Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 51 - 60 of 133 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Poverty and Inequality x
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With international human rights under challenge, this book represents a comprehensive critique that adds a social policy perspective to recent political and legalistic analysis.
Expert contributors draw on local and global examples to review constructs of universal rights and their impact on social policy and human welfare. With thorough analysis of their strengths, weaknesses and enforcement, it sets out their role in domestic and geopolitical affairs.
Including a forward by Albie Sachs, this book presents an honest appraisal of both the concepts of international human rights and their realities. It will engage those with an interest in social policy, ethics, politics, international relations, civil society organisations and human rights-based approaches to campaigning and policy development.
Available open access under CC-BY-NC license. Homelessness is unequivocally devastating. In the UK, people affected by homelessness are ten times more likely to die than their peers in the general population, yet we still miss important opportunities to adequately address the issue.
The Centre for Homelessness Impact brings together this urgent book gathering the insights and experiences of leaders in government, academia and the third sector to present new evidence-based strategies to end homelessness.
Demonstrating why and how a new movement is needed that embraces data and evidence as integral to ending homelessness effectively, this book provides crucial methods to underpin future policy, practice and funding decisions.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The number of people experiencing homelessness is rising in the majority of advanced western economies. Responses to these rising numbers are variable but broadly include elements of congregate emergency accommodation, long-term supported accommodation, survivalist services and degrees of coercion. It is evident that these policies are failing.
Using contemporary research, policy and practice examples, this book uses the Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine homelessness as a pattern of residential instability and economic precariousness regularly experienced by marginal households. Bringing to light stark evidence, it proves that current responses to homelessness only maintain or exacerbate this instability rather than arrest it and provides a robust evidence base to reimagine how we respond to homelessness.
As the population ages, this book reveals how divides that are apparent through childhood and working life change and are added to in later life.
Two internationally renowned experts in ageing look beyond longstanding factors like class, gender and ethnicity to explore new social divisions, including contrasting states of physical fitness and mental health. They show how differences in health and frailty are creating fresh inequalities in later life, with significant implications for the future of our ageing societies.
This accessible overview of social divisions is essential reading for those interested in the sociology of ageing and its differences, diversities and inequalities.
As the demand for food banks and other emergency food charities continues to rise across the continent, this is the first systematic Europe-wide study of the roots and consequences of this urgent phenomenon.
Leading researchers provide case studies from the UK, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain, each considering the history and driving political and social forces behind the rise of food charity, and the influence of changing welfare states. They build into a rich comparative study that delivers valuable evidence for anyone with an academic or professional interest in related issues including social policy, exclusion, poverty and justice.
A distinctive and original analysis of how the politics of the UK and the lives of British citizens have evolved in the first decades of the twenty-first century, this book provides an interdisciplinary critical examination of the roots, ideology and consequences of austerity politics, the Brexit vote and the rise of populist politics in Britain.
Bringing together case studies and perspectives from an array of international researchers across the social sciences, it dissects the ways that the UK has become increasingly contested with profound differences of geography, generation, gender, ‘race’ and class, and considers agency as a key concept to understand the links between austerity and Brexit.
In this persuasive study, social welfare and policy expert Paul Spicker makes a case for a relational view of poverty.
Poverty is much more than a lack of resources. It involves a complex set of social relationships, such as economic disadvantage, insecurity or a lack of rights. These relational elements tell us what poverty is – what it consists of, what poor people are experiencing, and what problems need to be addressed.
This book examines poverty in the context of the economy, society and the political community, considering how states can respond to issues of inequality, exclusion and powerlessness. Drawing on examples of social policy in both rich and poor countries, this is an accessible contribution to the debate about the nature of poverty and responses to it.
Child poverty is rising across affluent Western societies; how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses.
Seeking to redress this problem, Treanor places children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and to forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.
What risks and insecurities do older people face in a time of both increased longevity and widening inequality?
This edited collection develops an exciting new approach to understanding the changing cultural, economic and social circumstances facing different groups of older people. Exploring a range of topics, the chapters provide a critical review of the concept of precarity, highlighting the experiences of ageing that occur within the context of societal changes tied to declining social protection. Drawing together insights from leading voices across a range of disciplines, the book underscores the pressing need to address inequality across the life course and into later life.
Based on more than 30 case studies in eight different countries, this book explores the governance dynamics of local social innovations in the field of poverty reduction. The diverse team of contributors reflects on the trajectory of social innovation in European governance. They illustrate how different governance dynamics and welfare mixes enable or hinder poverty reduction strategies and analyse how such dynamics involve a diversity of actors, instruments and resources at different spatial scales. The contributions are based on research motivated by the standstill in the fight against poverty in Europe and the anxiety that conventional macro-social policies are insufficient to deal with the current challenges.
