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 51 items for :
- Type: Book x
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At a time of contested realities and a renewed focus on the power of personal stories, narrative research is as relevant as ever. But while it has been praised for ‘giving voice’ to individuals and highlighting how they make sense of the social world, critics are starting to question which voices are being heard, or allowed to speak, and which experiences are made to count.
Supported by the editors’ popular podcast Narrative Now, this interdisciplinary volume addresses timely concerns about representation, power, voice, and the ethics of storytelling.
Contributors explore the capacities and limitations of narrative research, and map out new directions for the field while honouring its legacy.
From fake news to infringement of privacy in digital spheres, the changing landscapes of media and public communication have completely transformed contemporary democracies in recent decades.
Disruptions of media functioning can be seen as evidence for a transition from democracy to post-democracy, but how plausible is this scenario? Using empirical evidence, the author asks how imminent the threat of the end of democracy is, and how it can be restored.
Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, the book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.
In this book leading sociologists explore how in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal experience, relations between generations and institutional processes.
The authors analyse the entanglement between past and future and explain how our ability to conceive the future is based not only upon the memory of the past, but also on forecasts about environmental crisis. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, they highlight the crucial role of the past elaboration processes in freeing the future from the weight of trauma and renewing the ability to hope.
Offering a sophisticated and innovative social theory in a burgeoning field, this is a much-needed intervention to the current ‘temporal crisis’ of social life and sociological debates.
In the context of sustained economic and environmental crises, marked by extreme inequalities of wealth, rising xenophobia, racism and precarity, never has the need for a radical change of system been so pressing.
This book is an invitation to think the world otherwise. The author breathes new life into socialist thought through the deployment of an intersectional lens, bringing diverse struggles for emancipation both within and outside the Global North into dialogue with one another.
In doing so, he offers the kind of bold and holistic thinking the present situation calls for.
Memory is at the center of a diverse array of political conflicts, moral disputes and power dynamics.
This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study and explain profound conflicts rooted in the past.
Addressing issues of racism, genocide, trauma, war, nationalism, colonial occupation and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.
Featuring an international group of scholars, this book makes important contributions to social memory studies, but also shows how studying memory is vital to our understanding of enduring social problems that span the globe.
Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body’s influence, meaning, and matter in society.
Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book’s chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end.
Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body.
Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiosis mediation.
Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition in a sociological context. Contributors offer empirical research that not only outlines the conceptual issues at stake, but also demonstrates ‘how to do things’ with semiotics through case studies.
Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for scholars interested in the connection between semiotics and sociology.
This book rethinks meritocracy as a form of coloniality, namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others.
Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the book explores the narratives of Northern meritocracy and Southern backwardness that inform migrants’ motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations.
Connecting decolonial theory with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this book provides innovative insights into the relationships between meritocracy, coloniality and European whiteness, and into the social stratification of EU migrations.
Luck greatly influences a person’s quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens social inequality. But societies can change their luck.
Too often debates about inequality focus on the accuracy of data or modeling while missing the greater point about ethics and exploitation. In the wake of growing disparity between the 1% and other classes, this book combines philosophical insights with social theory to offer a much-needed political economy of life chances.
Timcke advances new thought on the role luck plays in redistributive justice in 21st Century capitalism.
Most governments in the world – including many that are autocratic or authoritarian - have taken responsibility for social policy and elected to develop services in health, education and social security. This book explores the role of government and the state in the contemporary world and, considering a range of theories and evidence, discusses views about government responsibility for social welfare services.
Applying political theory to social policy, this book seeks to address a set of key questions: What responsibilities do governments have towards their populations? What ought they do and what not? How can they do things better?
