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 of over 1500 titles.
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 1 - 10 of 20 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Sociology of Childhood and Youth x
- Access: All content x
Understanding what ‘family’ means – and how best to support families – depends on challenging politicised assumptions that frame ‘ordinary’ families in comparison to an imagined problematic ‘other’.
Learning from the perspectives of people who were in care in childhood, this innovative book helps redefine the concept of family. Linking two longitudinal studies involving young adults in England, it reveals important new insights into the diverse and dynamic complexity of family lives, identities and practices in time – through childhood and beyond.
Paving the way for future policy and practice, this book makes an important contribution to the theorisation of family in the 21st century.
Children in the Global South continue to be affected by social disadvantage in our unequal post-colonial world order. With a focus on working-class children in Latin America, this book explores the challenges of promoting children’s rights in a decolonizing context.
Liebel and colleagues give insights into the political lives of children and demonstrate ways in which the concept of children’s rights can be made meaningful at the grassroots level. Looking to the future, they consider how collaborative research with children can counteract their marginalization and oppression in society.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY licence.
Millions of children throughout Africa undertake many forms of farm and domestic work. Some of this work is for wages, some is on their family’s own small plots and some is forced and/or harmful.
This book examines children’s involvement in such work. It argues that framing all children’s engagement in economic activity as ‘child labour’, with all the associated negative connotations, is problematic. This is particularly the case in Africa where many rural children must work to survive and where, the contributors argue, much of the work undertaken is not harmful.
The conceptual and case-based chapters reframe the debate about children’s work and harm in rural Africa with the aim of shifting research, public discourse and policy so that they better serve the interest of rural children and their families.
Telling the stories of young refugees in a range of international urban settings, this book explores how newcomers navigate urban spaces and negotiate multiple injustices in their everyday lives.
This innovative edited volume is based on in-depth, qualitative research with young refugees and their perspectives on migration, social relations, and cultural spaces. The chapters give voice to refugee youth from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including insights about their migration experiences, their negotiations of spatial justice and injustice, and the diverse ways in which they use urban space.
This collection explores leading values and concepts in global child-based research through the lens of reflexivity.
The book considers issues such as the identities and roles of researchers, as well as the burdens, boundaries and ethical frameworks which govern their activities. Using empirical examples from Israel, India, Thailand and England, expert contributors discuss a range of topics to include online safeguards, disabilities, gang membership, child protection and various sex-related issues.
This book guides childhood research towards a more reflexive debate that critically challenges conventions, highlighting plurality of voice and improving outcomes.
Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families.
Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children’s and parents’ voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children’s leisure from a fresh perspective.
Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, this is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies.
Combining a compulsive read with rigorous academic analysis, this book tells the real-life stories of drug dealers involved in county lines networks, including their methods, motives, and misfortunes. Conventional wisdom surrounding county lines often portrays drugs runners as exploited victims, gang proliferation as a market-driven exercise and suggests a business model facilitated exclusively by smart phone technology and routinely regulated by violence.
Aimed at students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers, this myth-busting, accessible book offers a novel way of thinking about county lines in relation to gangs and serious organised crime and new ideas for drug crime prevention, intervention and enforcement.
Chapter 10 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This interdisciplinary collection charts the experiences of young people in places of spatial marginality around the world, dismantling the privileging of urban youth, urban locations and urban ways of life in youth studies and beyond.
Expert authors investigate different dimensions of spatiality including citizenship, materiality and belonging, and develop new understandings of the complex relationships between place, history, politics and education. From Australia to India, Myanmar to Sweden, and the UK to Central America, international examples from both the Global South and North help to illuminate wider issues of intergenerational change, social mobility and identity.
By exploring young lives beyond city, this book establishes different ways of thinking from a position of spatial marginality.
Spanning the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on childcare, work and gender.
The book illustrates how maternal workers continue to organize against low pay, exploitative working conditions and state retrenchment and provides a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities.
Bringing together social reproduction with maternal studies, this is a resonating call to build a cross-sectoral, intersectional movement around childcare. Maud Perrier shows why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.
Bringing together new, multidisciplinary research, this book explores how children and young people across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas experience and cope with situations of poverty and precarity.
It looks at the impact of neoliberalism, austerity and global economic crisis, evidencing the multiple harms and inequalities caused. It also examines the different ways that children, young people and families ‘get by’ under these challenging circumstances, showing how they care for one another and envisage more hopeful socio-political futures.
