 28, 2015•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range fro...
Sep 26, 2015•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast The discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won’t. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won’t even finish their degrees. It’s little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harv...
Sep 22, 2015•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ronald P. Formisano has written Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky. Are those in the United States living in a plutocracy? Formisano offers a full-throated “definitely, yes.” His wide-ranging book explores the nature of inequality, the role political institutions play in perpetuating ine...
Sep 21, 2015•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast AirBnB has dramatically altered the landscape for the hotel, tourism, and real estate sectors. Uber and Lyft have done the same to transportation. But, how come we haven't seen the same in American higher education? Ryan Craig, Managing Director of University Ventures, engages that question in his new book, entitled College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave McMillan, 2015). The author is critical of the current higher educational system in the US, which he says focuse...
Sep 21, 2015•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the tran...
Sep 14, 2015•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast With 40 years of public school experience, from teacher to high-ranking official of one of the largest school systems in the US, Eric Nadelstern has a deep perspective and nuanced understanding of the current educational landscape. Now Professor of Practice in Education Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, he has his synthesized his experiences and success into a concise book, entitled Ten Lessons from New York City Schools: What Really Works to Improve Education (Teachers College ...
Sep 09, 2015•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Justin S. Vaughn and Jose D. Villalobos have written Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Vaughn is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University; Villalobos is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso. Who will best carry out the policy goals of the President? Appointed officials or White House advisors? Vaughn and Villalobos track 40 years of President...
Sep 07, 2015•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every year, thousands of teachers visit San Diego to understand project-based learning and find inspiration in the work done by students at High Tech High. Their multimedia presentations have been installed in public art galleries, and state and local ecologists have relied on their field guides for years. These high school students spend their time doing the complex work of professionals in countless fields. But what are the benefits of teaching this way? How do teachers create their own curric...
Sep 04, 2015•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast “America is a nation of immigrants.” Either this common refrain, or its cousin the “melting pot” metaphor is repeated daily in conversations at various levels of U.S. society. Be it in the private or public realm, these notions promote a compelling image of national inclusivity that appears not to be limited to particular notions of race, religious affiliation, gender, or national origin. Indeed, generations of American writers–like J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Israel Zang...
Sep 02, 2015•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-...
Sep 01, 2015•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
