On May 25, 2020, Dr. Sam Staley a Florida State University professor and film critic, discussed some controversial issues raised by Netflix’s miniseries, “Waco” on the program, American Viewpoints. The discussion includes religion, criminal justice, and militarization of law enforcement. Listen to the 10 minute interview here. The feature picture is from Forbes.
Suffering in Silence: How COVID-19 School Closures Inhibit the Reporting of Child Maltreatment
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has generated immediate challenges for policymakers across multiple areas including health, fiscal, environmental, and education policy. To contribute to ongoing policy discussions, recent academic work has sought to understand the impact of COVID-19 policy responses on outcomes ranging from job losses to mortality to pollution. In a recent paper, we…
PhD. Spotlight: Distance Education and Horizontal Stratification in U.S. Higher Education.
Distance education has become an increasingly common mode of instruction in U.S. higher education, and today more than a quarter of students are enrolled in distance courses or programs that are fully online. Dr. Kaley Boggs’s dissertation asks two fundamental questions related to the growing presence of distance-based instruction in U.S. higher education. First, does…
Hindsight 2020: Hurricane Season & Climate Change
The 2020 hurricane season is here and is expected to be a busy one. We’ve already had three tropical cyclones and it’s still June! Forecasts are unanimous in calling for an active season: seven to ten hurricanes, with most of them likely to occur after August 10th. Cold waters across the eastern tropical Pacific ocean…
Protests and Pressure: Why is Trump Responding to the Black Lives Matter Movement Now?
Today, Donald Trump is scheduled to sign an executive order on police reform. According to senior White House officials, the order will create a database to track police officers with histories of misconduct and use federal monies to incentivize police departments to meet higher standards on the use of force. The order will not address…
Aging Today: Why are older adults especially vulnerable to financial exploitation and how common is it?
The audio from these scripts originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. An early sign of cognitive impairment is difficulty managing money, making older people susceptible to scams or to financial abuse by family or friends. But even without cognitive impairment, the ability to judge trustworthiness can decline in later life, making older adults prey to false…
The Covid-19 Pandemic Shows the Power and Limits of American Federalism.
This post first appeared on The LSE US Centre’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy American federalism allows different responses to policy challenges, and the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is no exception. When looking at any sort of crisis, the chief executive of a state or municipality is often the leader in…
PhD. Spotlight: The Impacts of Health Care Capital Controls on Health Outcomes and Regional Competition
Capital control policies, such as certificate of need (CON) regulations, are often touted as a means of combating the rising costs of healthcare. However, such policies often have little to no concern with their impact on health outcomes. Dr. Kevin Chiu’s dissertation research examines this impact. Dr. Chiu’s dissertation is comprised of three articles. The…
George Floyd and the Future of Police Misconduct
This piece first appeared in The Beacon. The death of George Floyd at the hands of a cop with a history of excessive force complaints has spurred protests, demonstrations, and riots across the nation. Unfortunately, the violence some protesters have unleashed on these cities is likely to exacerbate existing cultural and political schisms, making meaningful…
Research Spotlight: Creating more Sustainable Communities through Planning
For the past several decades, urban planners have been promoting transit-oriented development (TOD) as a paradigm for building sustainable communities. TOD involves building compact, mixed-use, and walkable development around transit stops. This type of development ostensibly provides a place where one can live without a car while maintaining easy access to goods and services. In…
