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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 10 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Digital Life and Culture x
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In healthcare, we come across daily promises of miraculous cures for various ailments. However, in the digital era, the dynamics of experiencing and practicing these remedies have changed.
This book explores the intersection of miracle cures and technology, showcasing their transformation into hybrid forms, such as handwritten recipes captured in photos or tutorials streamed through videos. Combining computational social media data with ethnographic insights from Vietnam and the US, the book captures the interconnected lives of these cures in the digital realm with a unique methodology.
Unravelling the intricate connections between social, technological, biomedical and non-biomedical spheres, this is a significant contribution to how social scientists study online media.
In today's digital societies, parenting is shaped by algorithms daily - in search engines, social media, kids' entertainment, the news and more. But how much are parents aware of the algorithms shaping their parenting and daily lives? How can they prepare for children’s futures in a world dominated by data, algorithms, automation and AI?
This groundbreaking study of 30 English families sheds light on parents’ hopes and fears, their experiences with algorithms in searching, sharing and consuming news and information, and their awareness and knowledge of algorithms at large.
Looking beyond tech skills and media panics, this book is an essential read for social scientists, policy-makers and general readers seeking to understand parenting in datafied societies.
How can we have meaningful public conversations in the algorithmic age?
This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of arguing all sides of a case, the book offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in democratic societies.
This is a timely and urgent book for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in the digital era.
What role do science and technology play in society? What is the nature of expert knowledge? What is science’s relation to democracy?
This introduction to science, technology, and society answers these questions, and more, by exploring contemporary research on topics such as expertise, activism, science policy, and innovation. It offers a comprehensive resource for considering the place that science and technology have in contemporary societies, and the roles that they can and should play.
Accessible to a non-specialist audience, it draws on a rich range of cases and examples, from nuclear activism in India to content moderation in Kenya. Framing science as always social, and society as always shaped by science and technology, it asks: what worlds do we want science and technology to bring into being?
Bringing together contributors from Europe, North America and Australia, this book questions the purpose and outcomes of speculation in practical settings.
In the context of interrelated and complex global challenges, speculation is not just useful but necessary. The chapters in this book present a cross-disciplinary dialogue of people that are developing work in speculation and interrogates its practices and ethical and political charges. Through these discussions, the book explores the potential of speculation in addressing issues such as climate change, urban futures and new political practices.
We all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions.
Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, this book challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods.
Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers’ participation and presence.
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.
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.
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.
How can we achieve digital justice in the age of COVID-19? This book explores how the pandemic has transformed our use and perception of digital technologies in various settings. It also examines the right to resist or reject these technologies and the politics of refusal in different contexts and scenarios. The book offers a timely and original analysis of the new realities and challenges of digital technologies, paving the way for a post-COVID-19 future.