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 65 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Social Theory x
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Available open access digitally under CC BY NC ND licence.
Preventing Violence argues that we can move towards safer and better societies by advancing holistic public health approaches to violence prevention.
It explores the serious limitations of contemporary public health approaches and proposes an alternative path forward. Based on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded project, Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction, it also examines in-depth the work of 20 Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales.
The book makes clear recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and researchers working to prevent violence and improve the lives of children and young people.
In today’s digital world, platforms are everywhere, shaping our social and cultural landscapes. This groundbreaking book shows how platforms are not just technical systems, but complex networks involving diverse people, practices and values. It explores a wide range of digital platforms, using insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural theories to offer fresh perspectives on how platforms, media and devices function and evolve.
Blending ethnographic work with technical analysis, this is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the digital age.
This volume brings together a selection of chapters from social scientists who use various interpretive lenses and analytic/theoretical perspectives to analyze the sociology of identities. Drawing on theories of power, intersectionality, un/markedness, and the sociology of nothing, the book explores the ways in which identities are socially constituted, negotiated, and reinforced in complex and multidimensional ways that are tied to cognitive and interactional dimensions of privilege and marginalization. The first section of the book contains chapters that address themes of power, privilege, and intersectional dis/advantage. The second section’s chapters focus on experiences of absence, loss, and missed symbolic objects that form negatively defined identities. In the Afterword, we draw out some common themes across these contributions and discuss how they contribute to new interpretive understandings of social identities.
Using Northern Ireland as a compelling case study, this book offers a critique of peacebuilding approaches with young people in contested societies. In the north of Ireland, the spectre of murderous violence is increasingly distant for peace-agreement generations. However, legacies stemming from the 30 years of protracted conflict are ever-present in young people’s segregated lives.
This book presents four distinctive viewpoints that inform contemporary peacebuilding work with young people, revealing divergent purposes and conflicting aspirations. Offering a new model to understand peacebuilding, the authors urge peacebuilding communities around the globe to embrace an increasingly politicising and participative youth peace praxis.
Wellbeing is a hot topic: governments, psychologists and a thousand self-appointed ‘experts’ all claim to promote it and yet our societies are experiencing record levels of mental distress and ill-health. Why?
Matthew Fisher presents a compelling new perspective on psychological wellbeing informed by evidence on human stress responses. He shows how our mental health is shaped by the social and cultural conditions in which we all live.
Developing arguments and strategies for a society truly committed to wellbeing, this book offers new ways to understand the problems facing modern societies and ways to respond through political and social change.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field of the Sociology of Emotions, incorporating sociological, feminist and cultural perspectives.
Structured around three dimensions - conceptualisation, theory and analysis of emotions - it provides new insights into the field, with a particular focus on contemporary social issues such as loneliness, depression, confidence, consumption, class, intimacy and sexuality.
The book examines the language of emotions, looking at macro and micro framing of emotions in modernity, emotional labour, public emotions, passionate emotions, melancholic emotions, masculinity and emotions, love, intimacy and emotions. It delves into both positive and negative emotions such as happiness, anger, fear and sadness.
The book will be essential reading for researchers and students seeking a current and interdisciplinary resource covering a wide range of international material in the field of Sociology of Emotions.
This book presents a comprehensive exploration of Critical Race Theory, offering a clear understanding of its origins, the way it has been problematized and its potential for societal change.
By examining the historical influence of imperialism and capitalism, the author critiques both liberal and conservative perspectives. Centring the voices of marginalized groups, the book highlights their position as agents of change who have been consistently rejected, ignored or attacked by both the right and the left.
Providing a unique perspective on Critical Race Theory, this book is a valuable resource for readers seeking to navigate the complexities of systemic racism and how to dismantle these systems.
Love is fundamental to the flourishing of society and nature. However, the competition of the market economy has resulted in a fractured and traumatised modern world.
Revisiting philosophical developments and countercultures since the Enlightenment, this book offers a ‘loving critique’. It shows how learning to love better is the key to releasing ourselves from the alienating grip of the market.
The utopian template presented draws on archaeology, the witch trials, hippies, Hinduism, Buddhism, quantum mechanics, and psychedelics to describe how we can build a more loving society that can survive and flourish through the ecological, ethical, economic, and existential crises that we all now face.
In a present marked by planetary crisis, a radical rethinking of aesthetics is necessary. This inspirational collection proposes a new way of thinking about aesthetics as fundamental to cultivating more liveable futures.
Drawing on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Félix Guattari, the book develops aesthetics as central to all more-than-human forms of experience, including knowledge practices. Each contribution invites readers on an adventure to explore how this broader view of aesthetics can reshape areas including biomedicine, geological forensics, nuclear waste, race, as well as arts and education.
This is an agenda-setting contribution to understanding the significance of aesthetics in science and technology studies, as well social and cultural research more broadly.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book offers a theory of trafficking and modern slavery with implications for policy. Despite economic development, modern slavery persists all around the world. The issue is not only one of crime but the regulation of the economy, better welfare and social protections.
Going beyond polarised debates on the sex trade, an original empirical analysis shows the importance of profit-taking. Although individual experience matters, the root causes lie in intersecting regimes of inequality of gender regimes, capitalism, and the legacies of colonialism. This book shows the importance of coercion and the societal complexities that perpetuate modern slavery.
