Author: TheConversation

By Sara Safransky, Associate Professor, Department of Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University; Elsa Noterman, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Queen Mary University of London; Madeleine Lewis, Doctoral Student, Department of Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University Ever since the United States government’s unfulfilled promise of giving every newly freed Black American “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War, descendants of the enslaved have repeatedly proposed the idea of redistributing land to redress the nation’s legacies of slavery. Land-based reparations are also a form of redress for the territorial theft of colonialism. Around the world, politicians tend...

By Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor Questrom School of Business, Boston University Are you prepared for when the power goes out? To prevent massive wildfires in drought-prone, high-wind areas, electrical companies have begun preemptively shutting off electricity. These planned shutdowns are called public safety power shutoffs, abbreviated to PSPS, and they are increasingly common. So far this year, we have seen them in Texas, New Mexico, and California. Unlike regular power failures, which on average last only about two hours while a piece of broken equipment is repaired, a PSPS lasts until weather conditions improve, which could be days....

By Brittany Friedman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California President Donald Trump has vowed to target his political enemies, and experts have warned that he could weaponize U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct mass surveillance on his targets. Mass surveillance is the widespread monitoring of civilians. Governments typically target specific groups – such as religious minorities, certain races or ethnicities, or migrants – for surveillance and use the information gathered to “contain” these populations, for example by arresting and imprisoning people. We are experts in social control, or...

By Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data. These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal...

By Andrea Seielstad, Professor of Law, University of Dayton In some parts of the world, a person may be secreted away or imprisoned by the government without any advanced notification of wrongdoing or chance to make a defense. This has not been lawful in the United States from its very inception, or in many other countries where the rule of law and respect for individual civil rights are paramount. The legal doctrine of “habeas corpus,” a Latin phrase that has its American roots in English law as early as the 12th century, stands as a barrier to unlawful arrest....