Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Djupe and Amanda Friesen, coeditors of An Epidemic among My People, write about the impact of COVID-19 on collective action in religious communities.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. —II Chronicles 7:13–14 (King James Version)

A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe has pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape responses to the pandemic. We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective.

Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. Though 1000s of articles have been published about the social science of COVID-19, we thought that a book-length treatment was necessary to mark this substantial moment in time. We were uniquely positioned to address these questions as many Americanist social scientists had secured funding, ethics approval, and organized plans to collect original survey data in a consequential presidential election year. Pivoting to ask about the pandemic in addition to religious and political inquiries provided a nimble responsiveness to events typically not available on the average academic budget. Yet, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these relationships, we needed experts across the social sciences of religion to tell the full story. One particularly rich data collection by the editors conducted in late March 2020 and then October 2020 was made available to our recruited authors who may not have access or funding to run their own studies. In this way, we were able to expand the number of voices interpreting our empirical results.

One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around three major themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance in the broader population? What religious forces drove defiance?  Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion, exploring arguments of religious freedom versus public safety. Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs.

Throughout, our contributors find a variety of novel insights that have not been aired elsewhere. Here is a sample. Much of the resistance to shut-down orders was linked to prosperity gospel beliefs, in which fervent belief recruited God’s protection from illness. And many religious adherents were more likely to adopt COVID conspiracy theories. Another finding is how Christian nationalists had little regard for protecting the vulnerable at the expense of liberty and the economy.

We looked for racial differences in congregational and clergy reactions given the frequent assertion that racial minority communities were hit harder than white communities. Surprisingly, we largely did not find disparate reactions organized by racial groups, and defiance to public health orders grew as people attended worship more across racial groups. We also saw that racial groups equally trust their clergy with their health, but African-Americans had less trust of medical professionals early in the pandemic.

Despite strong partisan lines drawn over restrictive public health orders, the public’s willingness to save people largely did not follow that pattern, though Trump remained a polarizing figure in related religious freedom cases. This is no surprise, in part due to his own rhetoric, but also because Christian Right organizations found common cause with Trump in the pandemic due to a connection to their historic commitments to law and order and against foreign threats.

An Epidemic among My People expands upon these findings, digging deeper into sources of pandemic information, the impact of the pandemic on religious behaviors, discussion of the legal battles, and more. Our goal was to provide a nearly comprehensive discussion of religion in public life.

Our Contributors: Daniel Bennett, Kraig Beyerlein, Cammie Jo Bolin, Ryan P. Burge, Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Ryon J. Cobb, Melissa Deckman, Joshua B. Grubbs, Don Haider-Markel, Ian Huff, Natalie Jackson, Jason Klocek, Benjamin Knoll, Andrew R. Lewis, Jianing Li, Natasha Altema McNeel, Matthew R. Miles, Shayla F. Olson, Diana Orcés, Samuel L. Perry, Jenna Reinbold, Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Stella M. Rouse, Justin A. Tucker, Dilara K. Üsküp, Abigail Vegter, Michael W. Wagner, Andrew L. Whitehead, Angelia R. Wilson, and the editors: Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, who also contributed chapters.

Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2).

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

An Epidemic among My People is available open access or for purchase

Searching for missing Temple University Press books

This week in North Philly Notes, Will Forrest, the Press’s Editorial Assistant and Rights and Contracts Coordinator, blogs about finding the titles missing from the Press library.

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When I first interviewed for the rights and contracts intern position at the Press during my senior year at Temple, I was struck by the shelves of books that lined the conference room walls. Ashley Petrucci, my then supervisor, explained it was a library of the Press’s titles. I asked if it contained every book the Press had published and was told that we were missing a few from our early years of existence. This surprised me, and occasionally I would think of those gaps, wondering just what might be missing.

One year later, I found myself in the same role that Ashley held then, and the library gaps were still there. I asked our director, Mary Rose Muccie, if I could try to track down and obtain copies of the  missing backlist titles, and she gave me the thumbs up.  I was then faced with determining how many, and what, books were missing. Since these books were primarily published in the 1970s, there are fewer digital records and means of searching for lost books. So, I got creative.

