"At the center of the 'war on women' lies the fact that women in the contemporary United States are facing increased surveillance of their reproductive health. In recent years states have passed a record number of laws restricting abortion and reproductive rights. Physicians continue to sterilize some women against their will, especially those in prison; in other cases, women seeking medical interventions to prevent pregnancies encounter resistance from the medical community. While these trends seem to undermine women's decision-making authority, experts and state actors often defend such policies and actions as actually promoting women's autonomy. In Governed through Choice, Jennifer M. Denbow analyzes recent reproductive measures, such as 'informed consent' to abortion laws and the regulation of sterilization, in order to expose how the notion of autonomy allows for such a striking contradiction in how reproductive policies affect women. Yet, Denbow also offers an understanding of autonomy as critique and transformation of oppressive norms. Denbow shows how developments in reproductive technology, which would seem to increase women's options and autonomy, provide increased opportunities for state management of women's bodies. However, she also argues that reproductive technologies can disrupt oppressive norms about reproduction and gender and ultimately enable social transformation. A critically important analysis, Governed through Choice is a trailblazing look at how the law regulates women's bodies as reproductive sites and what can be done about it"--Unedited summary from paperback book cover.

"At the center of the 'war on women' lies the fact that women in the contemporary United States are facing increased surveillance of their reproductive health. In recent years states have passed a record number of laws restricting abortion and reproductive rights. Physicians continue to sterilize some women against their will, especially those in prison; in other cases, women seeking medical interventions to prevent pregnancies encounter resistance from the medical community. While these trends seem to undermine women's decision-making authority, experts and state actors often defend such policies and actions as actually promoting women's autonomy. In Governed through Choice, Jennifer M. Denbow analyzes recent reproductive measures, such as 'informed consent' to abortion laws and the regulation of sterilization, in order to expose how the notion of autonomy allows for such a striking contradiction in how reproductive policies affect women. Yet, Denbow also offers an understanding of autonomy as critique and transformation of oppressive norms. Denbow shows how developments in reproductive technology, which would seem to increase women's options and autonomy, provide increased opportunities for state management of women's bodies. However, she also argues that reproductive technologies can disrupt oppressive norms about reproduction and gender and ultimately enable social transformation. A critically important analysis, Governed through Choice is a trailblazing look at how the law regulates women's bodies as reproductive sites and what can be done about it"--Unedited summary from paperback book cover.

One of Choice Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles of 2018--an innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state.tate.

With the current state of the economy, the upcoming election is going to focus on federal spending and budget deficit. Charles Prow has brought together an impressive lineup of businessmen and women, reporters, and experts to show how the United States can be more competitive in the global economy. Creating a More Competitive Nation shows not only what is wrong with the current federal spending plan, but ways to fix it. Business professionals and anyone interested in the government's response the recession will find this an important book.

This edited volume seeks to provide guidance on how we can approach questions of governing and agency—particularly those who endeavour to embark on grounded empirical research— by rendering explicit some key challenges, tensions, dilemmas, and confluences that such endeavours elicit. Indeed, the contributions in this volume reflect the growing tendency in governmentality studies to shift focus to empirically grounded studies. The volume thus explicitly aims to move from theory to practice, and to step back from the more top-down governmentality studies approach to one that examines how one can/does study how relations of power affect lives, experience and agency. This book offers insight into the intricate relations between the workings of governing and (the possibility for) people’s agency on the one hand, and about the possible effects of our attempts to engage in such studies on the other. In numerous ways, and from different starting points, the contributions to this volume provide thoughtful insights into, and creative suggestions for, how to work with the methodological challenges of studying the agency of being governed. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, global governance and research methods.

An analysis of the political consequences of special district governance in drinking water management that offers new insights into the influence of political structures on local policymaking. More than ever, Americans rely on independent special districts to provide public services. The special district—which can be as small as a low-budget mosquito abatement district or as vast as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—has become the most common form of local governance in the United States. In Governing the Tap, Megan Mullin examines the consequences of specialization and the fragmentation of policymaking authority through the lens of local drinking-water policy. Directly comparing specific conservation, land use, and contracting policies enacted by different forms of local government, Mullin investigates the capacity of special districts to engage in responsive and collaborative decision making that promotes sustainable use of water resources. She concludes that the effect of specialization is conditional on the structure of institutions and the severity of the policy problem, with specialization offering the most benefit on policy problems that are least severe. Mullin presents a political theory of specialized governance that is relevant to any of the variety of functions special districts perform. Governing the Tap offers not only the first study of how the new decentralized politics of water is taking shape in American communities, but also new and important findings about the influence of institutional structures on local policymaking.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.