Andrea Benjamin, "Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
What explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or ethn...
13 Aug 202047min
Christopher Newfield, "The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public high...
12 Aug 202052min
LaDale Winling, "Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century" (U Penn Press, 2018)
Universities have become state-like entities, possessing their own hospitals, police forces, and real estate companies. To become such behemoths, higher education institutions relied on the state for ...
10 Aug 20201h 23min
Costas Lapavitsas, "The Left Case Against the EU" (Polity, 2018)
Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for ...
7 Aug 20201h 6min
Michael A. Olivas, "Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA" (NYU Press, 2020)
Why did the DREAM Act (for the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) never pass Congress – even though it was popular with Republicans and Democrats? What does the political and legal hi...
3 Aug 20201h 3min
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope...
3 Aug 202044min
Melissa J. Wilde, "Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion" (U California Press, 2020)
Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churc...
3 Aug 20201h 5min
Saqib Iqbal Qureshi, "The Broken Contract: Making Our Democracies Accountable, Representative, and Less Wasteful" (Lioncrest, 2020)
A democracy should reflect the views of its citizens and offer a direct connection between government and those it serves. So why, more than ever, does it seem as if our government exists in its own b...
31 Juli 20201h 8min