I searched the Library of Congress’s website for a listing of all the Temple books they had a record of. I searched WorldCat, a resource for finding books hosted in libraries worldwide, and I also looked through our author contract files to see which projects were signed during the period. I ran all of this against the actual books that we had in our library, and over time began to develop a master list.

Until I did the research, no one knew how many books were missing. My initial estimate was approximately fifteen. Most of us didn’t think it would be higher than twenty. It turned out, not counting the few titles that we had digitized and made available  open access through an NEH grant, we were missing thirty-eight titles! This was significantly higher than any of us expected. I began to search for them on used-book sites and was able to find reasonably priced copies in good condition to add to our shelves.

There are still one or two books that I have yet to track down, but I now know what they are. It felt great to finally complete the Temple University Press library.   Together the physical books covey our history, who we are, and what we do as a university press.

Here is a small selection of titles that we added to our library.

From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940, by Mark S. Foster (1981): This is a forty-year-old book that we could put out this year and it wouldn’t look out of place on our current urban studies list. From Streetcar to Superhighway looks at urban planning at the dawn of the 20th century, when passenger rail and trolley systems were booming and the automobile had just been invented, and the challenges that planners faced along with growing car ownership. A recent Temple book that comes to mind is Amy Finstein’s Modern Mobility Aloft, exploring how the building of early highways in cities changed their architectural as well as social and material landscapes.

Broadcasting and Democracy in West Germany, by Arthur Williams (1976): This is one of the titles I was most excited to find. It is part of our International and Comparative Broadcasting series of the 1970s, a series unlike any other at the time, which examined radio and television all across the globe, as well as its intersections with politics and society. The book is a fascinating look at Cold War-era broadcasting and an early work of the then-new field of media studies.

Every Need Supplied: Mutual Aid and Christian Community in the Free Churches, 1525-1675, edited by Donald F. Durnbaugh (1974): This is one of the most striking early books we received (with a great dustjacket). Collecting primary documents from the communities of Free Churches that were part of the Radical Reformation during the Renaissance era, this was part of an early Temple series devoted entirely to study of the Free Church of this period. Temple has always had strong religious studies titles, but this book’s focus on community and mutual aid has more currency than one might expect from one of its age.

Genocide in Paraguay, edited by Richard Arens (1976): This pioneering look at the then ongoing genocide of the Aché people in Paraguay was one of Temple’s first books in Latin American studies as well as genocide studies. It collects essays by anthropologists and scholars about both Paraguay and the topic of genocide at large. It also includes one of the most widely recognizable contributors to a Temple book: Elie Wiesel, who compares the events in Paraguay to his own experiences with the Nazi Holocaust.

Black Testimony: Voices of Britain’s West Indians, by Thomas J. Cottle (1978): This book is one of Temple’s first ethnographies as well as an early book in Latin American and postcolonial studies. Drawing on interviews from more than twenty Black Britons, the book describes the hardships and obstacles that immigrants from Jamacia and other West Indian colonies faced after emigrating to Britain.

Street Names of Philadelphia, by Robert I. Alotta (1975): This might be my favorite of the missing books, and the title I was the most surprised to find was missing. Street Names of Philadelphia is an alphabetical reference guide to nearly every named street in Philadelphia and a description of why the street is named as such. It’s to the best of my knowledge the only book of its kind and a classic example of a Press Philadelphia regional title. Also, it may have inspired Bruce Springsteen’s famous song (as of yet unconfirmed).

Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937, by Kenneth Fox (1977): This is another title that we could put out next season and nobody would bat an eye. Better City Government looks at urban political development from the 1850s to the New Deal era and draws lessons about the limitations of reform-minded individuals and the most effective ways to enact change. This book would be right at home alongside our Political Lessons from American Cities series edited by Richardson Dilworth.

