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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Challenges and Opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa

This book provides an important lens for understanding how interlocking humanitarian crises caused by armed conflict, natural disasters, forced displacement and, more recently, a global health pandemic have adversely impacted teaching and learning.

It brings together evidence from multiple, diverse research-practice partnerships in seven countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The authors provide a clear account of the key academic, policy and practice questions on education in crisis contexts and consider our capacity to develop just and resilient education systems.

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In recent years, climate litigation has become an important subject of global scholarly and policy interest. However, developments within the Global South, particularly in Africa, have been largely neglected.

This volume brings together an international team of contributors to provide a much-needed examination of climate litigation in Africa. The book outlines how climate litigation in Africa is distinct as well as pinpointing where it connects with the global conversation. Chapters engage with crucial themes such as human rights approaches to climate governance, corporate liability and the role of gender in climate litigation.

Spanning a range of approaches and jurisdictions, the book challenges universal concepts around climate and the role of activism (including litigation) in seeking to advance climate governance.

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Food, Heritage and Trade in Post-Authoritarian Environments
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Post-Soviet Latvia and post-apartheid South Africa are far apart geographically and yet have endured a similar history of colonial and authoritarian rule before transitioning to democracy at the end of the 20th century. This book examines these two nations in an unusual comparative study of post-authoritarian efforts to decolonize production and trade.

The book combines an analysis of political economy and ecocultural heritage to unpack alternative trade formations. It also connects world systems thinking with Indigenous knowledge to articulate a decolonial theory of development and change over the longue durée. Conclusions and insights drawn are timely and important for a planet confronted by crises such as authoritarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Beyond Resistance

Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective.

Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the ‘political work’ that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located.

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A Social Skills Ecosystem Perspective

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

The transition to more just and sustainable development requires radical change across a wide range of areas and particularly within the nexus between learning and work.

This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training that goes beyond the narrow focus of much of the current literature and policy debate. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this issue through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups, and in public and private educational institutions.

Offering new insights and ways of thinking about this field, the book draws out clear implications for theory, policy and practice in Africa and beyond.

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

Though a globally shared experience, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected societies across the world in radically different ways. This book examines the unique implications of the pandemic in the Global South.

With international contributors from a variety of disciplines including health, economics and geography, the book investigates the pandemic’s effects on development, medicine, gender (in)equality and human rights among other issues. Its analysis illuminates further subsequent crises of interconnection, a pervasive health provision crisis and a resulting rise in socio-economic inequality.

The book’s assessment offers an urgent discourse on the ways in which the impact of COVID-19 can be mitigated in some of the most challenging socio-economic contexts in the world.

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Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South
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This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments.

Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

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