John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) transformed how people around the world view the purposes of schooling. This new edition makes Dewey's ideas come alive for a new generation of readers. Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is the author of Teaching Political Theory: A Pluralistic Approach (2022) and Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (2018). Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He cu...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep 231•Transcript available on Metacast It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including ...
Jun 04, 2024•37 min•Ep 364•Transcript available on Metacast Weh Yeoh's Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence (Koan Press, 2023) presents a transformative approach to charitable work. Drawing on his extensive experience in the non-profit sector, Yeoh argues that the ultimate goal of a charity should be to render itself unnecessary. He critiques the traditional charity model, which often perpetuates dependency and self-preservation, and instead advocates for organizations to implement clear exit strategies and focus on supporting local comm...
Jun 02, 2024•38 min•Ep 219•Transcript available on Metacast Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton UP, 2024) tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happe...
Jun 02, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 363•Transcript available on Metacast Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault. In The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020), Professor Gruber contends that the legal reform movement on sexual assault began with feminists in the 19th century, who argued in favor of temperance reform, partly in the...
Jun 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrifi...
Jun 01, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 343•Transcript available on Metacast In Disability Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast What makes Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) uniquely Latinx? And how can university leaders, staff, and faculty transform these institutions into spaces that promote racial equity, social justice, and collective liberation? Today’s book is: Transforming Hispanic-Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), by Dr. Gina Ann Garcia. In it, Dr. Garcia argues that in order to serve Latinx students and other students of color, these institutions must acknowledge how whiten...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the “corporate poverty complex,” a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit...
May 30, 2024•28 min•Ep 183•Transcript available on Metacast Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government. Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine (W. W. Norton, 2023). It's both an h...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin in Italy and a Research Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, discuss the rise of inequalities around the globe and the divergent attitudes towards them since 1970. How can those inequalities be broken down? In this week’s episode, Duina and Storti preview their book-in-p...
May 28, 2024•32 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability,...
May 27, 2024•44 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others. The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels (Cr...
May 26, 2024•40 min•Ep 362•Transcript available on Metacast During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through it might scratch their heads at such a number, having seen little of it make any concrete impact in their own lives. This discrepancy is indicative of the underlying problem with the contemporary care economy, a series of federal and state programs, healthcare facilities and NGO’s, all trying to bend the needs of those under their care to the mechani...
May 25, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 458•Transcript available on Metacast For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren't the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish well-off people who cause widespread harm? This new edition continues to engage readers in important exercises of critical thinking: Why has the U.S. relied so heavily on tough crime policies despite evidence of their limited effe...
May 24, 2024•37 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also have the highest rates of poverty among the industrialized nations? Based on his decades-long research and scholarship, one of the nation's leading authorities provides the answer. In The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity (Oxford UP, 2023), Mark Robert Rank develops his unique perspective for understanding this...
May 21, 2024•40 min•Ep 360•Transcript available on Metacast Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century domestic politics and policies. He received his PhD in U.S. urban history from the University of California San Diego in 2014, and his writing has appeared all over the place, from edited volumes to academic journals, to the Washington Post and Zocalo Public Square. He’s also currently the senior co-editor of the Urban History Association’s blog The Me...
May 20, 2024•55 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism. While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire. Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else...
May 20, 2024•42 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents. Pregnant at Work: Low-Wa...
May 19, 2024•34 min•Ep 359•Transcript available on Metacast Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice (MIT Press, 2024, open access at this link), educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption—that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should not be about enforcing and entrenching norms but about using data science to break new groun...
May 15, 2024•53 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practic...
May 14, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022), there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective fr...
May 12, 2024•50 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition. Al...
May 11, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 186•Transcript available on Metacast Book bans and book challenges are both on the rise. And they are increasing at unprecedented rates. But why is this happening? Dr. Christine Emeran of the National Coalition Against Censorship joins us to explore what’s driving censorship movements nationwide. In today’s episode, she takes us through politically organized efforts to ban books, and shares the statistics of book challenges and bans. She explores the new strategies used by groups to challenge books (strategies which differ from the...
May 09, 2024•45 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling. There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-...
May 07, 2024•30 min•Ep 230•Transcript available on Metacast Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (PM Press, 2023) is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity, this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex, among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an Afro Latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed with...
May 05, 2024•38 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies (Routledge, 2024) edited By Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today. This collec...
May 04, 2024•38 min•Ep 355•Transcript available on Metacast Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth (Seven Stories Press, 2023) is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas: The technological dimension move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can...
May 03, 2024•48 min•Ep 186•Transcript available on Metacast After a storied career as a health policy expert, Stanford Medicine's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya's work became a political focal point during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he advocated against widespread lockdowns. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter signed by infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists which advocated for a focused protection approach to COVID-19, and the Twitter Files revealed that his Twitter account had been placed on Twitter's "black ...
May 03, 2024•57 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as 'creative industries', valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At...
May 01, 2024•1 hr•Ep 353•Transcript available on Metacast 