Gritty Cities, edited by Mary Procter and Bill Matuszeski (1978): I had to talk about this one. Aside from the fact that it  has the word “gritty” in the title decades before the Philadelphia Flyers debuted their beloved mascot, this is a fascinating look at twelve mid-sized industrial Rust Belt towns and their architecture right as manufacturing was beginning to fade away in the Northeast. It combines history with walking-tour commentary and great photographs. It is very much a time capsule of its era, and a great book for those interested in the last gasp of manufacturing in the United States.

Reforming Philadelphia

This week in North Philly Notes, Richardson Dilworth, author of Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, writes about what the history of reform might tell us about contemporary city elections.

On May 16 of 2023, Philadelphians will vote for mayor in the Democratic and Republican primaries, and the general assumption in this overwhelmingly Democratic city is that whoever wins the Democratic primary will also be elected mayor in the general election on November 7. The nine declared Democratic candidates represent a relatively broad ideological mix, from the relatively conservative candidacies of Rebecca Rhynhart and Allan Domb, to the more liberal candidacy of Helen Gym. But given that the current mayor Jim Kenney has reached his two-term limit, we are guaranteed to have a new mayor who will most likely set a distinct policy direction for our city government.

In my book, Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, I wanted to provide a short but comprehensive and deep context for understanding political events such as the 2023 mayoral election, by placing it in the long history of what I call “reform cycles.” “Reform” is a broad mantel that has been claimed by innumerable politicians for a variety of reasons. Among historians it is most typically associated with the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20^th Century. For my purposes, I took the historian’s definition of reform but generalized it into criteria that might be found in any historical period. My criteria were that a reform cycle is defined by:

• A new idea regarding the city and its purpose in the world.
• Actors who attempt to take control of city government and reform it in the image of this new idea.
• Actors conceived of as thwarting reform – sometimes known as “the machine.”
• Elections in which reformers gain some control over city government.
• The implementation of ideas that transform the city to some degree.
• Public recognition, typically provided through the press, that reform occurred.

Using these criteria, I identified the following five reform cycles:

• The 1840s to the city-county consolidation of 1854
• The 1870s to the adoption of a new city charter in 1887
• Mayor John Weaver’s revolt against the machine in 1905, to the adoption of a new charter in 1919
• The Democratic sweep of elected offices in 1951, to the mayoralty of James Tate in 1962
• The mayoralty of Ed Rendell, from 1992 to 2000.

My definition of reform cycles raises at least two important questions. First, it appears that race is a notably muted feature in my reform cycles. And second, what about the contemporary period? What can all of this tell us about the 2023 mayoral election?

With respect to race, I argue that the emergence of a substantial Black political class  — a product of the dramatic change in the city’s racial composition after World War II – fell largely into existing machine-reform categories, which was itself a result of the fact that the reform-oriented White political establishment moved relatively quickly to incorporate Black politicians, certainly to a greater extent than in many other cities (such as Chicago for instance). Thus, race-based political organizations such as the Black Political Forum or the Northwest Alliance functioned largely as earlier white reform organizations. And Wilson Goode was arguably a reformer when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. Yet crucially, Goode’s election fails my criteria for defining a reform cycle because it was not recognized as such, for at least two reasons: (1) Goode’s mayoralty was more often defined in the media in terms of race rather than reform, and (2) Goode’s reform status was often overshadowed by larger policy blunders, such as the MOVE bombing and the city’s near-bankruptcy.

With respect to what my conception of reform cycles can tell us about the 2023 election, this is the subject of the third and final chapter of my book, in which I argue that there are currently two overlapping reform cycles, not unlike the reform cycle of the 1870s and 1880s, which was quickly followed by the reform cycle of the 1900s and 1910s. In the 21^st Century, we can identify a reform cycle that was driven by the economic resurgence in and around Center City, resulting in the election of Michael Nutter in 2007 and extending at least to the surprise election of Rhynhart as controller in 2017. The issues that defined this reform cycle were campaign finance reform, increased government responsiveness and accountability, planning reform, and environmental sustainability. The second reform cycle is defined in policy terms by social and racial equity and justice and was most visible politically in the elections of Larry Krasner as district attorney in 2017, and of Helen Gym and Kendra Brooks to at-large council seats, in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

