Recent notable books by 天美影视传媒 faculty members explore how the U.S. government has historically used credit to create opportunity, how “reproductive slavery” has left lasting ramifications, and how technology design benefits from human values.

Information School’s Friedman, Hendry co-author ‘Value Sensitive Design’

and , faculty members in the UW , have co-authored the new book “

With technology affecting all aspects of life and the growing concerns over privacy, security and inclusion, the authors ask: “How should designers, engineers, architects, policymakers, and others design such technology? Who should be involved and what values are implicated?”

Value Sensitive design “brings together theory, methods and applications for a design process that engages human values at every stage.” And its methods, they write, “in short, catalyze moral and technical imaginations for design and engineering.”

With heightened awareness of bias in artificial intelligence systems and its negative social and economic impacts, the authors add: “Value sensitive design stands out as an approach that helps position engineers and technologists to get on the front end of these problems before systems are developed and deployed.”

The book offers 17 concrete methods for value sensitive design, they write, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach “through case studies from large-scale public transportation to security for implantable medical devices.

Friedman and Hendry cite social media and artificial intelligence as examples of technologies that would benefit from value sensitive design. Social media companies, in favoring young adult users, “tend not to consider other key stakeholders such as children and the elderly,” and AI systems are often inscrutable “black boxes” of automatic decision making.

“Value sensitive design offers concrete approaches and methods for broadening the focus of AI systems, away from a singular focus on efficiency to responsible innovation and such values as fairness and lack of bias, diverse stakeholder inclusion, and most broadly social justice.”

“Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination” was published in May by MIT Press.

For more information, contact Friedman at batya@uw.edu or Hendry at dhendry@uw.edu

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‘American Bonds’: Creating opportunity through government credit

In her book “,” UW associate professor of sociology explores how the United States government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities for American citizens.

Though federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities became well known in the 2008 financial crisis, publisher’s notes for “American Bonds” say, government credit has been part of American life since the nation’s founding.

“From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, ‘American Bonds’ examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs.”

Since westward expansion, Quinn argues, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage the nation’s social divides, and politicians and officials of all political stripes have used land sales, home ownership and credit “to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.”

Government credit programs supported the growth of industries, helped with disaster relief, foreign policy and military efforts “and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment and mortgage securitization.”

“American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation” is being published this month by Princeton University Press.

For more information, contact Quinn at slquinn@uw.edu.

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‘State of being stateless’: Juliet Shields co-edits volume on migrants in 18^th, 19^th centuries

, UW professor of English, is co-editor, with of Central Michigan University, of a book of essays titled “.” Publishers notes say the volume “initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.”

Migrants have often existed “historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities.” The essays “traverse the globe, revealing the experiences 鈥� real or imagined” of such migrants, and “explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others.”

“These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.”

“Migration and Modernities” was published in January by Edinburgh University Press.

For more information, contact Shields at js37@uw.edu

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Biocapitalism, black feminism and the ‘commodification of the human reproductive body’

In her book, “,” UW English professor examines “the continuing resonances of Atlantic slavery in the cultures and politics of human reproduction that characterize contemporary biocapitalism.”

Biocapitalism is a form of racial capitalism that relies on the commodification of the human reproductive body, its parts and its biological processes. It is dependent on what Weinbaum calls the “slave episteme 鈥� the radical logic that drove four centuries of slave breeding in the Americas and Caribbean.”

Weinbaum uses texts from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to Octavia Butler’s dystopian fiction, from Marxist theory to histories of slavery and legal cases of surrogacy to show how “the slave episteme continues to affect reproduction today, especially through the use of biotechnology and surrogacy.”

Black feminist contributions from the 1970s through the 1990s, she argues, “constitute a powerful philosophy of history 鈥� one that provides the means through which to understand how reproductive slavery haunts the present.”

“The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery” was published in March by Duke University Press.

For more information, contact Weinbaum at alysw@uw.edu.

