New Books in Public Policy New Books Network

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 – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification.
In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country’s legacy of unjust housing policies.
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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 whiteness operates across the organization, from the ways that it is governed and how decisions are made to how education and knowledge are delivered. Diversity alone is insufficient for achieving a dynamic learning environment within higher education institutions. Dr. Garcia's framework for transforming HSIs into truly Latinx institutions is grounded in critical theories, yet it advances new ways of thinking about how to organize colleges and universities that are actively serving students of color, low-income students, and students from other minoritized backgrounds. This framework connects multiple important dimensions, including mission, identity, strategic purpose, membership, curriculum, student services, physical infrastructure, governance, leadership, external partnerships, and external influences. Drawing on over 25 years of HSI research, Dr. Garcia offers unique solutions for colleges and universities that want to better serve their students.
Our guest is: Dr. Gina Ann Garcia, who is a professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on issues of equity and justice in higher education with an emphasis on understanding how Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) embrace and enact an organizational identity for serving minoritized populations. She explores the experiences of administrators, faculty, and staff at HSIs and the outcomes of students attending these institutions. As an equity-minded scholar, she tends to the ways that race and racism have shaped institutions of higher education. She is the author of Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges & Universities, the editor of Hispanic-Serving Institutions in Practice: Defining “Servingness” at HSIs, and the author of Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice. She consults directly with HSIs to work towards organizational transformation; is a proud alumna of an HSI; and was a Title V Coordinator at Cal State University, Fullerton which drives and motivates her research and praxis.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also like:

Presumed Incompetent

Leading from the Margins

Is Grad School for Me?


Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support our show by sharing episodes of the Academic Life.
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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 from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor. From bail bondsmen to dialysis providers to towing companies, their business models depend on exploiting low-income Americans, and their political influence ensures a thriving set of industries where everyone profits except the poor, while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.
In Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024), veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor—health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators. Supported by original investigative reporting on the lesser-known players profiting from the antipoverty industry, Poverty for Profit adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of how structural inequality and structural racism function today.
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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. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of “special education,” and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. 
Disability Worlds reflects the authors’ anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.
A transcript of this discussion is available here.
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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 historical account of this lifesaving treatment and an indictment of the industry that is dominated by two for-profit companies that control ~80% of the market.  
There is a precarious balance between ethical care for patients and the prioritization of profits for the providers, a tension that has led to ethical, political, and legal debates about the rationing and exploitation of life-saving care and quality of life. 
Dialysis services are desperately needed by patients who require the dangerous, uncomfortable, and exhausting treatments multiple times per week, and pay for it through complex insurance procedures.
Tom Mueller’s book includes a vivid account of CEOs who lead their companies with messianic zeal to drive revenues continually up while simultaneously reducing the cost of care. He introduces us to the doctors charged with reducing those costs even at the expense of high-quality care and negative health outcomes. And we meet the patients themselves, who have little choice but to put their lives and well-being at the mercy of this system.
How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? And who are the brave people -patients, doctors, and employees of the system who are willing to tell their stories despite tremendous pressure to remain silent? And why do we as Americans accept worse outcomes at higher costs than the rest of the world?
Tom Mueller's highly readable yet devastating book illustrates the dialysis industry as a microcosm of American medicine. 
Mueller challenges us to find a solution for dialysis, an approach that could also provide the opportunity to begin fixing our country’s dysfunctional healthcare system and a fighting chance at restoring human health outcomes, rather than the extraction of profits, as its true purpose.
To contact Tom Mueller, visit www.tommueller.co
Suggested reading: 


The Body's Keepers by Paul L. Kimmel, M.D.


The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott

Also mentioned: 


How to Get Away with Merger by Thomas G. Wollman (NBER working paper, 2020)


"How Acquisitions Affect Firm Behavior and Performance" by Eliason, Heebsh et al. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020)


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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-progress on The Social Acceptance of Inequality, and they examine four types of logic leading us to accept inequalities in today’s world. Not surprisingly, the concept of meritocracy plays a major role in our thinking about contemporary inequality, although perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe.
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