Special Issue of New England Journal of Public Policy features select writings by Marcy Murninghan

Cover for Special 2018 Issue of the New England Journal of Public PolicyThe most recent issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy is now available on ScholarWorks, the open access repository for scholarship and research at UMass Boston. The Special Issue is titled “Wealth, Power, and the Public Interest: Building Equity Culture and Civic Stewardship” and features eleven articles written by Marcy Murninghan.

In his editor’s note for this issue, New England Journal of Public Policy founder and editor Padraig O’Malley writes about Murninghan’s work: “I have known Marcy Murninghan since the early 1980s when she worked for the late Robert Wood, once president of the Massachusetts University system, then superintendent of the Boston School System during the heyday of court-ordered desegregation. During this tumultuous period in Boston’s history, Murninghan played a significant role, tasked by Wood to plan and direct the structural organization of the department. Since then her career has taken many turns. She has churned out a plethora of reports and analyses for foundations, universities, the corporate world, and media monoliths. The result is a formidable body of work, from which the articles for this issue of the journal draws a tranche.”

And in her introduction to this issue, Murningham describes the articles selected for inclusion: “America faces a reckoning, a crucible of what Reinhold Niebuhr observed more than eighty years ago. Our democratic principles and traditions are imperiled by the power of financial oligarchs and unfettered money flows, which have contributed to massive inequality that, in turn, has given rise to political unrest and a sense of cultural unmooring. The articles presented here are both descriptive and normative, setting forth a complex social problem with seemingly bottomless proportions and then offering a design or set of remedial actions to alleviate them. Drawing on my professional experience going back to the mid-1970s, I wrote these pieces to generate new knowledge, new capabilities, and new vistas that open opportunities for growth and well-being—all the while knowing that no problems ever can be solved permanently and that sometimes solutions in one era become new problems in another.”

The New England Journal of Public Policy has been published since 1985 by the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. After folding in 2006 due to financial constraints, the New England Journal of Public Policy resumed publication in 2013 as an online, open access journal. Full issues of the entire run of the New England Journal of Public Policy are available on ScholarWorks.

Apart from Murninghan’s introduction and the editor’s note by O’Malley, who is also the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at UMass Boston, the contents of this issue include:

To view the full issue, and to explore back issues of this publication, click here.


ScholarWorks is the University of Massachusetts Boston’s online, open access institutional repository for scholarship and research. ScholarWorks serves as a publishing platform, a preservation service, and a showcase for the research and scholarly output of members of the UMass Boston community. ScholarWorks is a service of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.

Spring 2017 issue of New England Journal of Public Policy available on ScholarWorks

The most recent issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy is now available on ScholarWorks, the open access repository for scholarship and research at UMass Boston.

Describing the topics explored in this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, founding editor Padraig O’Malley writes: “This issue of the journal has three parts. The first part had its origins in a conference on extremism held at the Center for Study of Intractable Conflicts (CRIC), Harris Manchester College Oxford in October 2015; the second comprises four articles on conflicts referred to as ‘intractable’—Colombia, Syria, and Israel/Palestine—and a reflection on the Holocaust; the third is a stand-alone, one article that addresses the leadership attributes necessary to crack the iron walls of intractability.”

The New England Journal of Public Policy has been published since 1985 by the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Full issues of the open access journal are available on ScholarWorks.

In addition to the introductory note by journal editor O’Malley, who is also the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at UMass Boston, the contents of this issue include:

To view the full issue, and to explore back issues of this publication, click here.


ScholarWorks is the University of Massachusetts Boston’s online, open access institutional repository for scholarship and research. ScholarWorks serves as a publishing platform, a preservation service, and a showcase for the research and scholarly output of members of the UMass Boston community. ScholarWorks is a service of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.

Place in the Neighborhood: Pushed Out, Pushing Back – Latest issue of the Trotter Review available on ScholarWorks

This photograph, from an article by Jen Douglas about gentrification and Jamaica Plain’s Hyde-Jackson Squares, shows Matchstick Man to "symbolize the landlords who burned buildings they found insufficiently profitable in order to collect insurance money" and "Monopoly Man ... proudly admiring his acquisitions with the fires literally behind him.". Photo credit: Diana Shoberg (2004).

This photograph from an article by Jen Douglas about gentrification in Jamaica Plain, shows Matchstick Man to “symbolize the landlords who burned buildings they found insufficiently profitable” and “Monopoly Man … proudly admiring his acquisitions with the fires literally behind him.” Photo credit: Diana Shoberg (2004).

The most recent issue of the Trotter Review, now available on ScholarWorks, explores issues of gentrification and dispossession. As Barbara Lewis, the director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, writes in her introduction to this issue of the journal, this issue of the Trotter Review explores “gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, through the lens of housing policy focused on increasing opportunity; as a strategy of neighborhood displacement; as possible collusion between developers, politicians, and members of an African heritage leadership class eager to keep their pockets jingling with gold; and as local examples of ouster and remake of a neighborhood to suit the tastes of a more moneyed population with a creamier complexion.”

The Trotter Review has been published since 1987 by the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Full issues of the Review are available on ScholarWorks, the open access institutional repository for scholarship and research out of UMass Boston.

Apart from an introduction by Barbara Lewis, the contents of this issue, titled “Place in the Neighborhood: Pushed Out, Pushing Back,” include:

To view the full issue, and to explore back issues of this publication, click here.


ScholarWorks is the University of Massachusetts Boston’s open access institutional repository for scholarship and research. ScholarWorks is a publishing platform, a preservation service, and a showcase for the research and scholarly output of members of the UMass Boston community. ScholarWorks is a service of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.

MOOC Design and Delivery: Latest issue of Current Issues in Emerging eLearning available on ScholarWorks

cover imageThe second in a two-part series, the new issue of Current Issues in Emerging eLearning explores the evolving landscape of “MOOC theory and practice” that has emerged in the four years since the New York Times dubbed 2012 the “year of the MOOC.”

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning launched in 2014 and is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal of applied research and critical thought on eLearning practice and emerging pedagogical methods. The journal is published by the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning, and sponsored by the College of Advancing and Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Apart from a foreword by editor-in-chief Alan Girelli and by Leslie Limon, the contents of this special issue include:

To view the full issue, and to explore back issues of this publication, click here.


ScholarWorks is the University of Massachusetts Boston’s online institutional repository for scholarship and research. ScholarWorks serves as a publishing platform, a preservation service, and a showcase for the research and scholarly output of members of the UMass Boston community. ScholarWorks is a service of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.