Thus, the 2023 mayoral campaigns will fall along a policy and political continuum defined by these two overlapping reform cycles – what journalist Larry Platt has also called a battle between “progressives vs. reformers.” The actual election dynamics will be shaped by at least two long-term trends that have fundamentally altered the city’s electoral politics: Declining voter turnout, which provides greater leverage to smaller groups; and a diminished local media, which makes it harder for campaigns to communicate to a mass audience. The sad result is that our local political universe is more fragmented than in the past. And with so many candidates running in the Democratic primary – so many of which are of high quality – whoever the winner is will undoubtedly be the choice of a minority of voters, making it more difficult for the new mayor to claim a mandate and set an aggressive policy agenda.

Books to choose for Election Day

This week in North Philly Notes, we offer books on voting and elections in honor of Election Day.

Blue-State Republican: How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP, by Mileah K. Kromer 

Blue-State Republican is the remarkable story of how his carefully messaged, pragmatic approach to governance helped build a coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats, independents, women, college-educated and Black voters and maintained his GOP base during a time of polarization and negative partisanship. Mileah Kromer takes readers inside Maryland politics to illustrate exactly how Hogan won where Republicans lose and consider whether the un-Trump Republican offers any lessons for how the GOP can win the center-right voters who continue to make up a majority of the country.

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger 

Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress provides an in-depth historical analysis—from the days of the Great Migration to the present—of the people and movements that made the city a center of political activism. The editor and contributors show how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House.   

Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City, by John Kromer 

Should the surprisingly successful outcomes achieved by outsider candidates in Philadelphia elections be interpreted as representing fundamental changes in the local political environment, or simply as one-off victories, based largely on serendipitous circumstances that advanced individual political careers? John Kromer’s insightful Philadelphia Battlefields considers key local campaigns undertaken from 1951 to 2019 that were extraordinarily successful despite the opposition of the city’s political establishment.

Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences, by Mary-Kate Lizotte 
 
In this era in which more women are running for public office—and when there is increased activism among women—understanding gender differences on political issues has become critical. In her cogent study, Mary-Kate Lizotte argues that assessing the gender gap in public support for policies through a values lens provides insight into American politics today. There is ample evidence that men and women differ in their value endorsements—even when taking into account factors such as education, class, race, income, and party identification. 

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele 

After the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a large cohort of women emerged to run for office. Their efforts changed the landscape of candidates and representation. However, women are still far less likely than men to seek elective office, and face biases and obstacles in campaigns. (Women running for Congress make twice as many phone calls as men to raise the same contributions.)  The editors and contributors to Good Reasons to Run, a mix of scholars and practitioners, examine the reasons why women run—and do not run—for political office. They focus on the opportunities, policies, and structures that promote women’s candidacies. How do nonprofits help recruit and finance women as candidates? And what role does money play in women’s campaigns?

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant 

Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South. 

Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns, by Kelly Dittmar 

From the presidential level down, men and women who run for political office confront different electoral realities. In her probing study, Navigating Gendered Terrain, Kelly Dittmar investigates not only how gender influences the campaign strategy and behavior of candidates today but also how candidates’ strategic and tactical decisions can influence the gendered nature of campaign institutions. Navigating Gendered Terrain addresses how gender is used to shape the way campaigns are waged by influencing insider perceptions of and decisions about effective campaign messages, images, and tactics within party and political contexts.

 Forthcoming in December:

Are All Politics Nationalized? Evidence from the 2020 Campaigns in Pennsylvania, edited by Stephen K. Medvic, Matthew M. Schousen, and Berwood A. Yost 

Given the news media’s focus on national issues and debates, voters might be expected to make decisions about state and local candidates based on their views of the national parties and presidential candidates. However, nationalization as a concept, and the process by which politics becomes nationalized, are not fully understood. Are All Politics Nationalized? addresses this knowledge gap by looking at the behavior of candidates and the factors that influence voters’ electoral choices.

