Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-...
Feb 21, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harris Beider is the author of White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change (Policy Press, 2015). Beider is chair in Community Cohesion at the Center for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. Many of the same socio-economic changes that scholars have associated with the rise of President Donald Trump in the US have been associated with recent political...
Feb 20, 2017•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program, and offers a fascinating story of unexpected policy origins and of the interplay between psychiatric theory, race, and U.S. social welfare policy. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Ham...
Feb 17, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, joins the New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled The Civic University: The Policy and Leadership Challenges (Edward Elgar Pub 2016). She is the co-editor of the book, along with John Goddard, Louise Kempton, and Paul Vallance. The book explores the new challenges that universities face in this era defined...
Feb 15, 2017•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is the role of evidence in the policy process? In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2016), Justin Parkhurst, Associate Professor of Global Health Policy at the London School of Economics, maps the history of evidence based policy making and offers a new model for the good governance of appropriate evidence in policy. The book is both agenda setting and a detailed and insightful overview of evidence in policy. Moreover, the ra...
Jan 30, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast The 9/11 attacks revealed a breakdown in American intelligence and there was a demand for individuals and institutions to find out what went wrong, correct it, and prevent another catastrophe like 9/11 from ever happening again. In Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown Publishers, 2016) Karen J. Greenberg discusses how the architects of the War on Terror transformed American justice into an arm of the Security State. She tells the story of law and policy after 9/11, introducing ...
Jan 27, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, political theory, and political science, Democracy Against Domination reinterprets Progressive Era economic thought for the challenges of today. The book offers a new approach to regulation and governance rooted in democratic theory and the writing of Louis Brandeis and John Dewey. In order to oversee ...
Jan 23, 2017•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways. These have included belief in divine origins, biological causation, and environmental influences. And treatments for mental illness have undergone a similar evolution. In his book Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity (Princeton University Press, 20...
Jan 20, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Pope said that Donald Trump wasn’t much of a Christian if all he can think about is building walls. Trump replied that it was “disgraceful” for a any leader, even the Pope, “to question another man’s religion or faith.” I imagine that many Americans agreed with Trump on this score. But is Trump’s “radical tolerance” position really sensible? Can’t someone reasonably and respectfully say to another “Gee, I think you’ve got that particular point of scripture wrong” or even “I think your faith ...
Jan 14, 2017•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially...
Jan 10, 2017•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rebecca S. Natow, Senior Research Associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, joins New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled Higher Education Rulemaking: The Politics of Creating Regulatory Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). In the book, she explores what happens after higher education legislation becomes law, specifically focusing on implementation of programs and rules in the sector. For the study, in-dept...
Jan 04, 2017•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) offers a detailed examination of how the reform regimen of incarceration developed as the new American nation was experiencing deep social and political transformation. The place of women, African-Americans, immigrants and the poor was recast by new attitudes toward maintaining the social order through the patriarchal family,...
Dec 19, 2016•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Misunderstanding Terrorism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Marc Sageman provides an important reassessment of the global neojihadi threat to the West. He argues that inaccurate evaluations of the threat and overreactions to a limited threat have transformed U.S. society. By constructing a model to explain the turn to political violence, Sageman shows how a misunderstanding of terrorism in the West has dramatically inflated fear of the actual danger posed by neojihadis. This has led t...
Dec 14, 2016•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was t...
Dec 13, 2016•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world.Canada was once a leading producer of asbestos and home to the worlds largest chrysotile asbestos mine, located in the Town of Asbestos in the province of Quebec. This is the subject of a new book by Professor Jessica van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmen...
Dec 12, 2016•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he means that policy should be decoded so its secrets can be laid bare, rather than treated as an impenetrable mystery. To this end, in the book, as well as in the interview, Gros uses a variety of methodological approaches to explain/explicate the re...
Dec 02, 2016•2 hr 35 min•Transcript available on Metacast What new can there be to say about the New Deal? Perhaps more than you think. Join us as Karen Tani talks about her new book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which examines the ways in which the rights talk we typically associate with the 1960s might be traced back to New Deal Administrators who, through programs like the ADC, simultaneously reshaped federal state relations and created new incentives for the professiona...
Nov 28, 2016•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s been said that for poor and low-income Americans, the law is all over. Join us for a conversation with Vicki Lens, who, in Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in Court (Oxford University Press, 2015), shows us how vulnerable populations interact with the legal system. Prof. Lens will talk about fair hearings for welfare applicants, cases of child maltreatment and neglect, the ways in which the law protects and coerces people with mental illness, and the implications for homelessness on New York...
Nov 21, 2016•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality. Stephen Pimpare is S...
Nov 12, 2016•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast American social welfare programs are rife with fraud — but its not the kind of fraud most people think of. Daniel Hatcher, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, in The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens (NYU Press, 2016), shows us the ways in which for-profit corporations and state governments alike have generated revenues through the (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal) exploitation of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. Stephen Pimpare is...
Nov 08, 2016•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which chronicles the lasting legacy of The Moynihan Report and the ways in which housing, criminal justice, education, and poverty policy all still bear its marks. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lect...
Nov 06, 2016•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1971, prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The uprising followed a wave of protests in prisons and jails across the state and nation. Prisoners sought to draw public attention to years of mistreatment and abuse as they held prison employees hostage and invited the media into the facility. Four days after the takeover, state officials ended talks abruptly and retook the prison using massive force. Both prisoners and guards were killed and injured in the ensuing...
Nov 01, 2016•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) argues that the Communists were neither the first nor the only group of urban intellectuals to look to the villages as the foundation of a new nation. The ...
Nov 01, 2016•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast James D. Boys is the author of Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty (Biteback Publishing, 2016). Boys is an associate professor of international political studies at Richmond University. Just in time for the election, Hillary Rising explores the full biography of Hillary Clinton. Boys draws on original interviews with close associates of Hillary Clinton, in addition to much recently declassified materials from the Clinton archive. For those who havent mad...
Oct 31, 2016•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Suja A. Thomas, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has written The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries (Cambridge University Press, 2016)–a book comprising history, political science, and constitutional jurisprudence. Her topic is the history of the jury in American law and its decline over the last century and a half. Thomas argues that the jury should be considered a branch of the government...
Oct 31, 2016•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anyone who has spent time in a school as an adult probably knows how hard it is for teachers to leave their work when they come home every night. There always seems to be more work for them to do, along with inordinate responsibility and a sense that every extra minute spent on tomorrow’s lesson plan will generate better outcomes for students. But teachers also bring their non-school lives along with them when they return each day. We have young teachers and old teachers; single teachers and tho...
Oct 27, 2016•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), authors Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham explore this question through both human rights law and children’s literature. Both international and domestic law affirm that children have rights, but how are these norms disseminated so that they make a difference in children’s lives? Human rights ed...
Oct 18, 2016•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Parents often wonder what their children do at school all day. How different is it from what they remember years ago? Teachers often hear similar questions from their friends. Is it like what they imagine? If these adults could really understand, what might they say about school? Does it matter? It would seem that the most effective critiques are those offered by the individuals with the most firsthand knowledge. But the analysis of outsiders is also powerful. These people can draw on their vari...
Oct 18, 2016•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016). Strach holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight examines the politics of market mechanisms–especially cause marketing–as a strategy for public poli...
Oct 17, 2016•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). St...
Oct 11, 2016•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
