Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others, due in large part to experiences in utero and during the first year of life. My guest, psychologist Dr. Daniel Keating, explores these biological and genetic mechanisms in his new book, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity–and How to Break the Cycle (St. ...
Jul 03, 2017•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Llana Barber explores the transformation of Lawrence into New England’s first Latina/o-majority city during the second half of the twentieth century. As with other industrial cities throughout the Rust Belt, Lawrence encountered an urban crisis via the processes of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and suburbanization in the decades following World War II. During th...
Jun 27, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic or unaesthetic annoyances to be eliminated, Lacey instead suggests ways in which they can be creatively harnessed to give new expression to urban life. Featuring expansive theoretical discussions and detailed analysis of Lacey’s own work as a soun...
Jun 15, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of them. Mainstreaming Black Power (University of California Press, 2017) upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of t...
Jun 14, 2017•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry, you won’t need calculus to enjoy and appreciate this book. Its actually an intriguing way to introduce some of the precalculus topics that will later be needed in a calculus class, through the examination of some of the basic mathematical ideas that c...
Jun 11, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy (Sydney University Press, 2016), Peter John Chen, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Sydney, explores the issue of animal welfare in Australia through the lens of political science. He examines how the media, interest groups, government officials, and the Australian public engage in debate and construct policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! ...
Jun 11, 2017•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interes...
May 31, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization, suburbanization (or “white flight”), gentrification, and postindustrial/neoliberal growth policies, among others. In Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (New York University Press, 2017) , Associate Professor Christopher...
May 27, 2017•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection, Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lexington Books, 2017), brings together authors in a variety of fields within the humanities to reconsider the arguments that have been made in support of the humanities over the past decades, even as these disciplines ...
May 26, 2017•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland, author of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) , a whirlwind tour of the welfare state, past and present. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey Schoo...
May 15, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated, and specifically focuses on what transpired over the past fifteen years that shifted attitudes around the issue of LGBT rights. Grounded in multiple dimensions of Political Science, Political Psychology, Political Theory, Communications Studies, and LGBT Studi...
May 04, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies: the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage ...
May 02, 2017•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016), about their decade-long research project tracking the ambitions and activities of 150 black Baltimore youth born in the 1980s and 1990s to parents living in high-rise public housing. The results — and the implications — will likely surprise you as muc...
Apr 26, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics. For Muslim communities in the US and beyond, few expectations and pressures have carried more weight and urgency than that to pass the test of moderation. In her brilliant new book, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the Ground Zero Mosque Co...
Apr 23, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Hudak unpacks and explains the historical place of marijuana in the United States, and the way that marijuana is situated within the criminal justice system, and how it is understood within our cultural vernacular and moral perspectives of what is right and wrong, legal and illegal. As marijuana now seems ...
Apr 15, 2017•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 20...
Apr 15, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finland’s educational system resulting from its success on international assessments and explains how policy translates into classroom routines and structures as well as what American teachers can learn from their Finnish counterparts. We discuss how the two countries take different views on what makes good ...
Apr 12, 2017•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what culture you were born and raise in. Alcoholism and treatments for it in Country A might be very different from alcoholism and treatments for it in countries B, C, and D. Alcoholism is, well, relative. This is one of the man...
Apr 11, 2017•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Psychological and psychoanalytic principles are often associated with individuals and therapist-client pairs, though they have plenty to bear on understanding and helping organizations in trouble. In particular, a psychoanalytic lens can uncover unconsciously-held beliefs members hold, about one another and about the organization as a whole, that impede effective functioning. In his new book, Discovering Organizational Identity: Dynamics of Relational Attachment (University of Missouri, 2016), o...
Apr 10, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (ILR/Cornell University Press, 2017) Dr. Michael A. McCarthy takes the reader through the historical background of the U.S. pension system. He breaks down the development of the current system into three parts: the spread of employer based private pensions, the financia...
Apr 07, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain people both do and believe others should do. When confronting real-world cases where groups act in ways...
Apr 01, 2017•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis. A...
Mar 25, 2017•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I speak with Pat Farenga about the new edition of John Holt’s Freedom and Beyond (HoltGWS LLC, 2017). This book offers a broad critique of traditional schooling and its capacity for solving social problems. We discuss John Holt’s transition from classroom teacher to public intellectual as well as the broader implications of schools prioritizing job training over citizenship and self-actualization. He recommends the following books for listeners interested in Holt’s work and our ...
Mar 21, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as high-modernist attempts to industrialize, urbanize, bureaucratize, and centralize. Indeed, modernization and development have almost come to be synonymous in our historical imaginations. Daniel Immerwahr’s Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press,...
Mar 17, 2017•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast A number of recent events (the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign) have brought inequality and poverty into national conversation. In an age of economic uncertainty and a declining social safety net, understanding the lives of people dealing with impoverished conditions has been a key task of social scientists. Focusing on people living below the poverty line and struggling to survive, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor (NYU Pre...
Mar 16, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a unemployed, rail thin degenerate with bad acne, no teeth and a penchant for child abuse. In these depictions, all meth users are “tweekers,” that is, very bad people who are addicted to speed (here, meth) and who can’t take care of themselves or others. But it just ain’t so, as Travis Linnemann points out...
Mar 15, 2017•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. What happens to the basic services of government after democratic institutions take hold? Specifically, when do elected officials relinquish the clientelistic approach to the provision of water services? In Water & Politics, Herrera shows that middle-class and business interests play an im...
Mar 06, 2017•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social justice” language is employed. But what if these are, in fact, conservative programs at their heart, ones that, in the context of the corporatized university, are furthering the neoliberal project and inhibiting the development of better social welfare policies? Listen to our interview with Randy Stoecker ...
Mar 03, 2017•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, and are there actually lessons that traditional higher ed institutions can learn from them? Join us as we speak with Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics ...
Feb 27, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a fi...
Feb 23, 2017•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