Examining care injustices

This week in North Philly Notes, Akemi Nishida, author of Just Care, writes about care as an analytical framework to understand the contemporary United States

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to recognize what was at the stake in the political debates on public healthcare programs such as Medicaid, the overstretched nature of the care labor force, and our own vulnerabilities. We also witnessed continuous fights for social justice including Black Lives Matter and Asian Americans against hate crimes, as well as the development of mutual aid networks to survive together.

Just Care suggests care as a lens to understand these phenomena—and incorporates care as not only an object of study but also an analytical framework. The book examines care injustices where people—whether they are situated as care workers, care receivers, or both—deteriorate under the name of care, when care is used as a mechanism to enhance the political economy and neglect the well-being of those situated as care workers and care receivers. It also addresses care justice, or just care, which occurs when people feel cared for affirmatively and when care is used as a foundation for more-just world building.

Just Care is based on research conducted at the request of disability communities to reveal how the public care services they receive are increasingly becoming money-centered, while they demand these services to be human-centered. Also, as a disabled person, my own experiences of receiving and providing care informed my work.

Just Care considers the experiences of care workers and care receivers under the Medicaid long-term care programs, queer disabled people who participate in community-based care collectives to interdependently support each other, and disabled and sick people of color who engage in bed activism to fight for social change from their bedspaces. By being in conversation with and witnessing care routines, the multiplicity of care became particularly noticeable—it is turned into a mechanism of social oppression and control while simultaneously being a tool with which marginalized communities activate, engage in, and sustain social justice fights.

Here are some key points from the book:

• When scholars and activists work to dismantle injustices surrounding care activities, they often approach them by looking into solely the labor exploitation care workers experience or the lack of adequate care recipients endure. Instead, Just Care engages in relational analysis to think through how these circumstances are intertwined and mutually witnessed and experienced, as care workers and receivers spend the majority of their daily lives side by side.
• An example of relational analysis is my tracing of the parallels between the histories of welfare programs for single mothers and families in need, (neo)colonialism and labor migration, and public healthcare programs like Medicaid, from the perspectives of critical race, transnational feminist, and disability studies.
• This analysis shows that in addition to differences in degrees and kinds of care people individually need, intersecting oppressions including racism, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and ableism shape who is currently pressured to take up caring responsibilities and how their own care needs or disabling conditions are quickly neglected. Such oppressions also make us think of disabled people exclusively as recipients of care and rarely acknowledge their caring contributions to society, let alone how the public healthcare services they receive are rarely adequate and can function to surveil them.
• Care services for disabled people are primarily planned by centering financial benefits for the care industrial complex and budget suppressions for governments and are not based on disabled people’s needs and preferences.
• This focus on financial benefits means that well-being of care workers and care recipients become secondary concerns. This leads them to experience mutual debilitation, rather than the presumed idea that one group thrives on the back of the other.
• Some care workers and care recipients under such debilitating public healthcare services develop interdependent relationships to help one another, in the middle of care-based oppression they experience, by transgressing the strict roles given to them.
• Disabled people have started care collectives to practice interdependence and based on their insistence that everyone needs care and can provide care. Engaging in interdependence in the middle of a society that values individualist independence is destined to be full of challenges. One challenge they faced is material (to physically meet all the care needs emerging within the group), and another is affective (to make sure conflicts within the group will not affect quality of care).
• Disabled and sick people engage in social change from their bedspaces, or “bed activism.” Bed activism entails critiquing of intersecting oppressions that manifest in bedspaces and offering visions for a more just world by centering the wisdom of sick and disabled people that emerges from their bedspaces.
• Bed activism can happen actively, for example, when bed dwellers engage in social change by writing a blog post. It also happens in inactive moments, for example, when they rest in their beds while going through depression, pain, or fatigue. Even those moments inform bed activists about their relationships with their bodies and minds or the social conditions that restrict them to their beds.

We all need care and are capable of caring for others in various ways. When we start from this foundational understanding, how can we each engage in just care or more-just world making through care? Just Care points the way to answering this question.

Images from the recent American Political Science Association meeting

This week in North Philly Notes we showcase the authors who stopped by the Temple University Booth at the recent American Political Science Association meeting to pose with their books.

