Georgetown U. Press

Cases in public policy analysis, 3d ed.

Taking a political economy approach to policy issues, Guess (public administration, American U.) and Farnham (economics, Georgia State U.) focus on the problems and tools of policy analysis rather than on the entire process of public decision-making. By analyzing particular cases, they bring an institutional and political dimension to the task of applying economic methods to public policy. The third edition updates case studies on District of Columbia schools, the Maryland Transit Authority, and a D.C. HIV prevention program. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Climate change and national security; a country-level analysis.

Moran (national security affairs, Naval Postgraduate School) and 21 scholars explain and estimate the intermediate-term security risks that climate change could cause for the US, its allies, and for regional and global order through 2030. They profile 42 key countries and regions and address the problems their practices and institutions will encounter to provide a way to understand how climate change could present political, social, economic, and military challenges in the near future. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Creative conformity; the feminist politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'a women.

Bucar (religious studies, U. of North Carolina-Greensboro) uses rhetorical analysis to examine similarities and differences in how Catholic women in the US and Shi'a women in Iran respond to the rulings of male leaders in religious communities that are known for their male chauvinist reputations. The book is based on interviews with 11 women in the US and Iran in 2004; these 'creative conformers' are public intellectuals in their local communities, who construct new rhetorical spaces in their response to Pope John Paul's and Khomeni's moral guidance. The author sees the study as an example of cross-cultural feminist politics, asking whether such a thing as cross-cultural feminist politics actually exists, and if so, how can it be studied in comparison without privileging one community's actions over another's? The book's readership includes those interested in gendered scholarship and in Christian and Muslim activism. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Grounding human rights in a pluralist world.

Kao (ethics, Claremont School of Theology) surveys theoretical justifications for universal accounts of human rights, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each and selecting from them in order to present her own version. She first examines "maximalist" claims that seek to embed human rights within religious commitments, discussing in particular the Organisation of the Islamic Conference's Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990), the papal encyclical Pacem in terries (1963), and the Parliament of the World's Religions' Declaration toward a Global Ethic (1993). She then turns to discussion of "minimalist" approaches, including John Rawls's theory of "human rights proper," consensus-based approaches, and the universalistic capability approach that defends an objective account of the good while denying the metaphysical character of such an account. In the end, she settles on an account that includes caution over inflating the concept of human rights through overextension, a consensus-based defense of pragmatism and plural foundations for human rights, the capability approach's focus on the characteristically and essentially human, and the maximalist commitment to the real worth of human beings. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

How information matters; networks and public policy innovation.

Hale (political science, Auburn U.) seeks to demonstrate the important role of information networks of administrators and nonprofit organizations in policy innovation by describing the role of one such network in the diffusion and institutionalization of drug courts as a successful innovation in judicial administration and criminal justice policy in the United States. The case study describes the information relationships connected to drug courts as an innovation and shows how these information relationships between the nonprofit sector and government agencies helped develop new capacity for government to address policy problems. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Implicit and explicit language learning; conditions, processes, and knowledge in SLA and bilingualism.

First presented at the 2009 Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics, these papers focus on implicit and explicit learning of second languages. Second language acquisition (SLA) is a curious phenomena in that it requires focus on nouns, verbs, predicates, pluralism and a variety of other concepts, yet a childhood speaker undergoing first language acquisition is probably unable to explain any of these. Edited by Sanz and Leow, both in Spanish applied linguistics at Georgetown University, submitted manuscripts went through a refereeing process with detailed comments and suggestions. No index is included. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)