Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash.

In Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2022), Dr. Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Dr. Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.” 

In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can actualize a just transition in the U.S. context and enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people’s lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the “Four+ Pillars,” formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The “Pillars” framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance a just transition for all, not just fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels.

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In Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell UP, 2024), Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.

From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

Matthew Gardner Kelly is an assistant professor of educational foundations, leadership, and policy at the University of Washington.  

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University.

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In this compelling and informative interview, Carrie N. Baker discusses her newest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press, 2024). This book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States, and Baker examines the actions of scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, pro-abortion rights activists and anti-abortion forces as the abortion pill was developed in France in 1980, and subsequently brought to market in the United States. She carefully investigates the fight for FDA approval of the abortion pill, and reproductive rights advocates’ work to expand access. She pays particular attention to the critical period of 2020-2024 when in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic telemedicine abortion became a possibility. Baker ends exploring attempts to restrict abortion pills and self-managed abortions in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In this thoroughly researched history, Baker draws on interviews with over 80 activists, abortion providers, researchers, and people who have used abortion pills to demonstrate the range of actors involved in efforts to expand access to abortion pills. In addition, she analyzes medical research, government records, legal cases, and the archives of several reproductive health organizations.

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics is available open-access starting December 3, 2024. Click the following link to see a PDF of the book

Carrie N. Baker holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, a J.D. from Emory University School of Law, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory’s Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Smith College where, as a legal and social movement scholar, she teaches courses on gender, law and public policy; feminist social movements; and feminist public writing. In addition to publishing peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Baker also serves as a regular writer and contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, has a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and hosts Feminist Futures, a radio program on WHMP 101.5 FM in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network.

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Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions - from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse - has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people.

Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony - pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates - the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities.

Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Political Scientists Dan Mallinson and Lee Hannah, both experts on state-level politics and the policy making process, have a new book that focuses on the state-level process of legalization of medical cannabis across the United States. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (NYU Press, 2024) is a book that needed to be written, since it is an important exploration not only of the continuing policy conflicts and tensions around marijuana in the United States, but it specifically focuses on how states have taken up this issue and what they each did in moving towards medical marijuana’s accessibility. The marijuana question in in the United States remains a fascinating federalism dynamic, with national laws in conflict with state laws, and state laws operating in different ways, around both medical marijuana and legalized recreational use of cannabis.

Mallinson and Hannah provide the reader with an excellent overview of policymaking designs and theories since their analysis takes up so many different dimensions of the policy process in the United States. They then move into the history behind the criminalization of marijuana, and the way in which this policy has clearly racialized roots. Green Rush highlights the ways that some of the shifts and changes in state policies started to make their way through different states, via action by state legislatures and or through state-wide referenda. With particular attention to a number of states, like California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, Mallinson and Hannah chart the ways that different states have gone about legalizing the medical use of marijuana, which has also been part of the pathway for other states to move towards decriminalization and legalization of adult use recreational marijuana.

Green Rush is an accessible policy analysis and provides important insight into the path that medical marijuana took as it became legal in one state after another. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States charts the policy changes themselves, but also pays attention to changing public opinion around cannabis and shifts in the war on drugs as well.

(I found this book so useful that I have adopted it to use in my Public Policy class.)

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.

Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tom Scott-Smith focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great "summer of migration" in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Dr. Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Football is the national game in the United States – and many families and friends bond over their love of the sport. While few people play professional football, many participate in tackle football as children and adolescents. In the last decades, more attention has been paid to the dangers of playing tackle football, including traumatic brain injury and the degenerative brain disease, CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). As more former players donated their brains, the rate of CTE surprised even those already concerned with traumatic brain injury. If the risks are so great, why do more than two million American children under the age of 18 continue to play tackle football? Is it the opportunity to contribute to a team? Overcome adversity? Test personal limits?

In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg asks readers to think about American tackle football as an industry – like the American tobacco industry – that sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it. Despite the clearly documented costs to society and individuals who play, the tackle football industry has successfully manufactured doubt about the health hazards. Goldstein argues that a basic familiarity with the history of regulated industries and their intersection with public health is needed both to understand the contemporary debates and to move forward with fair and equitable policy solutions. If the risks to people who play were better known to the public, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk.

Goldberg draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Goldberg recommends using public health laws to counter the manufacture of doubt – offering specific policy proposals to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football.

Daniel S. Goldstein, JD, PhD is an associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is the director of Education at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and director of the Public Health Ethics and Law Program.

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With The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century “culture of sentiment” to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public’s capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support for improving the welfare of women and children.

Sentimentalism marched right alongside women’s steps into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the “fall” of young women intertwined with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the American welfare state. The work of voluntary and paid female reformers during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shaped what would become lasting collaborations between grassroots voluntary organizations and the national government.

Women saw a social need, filled it, and cobbled together a network of voluntary organizations that tapped state funding and support when available. Their work provided safeguards for women and children and created a network of female-oriented programs that both aided and policed women of child-bearing age at the turn of the twentieth century. Through an examination of these reform programs, Dr. Masarik demonstrates the strong connection between nineteenth-century sentimental culture and female political action, advocating government support for infant and maternal welfare, in the twentieth century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it?

In The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world's biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape the political environment in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience--it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, the jailer's reckoning, to be paid for this. As Smith shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage on the entire country, and we must all do something about it.

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