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

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Creative research methods for data generation have expanded over recent decades and researchers are eager to take a creative approach to data analysis.

It is challenging to bring creativity into data analysis while retaining a systematic, rigorous, and ethical approach. Written by experts in the field, this handbook addresses these challenges. The chapters adapt analytical techniques in creative ways for novice and expert researchers. Existing and novel methods from analysis of quantitative data to embodied, performative, visual, written, arts-based, and collaborative analysis are featured with case examples that are transferable across disciplines.

This collection offers a definitive practical guide to creative data analysis.

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A Guide to Connecting Stories and Inquiry
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Discover how fiction can breathe life into your research.

Fiction – in the form of everyday storytelling, prose, plays, films, folktales, and comics – can be powerful and resonant. This engaging book introduces the ways in which fiction can inform, inspire and enliven all kinds of research.

Presenting a range of case studies and examples from diverse disciplines, this book explores how and why researchers have employed fiction and fictional techniques throughout the research process, including using fiction to communicate research findings. An essential primer to thinking creatively with fiction, the book:

 • discusses a range of theoretical perspectives on the use of fiction in research;

 • explores challenges and ethical questions for researchers using fiction;

 • offers practical advice, creative prompts and resources.

Enabling the reader to reflect on how fiction might be used in their own research, this comprehensive introduction will help students and experienced researchers embark on their own research-based fiction projects in no time.

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Diverse Approaches to Policy Movement

The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organisations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed.

To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.

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Literature on sex, intimacy and sexuality in later life has been heavily influenced by perspectives from more affluent regions, perpetuating the belief that the West is more sexually progressive and liberal than other cultures.

This book challenges this belief by exploring diverse cultures and perspectives from the majority world, which are often overlooked. It highlights the importance of learning from cultures in the global South and East, dismantling stereotypes that frame them as sexually conservative or inferior.

Variously drawing on structuralist, postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as social anthropology, the book critically examines binaries related to culture, age, sex and intimacy, highlighting the need to decentre Western perspectives as the benchmark while other cultures and practices are misunderstood.

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A Creative Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Research

This book invites us to consider the profound impact that poetry can have in shaping personal and professional development in a higher education setting.

Suitable for educators, learners, and practitioners, it offers a transformative learning approach in using poetry for teaching, assessment, research, and reflection. The book includes diverse examples, case studies, and practical exercises, demonstrating poetry's application in personal and professional development in a higher education setting.

Each chapter guides readers through these processes, empowering them to integrate poetry into their own teaching and learning practices in a way that is creative, inclusive, and impactful.

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This book firmly positions lived experience-led expertise as a unique and compelling form of knowledge in decolonising and disrupting research, teaching and advocacy.

Based on the insights of people with first-hand experiences, each chapter presents unique accounts and reflections on a diverse range of social justice issues. Together, the authors’ perspectives centre lived experiences in the production of knowledge, challenge outsider-imposed views, and create new research and writing norms. They demonstrate that when lived experience experts lead the way, their knowledge of how to address social injustices can enrich, transform and decolonise research, teaching and advocacy.

This collection is an invaluable resource for academic and community-based researchers, practitioners, advocates, educators, policymakers, students and people whose lived experiences and views continue to be marginalised across diverse settings.

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Lessons from a Time of Crisis

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This collection scrutinizes the methodological and ethical challenges that researchers face when working with and for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in the context of global crises.

Contributors assess the impact of the pandemic on their engaged research, evaluating novel methods and technologies. They reveal how current research practice blurs the borders between activism and scholarship, and they argue the need for innovative collaborations with local communities.

Showcasing emerging aspects of GRT-related scholarship, this book makes a key contribution to larger debates on the positionality of researchers and the politics of research, and affirms the continued value of rigorous ethnography.

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Violence, Development and Dialogue in Colombia

What role does dialogue play in peacebuilding? How can community-based activities contribute to broader peace processes? What can participatory research methods add to local efforts to build peace?

In this book the authors examine these questions through their work with two different Colombian communities who have pursued dialogue amidst ongoing violence, environmental injustice and socio-economic challenges. By reflecting on what people in these contrasting places have achieved through participatory peacebuilding, the authors explore different forms of local agency, the prospects for non-extractive academic engagement, and practical and theoretical lessons for participating in peace in other conflict-affected settings.

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The Ideological Contours of Public Scientific Controversies

When the utility of masks or vaccinations became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic and lost its mooring in scientific evidence, an already-developing crisis of expertise was exacerbated. Those who believe in consensus science wondered: “How can ‘those people’ not see the truth?

This book shows that it is not a ‘scientific’ controversy, but an ideological dispute with ‘believers’ on both sides. If the advocates for consensus science acknowledge the uncertainties involved, rather than insisting on cold, hard facts, it is possible to open a pathway towards interaction and communication, even persuasion, between world views.

As the crisis of expertise continues to be a global issue, this will be an invaluable resource for readers concerned about polarized societies and the distrust of consensus science.

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The Poetics of Letting Go

This book invites the reader to think about collaborative research differently. Using the concepts of ‘letting go’ (the recognition that research is always in a state of becoming) and ‘poetics’ (using an approach that might interrupt and remake the conventions of research), it envisions collaborative research as a space where relationships are forged with the use of arts-based and multimodal ways of seeing, inquiring, and representing ideas.

The book’s chapters are interwoven with ‘Interludes’ which provide alternative forms to think with and another vantage point from which to regard phenomena, pose a question, and seek insights or openings for further inquiry, rather than answers. Altogether, the book celebrates collaboration in complex, exploratory, literary and artistic ways within university and community research.

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