Feb 25
Jamila Michener and Mallory E. Sorelle, "Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Each year, as many as 250 million Americans face civil legal problems like eviction, debt collection, and substandard housing. These problems are disproportionately shouldered by racially and economically marginalized people, particularly women of color. Civil courts and legal ai ... Show More
55m 15s
Feb 24
Josh Seim, "The Welfare Assembly Line: Public Servants in the Suffering City" (U California Press, 2026)
Despite claims that we live in a "post-welfare society," welfare offices remain vital not only for those who depend on them for benefits but also for those who depend on them for a paycheck. The Welfare Assembly Line: Public Servants in the Suffering City (U California Press, 20 ... Show More
40m 9s
Feb 21
Wendy Wolford, "The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique" (U California Press, 2025)
Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal: ... Show More
1h 6m
Aug 2024
Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer ... Show More
55m 20s
Jul 2024
Premal Dharia et al., "Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change" (FSG Originals, 2024)
In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. The incarceration of vast numbers of people, and the punitive treatment of African Americans in particular, are targets of widespread ... Show More
31m 49s
Apr 2023
Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston, "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix" (Routledge, 2022)
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles t ... Show More
59m 58s
Jun 2023
Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)
Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become muc ... Show More
50m 14s
Aug 2024
Wesley G. Phelps, "Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement" (U Texas Press, 2023)
In 2003, in a ruling that bordered on poetic, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Lawrence v. Texas that sexual behavior between consenting adults was protected under the constitutional right to privacy. This was a landmark case in the course of LGBTQ+ rights in the Un ... Show More
58m 23s
Jun 2025
Carolyn Wolf-Gould et al., "A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States" (SUNY Press, 2025)
A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States (SUNY Press, 2025) takes an empathic approach to an embattled subject. Sweeping in scope and deeply personal in nature, this groundbreaking volume traces the development of transgender medicine across three centuries-centerin ... Show More
1h 3m
Feb 2019
David Ray Papke, "Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor" (Michigan State UP, 2019)
The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than go ... Show More
31m 17s
Sep 2024
Anthony Michael Kreis, "Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development" (U California Press, 2024)
One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words define the law and political scientists who dismiss all judicial arguments as smokescreens for partisan bias or wider political forc ... Show More
1h 3m
Nov 2023
B Camminga, "Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgend ... Show More
51m 16s
Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of lynching, burning, or murdering of LGBTQ people have been documented for centuries. Prior to the 1970s, LGBTQ people were deemed as having psychological disorders and subsequently subject to electroshock therap ... Show More
