Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the 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 1 - 10 of 39 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Sociology of Health and Illness x
- Access: All content x
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Stigma has long been a central concern for social scientists studying health and illness. Yet, in existing work, stigma often escapes definition and clarification, is treated as universal and constant, and becomes a vague catch-all term for a range of conditions and situations.
This book initiates a process of recalibrating the conceptualisation of stigma. The book features original analyses from early- and mid-career scholars focusing on diverse issues, including mental health, racism, sex, HIV, reproduction, obesity, eating disorders, self-harm, exercise, drug use, COVID-19 and disability.
This ambitious book offers new perspectives to stimulate and intensify conversations around stigma, and highlights the valuable contributions of sociological approaches to the study of health and illness.
In this book, Sally King interrogates the diagnostic label of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) to expose and challenge sexist assumptions within medical research and practice. She powerfully demonstrates how the concept of the ‘hormonal’ premenstrual woman is merely the latest iteration of the ‘hysterical’ female myth. By blaming the healthy reproductive body (first our wombs, now our hormones) for the female-prevalence of emotional distress and physical pain, gender myths appear to have trumped all empirical evidence to the contrary.
The book also provides a primer on menstrual physiology beyond hormones, and a short history of how hormonal metaphors came to dominate medical and popular discourses. The author calls for clinicians, researchers, educators, and activists to help improve women’s health without unintentionally reproducing damaging stereotypes.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a drug taken by HIV-negative people that reduces the risk of getting HIV. Comparing two case studies in Denmark and Zimbabwe, this book demonstrates six paradoxes that users often encounter in navigating their PrEP journey. The paradoxes lead to contentions, uncertainties, dilemmas and ambiguities that need to be carefully and pensively responded to through what the author terms ‘everyday PrEP negotiations’.
The social nature and need for such everyday PrEP negotiations help explain why PrEP works for some people and not for others. This book argues that such insight is critical to make PrEP work for more people and to inform social public health responses.
Three decades of neoliberal efficiency thinking about caring and care systems have resulted in a greater need for relationality in healthcare and social work than ever before. These support services extend beyond the giving of care and support to include the development of relationships between caregivers and their care recipients in their socio-institutional contexts.
The culmination of over 30 years of research, this book provides an extensive and critical introduction to relational working in care, education and welfare. It explains what relational work is and proposes a new, human-orientated theory beyond the simple needs provision model. Demonstrating the kind of professionalism required for such work, it explores why it is as important to be present with and for people, especially those in precarious conditions, as it is to give care.
This is essential reading for researchers, educators, quality officers, policy makers, students and practitioners interested in understanding the growing scholarship related to both care theory and presence theory.
From SARS to Zika, and Ebola to COVID-19, epidemics and pandemics have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Each outbreak presents new challenges but the responses are often similar.
This important book explores the dimensions, dynamics and implications of emerging pandemic societies. Drawing on ideas from sociology and science and technology studies, it sheds new light on how pandemics are socially produced and, in turn, shape societies in areas such as governance, work and recreation, science and technology, education, and family life. It offers pointers to the future of pandemic societies, including the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, as well as the prospects of social renewal created by economic and social disruption.
Can society be healthy, and how? Is Britain a ‘healthy society’ in the 21st century?
When people ponder health, they usually consider the health of the individual, but individuals co-exist in a social environment so attention should be placed on the health of communities and populations.
Re-examining health, healthcare and societal health using the latest data and research, this book provides a clear, accessible account of the current state of play. Addressing definitions of health in individuals, communities and populations, definitions of society itself, changes in health over time and the contribution of healthcare to health and longevity, it also suggests ways of effectively tackling obstacles to improving health and healthcare in 21st century Britain.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust fear into the heart of political debate and policy making. In the wake of the pandemic, it is critical to clarify the role of fear in these processes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to learn crucial lessons for future crises.
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives from leading and emerging scholars in politics, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the book enables a better understanding of post-pandemic politics for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book delves into the complex and controversial realm of fertility care. It analyses the clash between evidence-based medicine and market dynamics in fertility treatments, with a unique focus on "add-on" treatments. It reveals how these contentious treatment options are now common practice and how they lead to an emerging market for hope.
With an interdisciplinary approach, this is an essential resource for readers in the fields of science and technology studies and medical sociology.
Since the 1960s, a major mental health crisis has emerged among Western working populations. By analysing the development of various occupational cultures and using extensive data sources, this book captures the history of mental vulnerability in working life.
Through a study spanning several decades, the book develops a new understanding of how mental vulnerability has evolved through changes to our working lives and socio-cultural being. It shows how our current knowledge about work, disability and the psyche is influenced by our time and provides intertwining conceptual frameworks and alternatives to current canonised knowledge about mental health in working life.
EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
We tend to hold people responsible for their choices, but not for what they can’t control: their nature, genes or biological makeup.
This thought-provoking collection redefines the boundaries of moral responsibility. It shows how epigenetics reveals connections between our genetic make-up and our environment. The essays challenge established notions of human nature and the nature/nurture divide and suggest a shift in focus from individual to collective responsibility.
Uncovering the links between our genetic makeup, environment and experiences, this is an important contribution to ongoing debates on ethics, genetics and responsibility.
