The Rethinking Regulation Program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics is an interdisciplinary research, teaching and outreach network exploring the broad terrain of regulatory governance. It focuses on disciplinary and methodological approaches from departments including Law, Economics, Political Science, Philosophy, History, Public Policy, Environmental Sciences, Business and Sociology.
William D. Goldsmith
, a Ph.D. Candidate in History, is a Rethinking Regulation Graduate Scholar who has taught an undergraduate course on the history of the modern regulatory state. He is also the 2015 recipient of the Rethinking Regulation Graduate Research Award. This year he presented a paper, “Failures of Co-operative Capitalism in the North Carolina Black Belt,” at the Business History Conference in Portland, Oregon. The paper explored a 1980s policy experiment with a public-private partnership that sought to harness the supply chain needs of an engine manufacturer to stimulate black capital formation and equity-oriented community development.
His dissertation examines the construction and evolution of education and economic development policy in North Carolina from 1960 to 2000 in order to understand how a rural Jim Crow state with the nation’s lowest manufacturing wages and abysmal educational attainment became an emblem of the “New Economy.” His work traces how the civil rights revolution created policy space for the emergence of “education for economic growth” as a central focus of state economic development efforts as well as the uneven implications of such policies for rural areas and economic equality.
Rethinking Regulation Graduate Scholars and Affiliates are graduate students whose research interests align with those of the program in Rethinking Regulation at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and who regularly participate in Rethinking Regulation events. In addition, Graduate Scholars are actively engaged in research projects funded by Rethinking Regulation.
The Rethinking Regulation Graduate Student Working Group is a forum for Graduate Scholars and Affiliates to collaborate on topics of regulatory governance. The group meets monthly to present research, discuss interdisciplinary regulatory scholarship and analyze contemporary regulatory policy issues.
If you are interested in joining the Rethinking Regulation network, please contact Amber Díaz Pearson. To receive the email newsletter, sign up online. Any graduate students interested in participating in the Working Group meetings should contact Mercy DeMenno.
Originally published in the Rethinking Regulation newsletter