Temple University Press’s booth

Sara Rinfret, editor of Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?: Creating and Implementing Environmental Rules and Regulations. This book provides a clear understanding of regulatory policy and rulemaking processes, and their centrality in U.S. environmental policymaking.

Shamira Gelbman, author of The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction. This book investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s.

Luis Felipe Mantilla, author of How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey, which analyzes the evolution of Catholic and Sunni Muslim parties to study religious political mobilization in comparative perspective.

Rachel Bernhard (left) and Mirya Holman (right), coeditors of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, which examines how and why women run for office.

Paul Djupe, coeditor of The Evangelical Crackup?: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition, which explains evangelicalism’s relationship to the party system.

Djupe is also the editor of the Press’ Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics series.

Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, are coeditors of the forthcoming An Epidemic among My People: Religion, Politics, and COVID-19 in the United States, which asks, Did religion make the pandemic worse or help keep it contained?

Richardson Dilworth, author of the forthcoming Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, a short but comprehensive political history of the city, from its founding in 1682 to the present day. Dilworth is also the editor of the Press’ Political Lessons from American Cities series.

The Pitfalls of an All-Charter School District

This week in North Philly Notes, J. Celeste Lay, author of Public Schools, Private Governance, writes about how school choice in New Orleans hurt more than it helped.

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on our lives in so many ways, but for children, one of its most important and potentially lasting effects has been in public education. The pandemic has been a boon for school choice advocates, who see in this disaster a means to push legislation that eases restrictions on charter schools, voucher programs, homeschooling, and more.

The parents and teachers of public school students in New Orleans know all too well how advocates can take advantage of a disaster to achieve long-term political goals. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Louisiana’s state legislature voted to strip the city’s school board of its authority over nearly all its public schools. In Public Schools, Private Governance, I examine the path that has led the city to become the nation’s first all-charter district, and its consequences on democratic values like representation, accountability, and participation.

Although many scholars and advocates place Katrina as the starting point for education reform in New Orleans, I contend that the hurricane merely sped along and expanded the scope of the already existing reform movement in the city. The book spotlights the decade prior to Katrina to reveal and examine the incremental policy changes that made it possible for the state to seize control of the city’s schools. In this period, state legislators—including many of New Orleans’s representatives—passed a school grading system, mandated annual standardized tests, eased the pathways to alternative teacher certification, created multiple types of charter schools, approved a state “recovery” district that could take over “failing schools,” and ultimately, in the year before Katrina, stripped the elected board in New Orleans (and only New Orleans) of most of its authority. By the time the city was draining the floodwaters in Fall 2005, all the state had to do was change the definition of a failing school for it to seize all but a handful of the city’s schools.

This movement largely excluded those who worked in the schools, as well as the parents of school children. This exclusion continued in the wake of Katrina and I show that it continues to the present day. In the all-charter system, parents theoretically have choices about where their children enroll in school. They must rank preferences in a Common Application and there are no neighborhood schools to which kids are assigned. They can go anywhere—in theory. However, in reality, as shown in my book many parents are confused by the system and do not believe it is fair. In particular, they see that the racial disparities that have long been a hallmark of New Orleans public schools continue in this new, supposedly better system. The few white children who attend public schools are enrolled in selective admission schools that require admission tests and other barriers to entry. Meanwhile, the Black children who make up most of the public school district  continue to attend low-performing schools that are predominantly Black institutions.

Although a generation of children have now gone through the new system, the district’s scores have remained well below the state average and only a small minority of schools are rated as “A” or “B” on the state’s A-F scale. Though overall test scores have improved slightly, Black parents do not believe their children are getting a great education and they believe they have little recourse to do anything about it. The elected school board is essentially a mere charter authorizer, and while it has opened and closed dozens of schools over the last 17 years, parents long for high-quality, neighborhood schools staffed by experienced teachers who understand and appreciate New Orleans culture and history. This elected board has almost no authority over school operations. Rather, privately selected charter boards govern school finances, select school leaders, and establish policies. My research shows that these boards are not representative of the city; they cannot be held accountable by voters, they display disdain for parents, and they do not comply with state laws about public bodies. They routinely withhold information they are required to disclose and yet the elected board never sanctions schools or networks for these violations.