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History professor Bet-Shlimon writes of Kirkuk in new book ‘City of Black Gold’

, UW assistant professor of history, tells of Iraq’s most multilingual city and the historic heart of its powerful petroleum industry in her new book, “.”

It was 1927 when a foreign company first struck oil in Kirkuk, which had for millennia been home to a diverse population. “City of Black Gold,” publisher’s notes say, “tells a story of oil, urbanization and colonialism in Kirkuk 鈥� and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk’s citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict.

“Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.”

“City of Black Gold” was published in May by Stanford University Press.

For more information, contact Bet-Shlimon at shlimon@uw.edu

Immigrant rights, environmental concerns and racial, class, gender and sexual justice will be the focus of a daylong conference hosted by the at the 天美影视传媒.

The conference, gathering activists, academics, union leaders and policymakers, is titled “.” It will be held from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 10, in Kane 225, the Walker-Ames Room.

, UW associate professor of political science, will moderate a panel discussion on “Transforming Politics as Usual: Electoral Politics.” Participants will be Dulce Guti茅rrez of the Yakima City Council, Rosalinda Guillen of Community to Community Development, Washington State Rep. Bob Hasegawa (D — Seattle) and Nikkita Oliver of the Seattle Peoples Party.

, UW assistant professor of sociology, will moderate a panel discussion on “Retaking Ownership of the Company Town.” Participants will be Kshama Sawant of the Seattle City Council, Nicole Grant of the M. L. King County Labor Council, KJ Moon of the Democratic Socialists of America and Matt Remle of Mazaska Talks.

Author and activist will moderate a panel discussion on “Challenging Strategies for Advancing Social Justice Unionism.” Others participating are Faye Guenther of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 21; Eunice How of UNITE-HERE, Local 8; Dean McGrath of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 23; Sandy Restrepo of Colectiva Legal del Pueblo; and Rev. John Stean of the Ebenezer A.M.E. Zion Church in Seattle.

The welcoming and closing remarks will be by , UW professor of political science and director of the Harry Bridges Center. Lynne Dodson of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO will provide some opening remarks, followed by the opening keynote address by activist and author Bill Fletcher, Jr. The lunchtime keynote address will be by Kent Wong, author, activist, and director of the UCLA Labor Center.

The conference is dedicated, promotion notes say, “to conversations among local activists on ways to join commitments and collaborate on transformative projects fighting for social justice, racial justice, gender justice and workers’ empowerment in the current political moment.”

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For more information, call 206-543-7946 or email hbcls@uw.edu. Press interested in attending or interviewing participants may contact organizer Michael McCann at mwmccann@uw.edu.

Given today’s political climate, one might assume that terms like “administrative state” and “deep state” are merely examples of polarized rhetoric.

But the wariness underlying those terms goes back much further, said , an assistant professor of sociology at the 天美影视传媒.

Try colonial America.

“Some historians will say this is something that defines American culture, going back to before the revolution 鈥� that there is a longstanding dislike of centralized power and markets, and that this is what it means to be an American,” she said.

That characterization overlooks the fact that there always have been Americans who liked and wanted a bigger, more active government, Quinn said. What has evolved is the way people talk about the government 鈥� shorthanded in academia as “the state” 鈥� and how its actions are helpful or “hidden,” well-intentioned, blundering or downright sinister, depending on the speaker’s perspective.

“I used to think that people perceived or didn’t perceive the state, and then decided whether something was good or bad,” said Quinn. “Now we are investigating whether it’s the reverse. People have a pre-existing sense of the government as good or bad, and that moral sense helps determine the kinds of government action they are able to perceive.”

Even before the 2016 election, Quinn and Damon Mayrl of Colby College were researching Americans’ perceptions of government. They co-authored a piece, “Beyond the Hidden American State: Rethinking Government Visibility,” which appears in the book “,” published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. Their chapter focuses on two real-life examples of government policies and programs that, through language, were either promoted or veiled to fit a political agenda.

As fear of the “deep state” 鈥� by definition, a group that manipulates the government behind the scenes — continues to gain traction in some political constituencies, Quinn said, academics can help shed light on what the state is, or is not, and why people so often misunderstand what the government even does.

