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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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
In a world where artificial intelligence increasingly influences the fabric of our daily lives, this accessible book offers a critical examination of AI and its deep entanglement with power structures. Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, it emphasizes how AI impacts our everyday interactions and social norms in ways that fundamentally reshape society. By examining the different forms of exploitation and manipulation in the relationship between humans and AI, the book advocates for collective responsibility, better regulation and systemic change.
This is a resounding manifesto for rethinking AI ethics through a power-aware lens. With detailed analysis of real-world examples and technological insights, it is an essential reading for anyone invested in the future of AI policy, scholarly critique and societal integration.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Studies of surveillance have emphasised how technology is used to control space. This innovative collection examines how new monitoring technologies are also affecting the experience of time.
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm, the book brings together ethnographic research from Europe, China and the US, to show how digital monitoring is transforming spatio-temporal relations across the Global North.
As digital technologies continue to reshape the rhythms of life, this book makes a valuable contribution to both anthropology and surveillance studies.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
The realities of autonomous weapons are a complex blend of both existing military technologies and visions of their future capabilities. The expected ramifications are profound and always point to the interplay between fact and fiction, actual developments and creative imagination.
This book explores how these realities shape and become themselves shaped by popular culture, regulatory and ethics debates, military doctrines, policies and research. It analyses phenomena ranging from film and artistic interpretations to warfare scenarios and weaponised artificial intelligence.
Intended for researchers (including the disciplines of political and social sciences, media, culture and technology), policy-makers, educators and journalists, this is a key resource that uncovers how autonomous weapons are constructed as both a technological reality and a futuristic possibility.
With over five billion internet users globally, it is crucial to understand social media activism and legal change for women and girls.
This insightful book examines the impact of international Twitter (now X) campaigns on domestic laws affecting women and girls. Exploring the complexities of legal change for women and girls across seven countries from Latin America to Middle East and Africa, the book offers empirical insights into the effectiveness of hashtag advocacy and sheds light on the role of social media in shaping different outcomes.
This is a key resource for understanding the dynamics driving social media activism and its potential impact on the rights of women and girls worldwide.
Dementia is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Responding to the global dementia challenge, however, affects more than humans alone. We live in a multi-species world but often think about dementia in mono-species ways. From the lab to the living room, other beings are “on the scene” and our relations with them affect how we understand, experience, and respond to dementia. Drawing on cutting-edge work across the social and biological sciences, this book offers readers the tools to respond to dementia in multi-species ways. By exploring a range of topics, from pathology to personhood, contributors highlight how thinking about dementia as a more-than-human phenomenon may enable new ways of responding to our global dementia challenge.
Discussions around digital technologies, new media, platforms and information have long centred on the protection of personal data and privacy. This timely volume extends the conversation to address fundamental societal and structural issues from three perspectives: people, practices and politics.
Organised around an international collection of case studies, the book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the challenges of privacy in the digital sphere, from emerging regulatory programmes to surveillance capitalism and big tech companies.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this is a new and innovative perspective on our datafied societies that goes beyond privacy. It will be a key resource for scholars and students of communication and media studies, and science and technology studies.
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.
This book explores data science in practice through an ethnographic study at a global marketing technology and research firm.
The book shows that, while businesses have embraced data science methods to understand markets and consumers, in practice they produce too much information. Consequently, they must be combined with creative practices that simplify and make sense of analytics. Cluley shows that in the age of data science, business is increasingly artistic. In this case, marketing science is more like marketing science fiction.
This is essential reading for understanding contemporary data-driven business and marketing as well as social and economic relations in the age of surveillance capitalism, with lessons for academics and students of marketing, technology and data science.
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.
The platform economy, powered by companies like Airbnb, Uber and Deliveroo, promised to revolutionize the way we work and live. But what are the actual benefits to our society and economy?
This book interrogates the ‘sharing economy’, showing how platform capitalism is not only shaped by business decisions, but is a result of struggles involving social movements, consumer politics and state interventions. It focuses in particular on the controversial tactics used by platform giants to avoid regulation.
Drawing on cutting-edge research and analysis, this book provides a critical overview of this important topic, and imagines the different possible futures of the platform economy.