For states that are considering an expansion of school choice due to the Covid-19 pandemic, my book offers a warning about the effects of considering schools as consumer goods. There is little improvement in overall school quality, but there is devastation to the local democratic character of public education.

Celebrating Pride Month

As Pride Month comes to a close North Philly Notes showcases three recent books by LGBTQ authors. You can check out all of our Sexuality Studies series titles here and all of our Sexuality Studies/Sexual Identity titles here.

Charles Upchurch, author of “Beyond the Law,”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain

PRIDE is about continuing, celebrating, and securing the work of past generations that has led to greater LGBTQ equality and inclusion within society. That work is sometimes advanced by those with access to political, economic, and cultural power, but this is of secondary importance to the work done by everyone who lives an authentic life, influencing those around them by their example. I have the privilege of being an academic historian, and my new book, “Beyond the Law,”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, documents the first ever political effort to reform the laws that punished sex between men, which occurred in the early nineteenth century in Britain. At its core, it is a story about those who refused to go along with the vilification of individuals for engaging in private consensual acts. It’s a hopeful story, and while theoretically informed, it is also one that is written in accessible language to reach more people with an account of their rich past, perhaps inspiring them as they make a better future for us all. Happy PRIDE.

Martin Manalansan, coeditor of Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America

Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America is a forum of vibrant queer voices from Asian North America. At a moment of xenophobic anti-Asian violence and major anti-LGBTQ legislations, the essays, poems, and other creative works in this collection are offering experiences of struggle, exuberance, and survival. Q & A is a testament to the resilience of this  group of scholars, writers, poets and cultural workers whose works are forging hope and viable futures beyond the precarious present.  

Susan Krieger, author of Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple

During this Pride month, a great array of alternative identities and lifestyles are honored. The “L” word comes first in the list of LGBTQ+, but it is often an invisible identity, as the title of my book Are You Two Sisters? suggests. Particularly for that reason, I think, this new ethnography makes an important contribution.

Since the publication of Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, I have been overwhelmed by the appreciation I have felt from readers and potential readers of the book. Studies of lesbian life are rare. As women, much of how we live and feel is invisible to others, and even invisible to ourselves. Aware of that invisibility, lesbian and queer women readers have been especially grateful for this account. I value their praise for the authenticity of the story and for the narrative as a contribution to “our lesbian herstory.”

I am also pleased to have reached a broader audience of Psychology Today online readers. My articles there draw from chapters in the book concerning lesbian invisibility in the larger world and dilemmas of identity within a lesbian couple. I am proud that the insights presented in Are You Two Sisters? may be of value for readers from a range of life experiences.

Listen Up! Temple University Press Podcast, Episode 5: Jennifer Lin, author of Beethoven in Beijing

This week in North Philly Notes, we debut the latest episode of the Temple University Press Podcast, host Sam Cohn interviews author Jennifer Lin about her book, Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s History Journey to China, which provides an eye-opening account of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unprecedented 1973 tour. A companion volume to Lin’s documentary of the same name, this photo-rich oral history takes readers to the People’s Republic of China during the time when Western music was banned.

The Temple University Press Podcast is where you can hear about all the books you’ll want to read next.

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The Temple University Press Podcast is available wherever you find your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Overcast, among other outlets.

About this episode

Eugene Ormandy was the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1971 when ping pong diplomacy was starting to thaw U.S.-China relations. (An American table tennis team was invited to Beijing—the first American group of any kind asked to visit mainland China since 1949). Wondering about the possibility of having the Orchestra visit, Ormandy’s idea soon became a reality with some assistance from the White House, and President Richard Nixon, and National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, among others. In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra embarked on a 10-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai to perform a series of concerts. This historic event is retold in Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing, which recounts this remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange.

