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 56 items for :
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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.
Despite recent achievements in the South Korean economy and development within welfare institutions, new forms of precarious work continue to prevail.
This book introduces the concept of ‘melting labour’, which refers the blurring of boundaries between traditional forms of work and workplace and the dissolution of standard employment relationships. Presenting a theoretical framework at the intersection of ‘melting labour’ and institutional protection of workers, it addresses how and why the Korean welfare state has failed to protect precarious workers.
Based on rich, in-depth interviews with over 80 precarious workers in Korea, from subcontracted manufacturing workers to platform workers, it provides a real depiction of how workers lose control over their lives and experience precariousness in labour markets.
From health tracking to diet apps to biohacking, technology is changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves.
Drawing from a range of disciplines and case studies, this volume looks at what makes these health and genetic technologies unique and explores the representation, communication and internalization of health knowledge.
Showcasing how power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses and practices, this book will be a go-to resource for scholars in science and technology studies as well as those who study the intersection of race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health.
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming.
Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour.
Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
This book explores the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire.
This interdisciplinary analysis brings feminist and queer questions about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises.
This accessible book introduces students to perspectives from the field of science and technology studies.
Putting forward the thesis that science and democracy share important characteristics, it shows how authority cannot be taken for granted and must continuously be reproduced and confirmed by others. At a time when fundamental scientific and democratic values are being threatened by sceptics and populist arguments, an understanding of the relationship between them is much needed.
This is an invaluable resource for all who are interested in the role of scientific knowledge in governance, societal developments and the implications for democracy and concerned publics and citizen engagement.
We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.
Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimise exploitation and increase inequalities.
Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalised and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
This book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are embedded in journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilise and achieve legitimacy.
This is a seminal contribution to the debates about the future of media, journalism and civic practices.
Information matters to us. Whether recorded, recoded or unregistered – information co-shapes our present and our becoming.
This book advances new views on information and surveillance practices. Starting with a methodology for studying the liveliness of information, Kaufmann provides four empirical examples of making information matter: association, conversion, secrecy and speculation. In so doing, she presents an original and comprehensive argument about the materiality of information and invites us to investigate, and to reflect about what matters.
This is a go-to text for scholars and professionals working in the fields of surveillance, data studies and the digitization of specific societal sectors.
In this stimulating analysis, Hannes Gerhardt outlines the potentials and challenges of a technology-enabled, commons-focused transition out of capitalism.
The book shows that openness and cooperation are more beneficial in today’s economies and societies than competition and profit-seeking. Driven by this conviction, Gerhardt identifies key imperatives for overcoming capitalism, from democratizing our digital, material, and financial economies to maintaining a robust, political mobilization. Using clear examples, he explores tactical openings through the lens of ‘compeerism’, a newly constructed framework that highlights the latent counter-capitalist possibilities, but also limits, of our emerging technological landscape.
This is an accessible contribution to counter-capitalist discourse that is both inspiring and pragmatic for academics and activists alike.
