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
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This book explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book demonstrates in what way power is derived from how roles are assigned, exploring who is deemed a perpetrator, victim or hero, as well as uncertainties in this memory.
The author interrogates the ways in which these roles are attributed and ambivalences created in each society’s political discourses, transitional justice processes and cultural heritage. The comparative empirical analysis illustrates the importance of memory for political power and legitimacy today.
The context for transportation planning worldwide—including social change, technology, and politics—has moved the goalposts for mobility and placemaking. Researchers explore new methodological landscapes of techniques for working with big data and storytelling for imagined futures. Practitioners seek ethical applications of emerging approaches. Advanced students look for guides that connect traditional toolsets with a changing world. Transport Truths provides a forward-looking guide to re-consider the nature and aims of transportation planning through in-depth (from Texas and The Republic of The Gambia) and secondary research from around the globe.
Transport Truths shows the ‘other side’ of how knowledge is constructed for transportation planning decisions, whether the reader comes from a background in engineering, the social sciences, or other fields. Assuming educated but non-specialist readers, the book shows how disciplinary training leaves gaps in how researchers and practitioners understand and communicate the issues while relying on interesting and critical cases to show how and why an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach can result in better planning decisions. As cities often grow, shrink, and re-organize with access provided by transport infrastructure, this book centers normative values and ethics to create lasting, positive impacts on society and the environment.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
What will the world be like in 2050? This book explores possible future worlds through eight hard science fiction stories. Taking in automation, big data, climate catastrophe and government dysfunction, each tale looks at the world through the eyes of people whose lives have been influenced by the societies they live in and the transport systems they live with.
Asking important questions about our values and role of transport in society, this book will encourage planners, policy makers, researchers and anyone interested in a positive future for public mobility to take the steps to ensure we get there.
The Gated City offers a comprehensive analysis of the proliferation of gated communities, urban fragmentation, and the privatisation of public life in the Latin American context from a policy and practice perspective. The book engages with global debates about the increasingly locked-down, securitised, and elite nature of much city life and the possible ‘death of public life’ that many have suggested is occurring in cities today. It draws on original, in-depth research in one of the largest gated communities in the world, a comminity that exemplifies the tensions and conflicts that make it harder for planning professionals to provide more inclusive urban spaces. The argument comes from the different and sometimes contrasting experiences obtained through the author’s academic and personal planning practice in Mexico. The discussion offers valuable insights into policy and planning practices that are relevant worldwide under the current conditions of uncertainty, fear, and increased social inequality. The book provides elements of analysis for university students, policy makers, researchers, and urban studies instructors interested in better understanding exclusionary spaces. The Mexican case provides methodological tools for scholars and practitioners researching and presenting planning and policy-making alternatives against exclusion in cities and social inequalities.
‘Panic buying’ at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic generated enduring media images of empty supermarket shelves and calls for food rationing. The fragility of the Just-in-Time food system was seemingly exposed yet, as the pandemic progressed in the UK, there were remarkably few food shortages. This book reveals the changing patterns of food provision in the UK during that period, looking at how diets changed, and retail, processing, distribution and production businesses adapted. But beneath the apparent logistical success story, there were injustices as the more vulnerable struggled to access good quality food and some businesses received inadequate help.
The authors consider the winners and losers in a time of rapid social change, the lasting impacts on the UK food system, and lessons to be learned for a food system dependent on imports and large retailers and with a high burden of diet-related health issues.
Looking at how austerity has become embedded in institutional practices, this book offers new critical insights into the uneven geographies created by austerity.
Reflecting on the spatially and socially uneven impacts of austerity on individuals and families, Julie MacLeavy shows how the ‘new normal’ of post-welfare state governance will negatively condition life chances, even in better economic times. She considers the political, economic and social developments that have led us to the present moment and shows how the rhetoric of austerity has pushed social inequality and uneven development off the political agenda.
To mitigate climate, biodiversity, and public health crises, the global agrifood system needs radical change. The Global North remains central to agrifood innovation but new players in the South, especially Brazil and China, will increasingly determine its pace and direction.
Investigating climate-controlled agriculture and alternatives to animal proteins, John Wilkinson shows that trade, investment, and innovation in agrifood is reorienting to the South. As the global population becomes increasingly urban, he skilfully illustrates the connections between social movements and technological innovation – and the need for consumer acceptance of new food habits.
In the 21st century, global demographics are rapidly changing, with a higher population of middle-aged people than ever before. As the ‘sandwich’ generation, people in midlife often experience significant work and intergenerational caring responsibilities, yet they are the subject of relatively little research.
This short, accessible book redresses the balance in offering a geographical approach to how people embody and claim space in midlife while analysing the influences of gender, class and location. The author considers midlife in varying socio-cultural and geographical contexts, viewed through the lens of the global neoliberal shift.
This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems challenges across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all.
Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography.