Caring Beside: Metaphors of Solidarity at the Bedside

This week in North Philly Notes, James Kyung-Jin Lee, author of Pedagogies of Woundedness, writes about “the horizontal ethics of care and politics of resistance” as well as the power that can come from the person lying on the bed.

            

In the epilogue of Pedagogies of Woundedness, I cite the opening scene of Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory,” in which they describe listening to the sounds of a 2014 Black Lives Matter protest taking place outside their apartment, while Hedva was consigned to a bed because of a chronic illness: “Attached to the bed, I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.” They then wonder what role ill/disabled people might play in revolutionary activity: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Such a question resonates with a corresponding image that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha conjures in her essay “Crip Superpowers,” that implores her readers and fellow activists to imagine, “We can community-organize flat on our ass in bed—as what the movement needs most.”

The horizontal body in space and time is the prevailing image of the patient consigned to the hospital bed that animates so much of the crucible of experience that animates physician memoirs, the contrast between the standing, able-bodied doctor hovering over, caring, surveilling, and enacting on the prone one in need of care and thus submitting to such diagnostic colonization. It is this asymmetry of power exemplified in bodily position that motivates both Hedva and Piepzna-Samarasinha to see the bedridden Asian American sick woman as nonetheless agentive. Here, I also take to heart Mel Chen’s meditation on Piepzna-Samarasinha’s insistence on a politics enabled “flat on our ass in bed” by their subtle but trenchant critique of the most widely used phrase to demonstrate solidarity with a cause or community or condition: “The grammar of ableist liberatory fervor is succinctly captured, for instance, in the widespread use today of declamatory campaigns that urge one to metaphorically ‘stand with’ various populations or politicians. Such a metaphor is constructed on the figurative imagining of a literal standing. The question becomes what might it mean to ‘stand with’ a figural group, when standing for wheelchair users, or those chronically ill ‘flat on our ass in bed,’ cannot readily invite such ‘politically aligned’ embodied action.” At the time of this writing, my social media feed is filled with posts that stand with the people of Ukraine, stand with LGBTQ+ kids in Florida and trans children in Texas, and of course all through the pandemic we were ostensibly standing with health care workers toiling in the desperate days and weeks of the worst of the COVID pandemic. I suppose that the lack of shortage of people standing with others is a small testament that wounded, vulnerable people receive some modicum of compassion that isn’t tethered to market forces or transactional expectation.

But Chen’s, Hedva’s, and Piepzna-Samarasinha’s insistence on a horizontal ethics of care and politics of resistance have hit home in ways that exceeded my imagination once the final draft of Pedagogies of Woundedness was locked. The following is a story which I have permission to disclose: a year ago, our older teenage daughter attempted suicide and in doing so revealed that she had been suffering from severe mental illness and associated trauma for years, unbeknownst to me and her mom. What followed was a long flight of various treatments, both outpatient and residential, and our family’s baptism into the world of mental health care. There have been and continue to be moments of crisis that punctuate periods of relative mental and emotional stability, and some rare moments of happiness for my daughter, and for the other members of the family. Early on, I clung to a restitution narrative, but we’re late into this story and I recognize now that my daughter is living a different genre. Early on, I stood over her bed desperately wishing she could join me, despairing that the aggressivity of her depression prevented her from even remaining conscious for hours at a time. Over time, I came to understand that standing with my daughter when she couldn’t get out of bed wasn’t all that much different from the physician’s diagnostic colonization of his patient.

So I’ve tried to shift my body and my metaphor to align with where my daughter is on any given day. On really tough days, as she lies in bed, I’ll sometimes lie on the floor and listen to the quiet sounds of her breathing. At moments when she is able to sit at her desk and is willing to let me into her space, I’ll pull up a chair: sometimes we sit face to face and at others side by side, as if we’re facing the world together. Stories of illness and disability, and the politics and ethics that emanate from these stories, the power that can come from the person lying on the bed, have taught me that there is and must be always more room to imagine solidarity with the vulnerable. Nowadays, I will only stand with people, like my daughter, if they want to stand, and if they give me permission to rise with them, if they let me take their hand into mine.