Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide the voting rights protections it has in the past. In Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act (Stanford University Press, 2017), Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,...
Mar 19, 2018•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world―and revealed how unprepared we are for the next outbreak of an infectious disease. Somewhere in nature, a killer virus is boiling up in the bloodstream of a bird, bat, monkey, or pig, preparing to jump to a human being. This not-yet-detected germ has the potential to wipe out millions of lives over a matter of week...
Mar 16, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and collective challenge of rehabilitating Australian prisoners of war in the post-war decades. Using a variety of sources, including memoirs and the archives of the Prisoners of War Trust Fund, Twomey argues that the commemorations of the 1980s and more recent decades were actually a change from the quiet ...
Mar 13, 2018•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medicaid. But unlike some other large social welfare programs, Medicaid seems to reduce rather than increase political participation, resulting in a population of people stigmatized by the program itself and afforded less political representation. Such i...
Mar 12, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been undermined by neo-patrimonialism and clientelism. Scholars such as Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz have argued that Africa’s political culture is inherently different from the West and that African political system is actually working through wha...
Mar 12, 2018•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He has written for a number of popular publications including the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, and the Nation. His newest book The End of Policing is out now from Verso press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ...
Mar 08, 2018•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratize party politics. One hundred years later, party organizations remain powerful arbiters of candidate selection. Candidates who aren’t backed by the party rarely fare well. In his new book, The Party’s Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations (...
Mar 05, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research (Routledge, 2017). The book puts into conversation ideas from the fields of the learning sciences and participatory design research. Betsy describes the learning sciences as already an interdisciplinary field of computing and cog...
Mar 01, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics, our understandings of governors in the United States, and the geographic and political shifts that transpired during the latter half of the twentieth century. While Saladin Ambar‘s book focuses specifically on Cuomo’s life, his engagement with Democratic ...
Feb 28, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Shiri Noy explores this question and more using mixed methods, including interviews, quantitative analysis, and review of policy documents and archives. The book starts off by providing readers a history of the World Bank and its role in health reform. Even though it may seem as if the Wo...
Feb 28, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new book from Christopher Witko and William Franko, The New Economic Populism: How States Respond to Economic Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2017). Witko is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina; Franko is assistant professor of political science at West Virginia...
Feb 26, 2018•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017), Jerry Flores explores these questions and more through ethnographic research along with interviews, focus groups, and collection of secondary data. Flores asks the reader to contemplate the ways in which wraparound services may actually be aiding in wraparo...
Feb 23, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an im...
Feb 23, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their respective powers, Investigating the President garnered two impressive book awards, from the Presidents and Executive Politics Section (R...
Feb 21, 2018•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017), Daniel Fridman explores what it means to be an economic subject in what different people call the new economy, the post-industrial economy, or neoliberal capitalism. Fridman begins his investigation by looking into a best-selling book in what he calls financial self-help, an ascendant genre of self-help that tries to teach its readers how they should think about the economy t...
Feb 15, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can stand together to prevent crime, violence, and drug abuse. The concept ignited and late-night basketball leagues were developed in dozens of cities across America. In Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Douglas Hartmann traces the history...
Feb 12, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Like many cities, Cleveland has gone through periods of decline and renewal, yet the process there has followed a process where these periods were not always obvious and often failed because of a lack of cohesiveness among civic leaders, both public and private. In his new book Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in ‘The Best Location in the Nation’ (Temple University Press, 2017), J. Mark Souther, a professor of history at Cleveland State University, reviews the city’s attempts to revitali...
Feb 09, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin either were or are prison workers and it is their work-related humor that inspired this book. If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) is based on multiple interviews which Schmidt conducted during a decade or more, a...
Feb 08, 2018•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adequately prepare for potential disasters. Leveraging examples of high-impact events, The Ostrich Paradox summarizes how preparedness efforts are affected by issues with human memory, risk probability comprehension, and information overload. Finally, the authors provide a tool for assessing and mitigating...
Feb 07, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made in mitigating this disease in the global north, unfortunately, Africa is left behind. In her new book Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDs in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Kim Yi Dionne examines the obstacles to AIDs interventions in Africa. She challenges the narra...
Feb 06, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” t...
Feb 06, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Lisa King explores the ways in which rhetoric is used to represent Indigenous sovereignty and explore difficult histories related to colonialism and self-determination in museums and cultural centers. Her long-term, interdisciplinary study examines how exhibits related to these issues have evolved over a ten-year period at three different institutions: the Ziibiwing Center in M...
Feb 02, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story of the “last and largest” asylum in the British Commonwealth. From its founding in the 1920s until the age of deinstitutionalization, Weyburn Mental Hospital was central to the changing landscape of psychiatric care in Canada and beyond. Using a wide variety of documentary sources, Erika Dyck and Alex ...
Jan 31, 2018•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the EAEPE-Kapp Prize 2017 for “Marketising the commons in Africa: the case of Ghana” Review of Social Economy 74 (4), 390-419. He has recently published Reconstructing Urban ...
Jan 31, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Are iPhones or homes bankrupting Americans? Joe Cohen‘s new book, Financial Crisis in American Households: The Basic Expenses That Bankrupt the Middle Class (Praeger, 2017), presents data and discussion on the financial status of American households. The book considers whether capitalism or government policies are to blame. Cohen considers the historical changes that have taken place in America, including the post WWII economy, globalization, and technological advances. Rather than focus on indi...
Jan 30, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal and idealized American life (Duke University Press, 2015). She describes how the iconic military hospital orients its patients (mostly men) towards normative masculine domestic ideals in an attempt to assimilate them to ordinary life. By closely following their lives in and out of rehabilitation (clinic...
Jan 29, 2018•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing (Routledge, 2018), edited by Vicki Bier, is a series of multidisciplinary approaches to analysis of rare, severe risks. The essays demonstrate a wide variety of methods, from quantitative analysis to qualitative evaluation of organizations and case studies. Additionally, Risk in Extreme Environments tackles several hot-topics in risk management: managing black swans, balancing investments in preparedness versus response,...
Jan 25, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re almost always talking about a mass atrocity that took place ‘before.’ Sam Totten‘s new book Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege: Accounts by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone (McFarland, 2017) is different. The book is a compilation of first hand accounts of people currently working in a crisis a...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants. These protesters participated in one of the largest movements to defend immigrant and civil rights in US history. In Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Chris Zepeda-Millan surveys the strategies and impa...
Jan 22, 2018•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Alexandra Dellios, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Australian National University, provides a critical reassessment of Bonegilla, which received and temporarily accommodated about 320,000 post-war refugees and migrants from 1947 to 1971. Using a series of four cases studies of controversy, she argues that rather than being a simple story of progress, the center’s history is actually...
Jan 19, 2018•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