How do you define “the state”? Do government leaders see themselves as part of it?

SQ: The most traditional answer is to say that the state, at its core, is an administrative structure, an organization. More radical scholars say the state is one very special way that power moves through society. We’re trying to find a middle ground through ongoing research, recognizing that the state has an organizational core but that its actions have reverberations that we can trace.

As for who likely sees themselves as part of the state, that depends. Most government officials, like members of Congress, do. Where it gets more interesting is among people who work at the state and local level. Here, among faculty and staff at the UW, we work for the government, but we don’t always think of it that way.

Your book chapter details what happened when the City of San Francisco instituted universal health care, and restaurants started adding a “Healthy San Francisco surcharge” to diners’ tabs to, ostensibly, pay employee health care costs. How was that an example of the “hidden state” debate in action?

There are many issues playing out like that. Ever since we wrote the chapter, I’ve obsessively looked at receipts. Businesses have to pay and comply with all sorts regulations, but when it comes to rules about labor and workers, they sometimes treat it differently. After the minimum wage was increased in Seattle, some restaurants started adding a 鈥渓iving wage fee.鈥� Restaurants in San Francisco had done the same thing years ago when the city passed a new health care law. In both cases owners were saying, “The expense we’re passing on to you isn’t something we’re responsible for. This is the government creating this expense for you.” It’s about what they want to call out the government for and what they want to take credit for. In the process, they help highlight some government programs and ignore others.

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“The state,” as a term, tends to carry a negative connotation. But is there also a positive one?

SQ: People believe different things, and they fight it out. There are Americans who have always been fighting for more active government; they see it as the representative of the people and the best system we have for taking care of each other and being accountable to one another. There are also people who think it’s a terrifying source of oppression. We’re seeing a lot of those battles playing out now. As researchers, if we’re trying to understand what people see when they look at a structure, we have to realize people are bringing their political beliefs and moral understandings to their perceptions.

How does the concept of the “deep state” or the “administrative state” relate to this?

SQ: One of the ways groups fight for power is in the very definition of what the state is and where it lies. Fights over the “deep state” are battles over how we classify the world. Now you see a ramping up of these classification struggles.

Michael Lewis recently wrote an in Vanity Fair that looks at what actually happens at the Department of Energy. This administration wants to dismantle the Department of Energy, but it’s actually the department that takes stock of our nuclear weapons. There’s a lack of understanding of what government departments do. Is the Department of Energy a lefty, green, tech space? Is it a colossal structure of industrial development? Is it part of our massive military apparatus? How you classify it has implications for what you do with it.

The adoption of the idea of a “deep state” in the U.S. represents a new and deeply moralized classification of the state, but it is also in many respects a misunderstanding of what that is. The United States is not Turkey, which does have a shadow apparatus like nothing we have here.

Is the way we classify 鈥� and argue about 鈥� the state a problem that requires a solution?

I’m not saying we’ll all come to the same terms about what the government does, so I don’t think it’s a social problem to be solved, like getting people to wear seat belts.

But the ways we study what the government does really shape what we think the government is. Our next book will include international comparisons. For example, in France and in the United States, railroads were built with a combination of private and government effort. In the U.S., the government gets involved but says it’s mostly the work of private companies; in France, private companies get involved, but the government says to the people, “Don’t worry about it. We’re involved. Everything is fine.” Everywhere, government action has to happen through a combination of government and private effort. How people make sense of it is colored powerfully depending on the lens we use, which can vary widely across nations.

One of the reasons there’s more research coming out about this now, across a variety of fields, is that Americans have long failed to fully grasp what the government really does. Damon and I are trying to contribute to that effort by finding new ways to talk about the state that are specific, tangible and usable, but that don’t erase the state’s complexity as an organization.

A lot of the work in sociology and other disciplines is shining a light on parts of the government in ways that haven’t been properly appreciated. So this is ultimately about clarifying the profound ways that government matters for both everyday life and for economic growth.