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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Are Social Media Campaigns Really Making Laws Better for Women and Girls?

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.

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A New Subfield

How can feminist scholarship advance the field of foreign policy analysis to better understand contemporary foreign policy actions and challenges?

This groundbreaking book provides the state-of-the-art in the study of gender, feminisms and foreign policy. Bringing together contributors from around the world, chapters offer new analyses of foreign policy topics, including diplomacy, trade, defence, environment, peacebuilding, disinformation and development assistance. The book advances new theories, concepts and empirical knowledge for the emerging field of feminist foreign policy analysis.

The book stands as a vital resource for scholars, students and practitioners seeking to understand and respond to the multifaceted gendered dynamics of global politics.

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Negotiations, Healthcare, and the Tension of Demedicalization
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Healthcare for transgender people is in crisis. Many of the problems stem from bureaucracies within the health system, limiting conceptualizations of sex and gender, and the requirement for a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’.

This book presents a unique argument for full demedicalization of transness as a crucial step towards removing existing barriers to good healthcare. Resisting the current norm of separating sex and gender, it also argues for an understanding of them as necessarily interlinked and co-constructed.

By elevating trans voices and experiences, this book offers a new perspective on transness, medicalization and research methodologies to help trans people, practitioners and policy makers better understand the barriers faced by trans people when seeking healthcare.

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Bodies, Emotions, and Feminist Activism

Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.

Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.

It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

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Critiquing the Past, Plotting the Future

In 2003, the UN adopted a zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers and aid workers. The policy arrived amid a series of scandals revealing sexual misconduct perpetrated against the very people peacekeeping and humanitarian missions were meant to protect.

This edited collection, including contributions from academics and practitioners, highlights the challenges of preventing and responding to abuse in peacekeeping and aid work, and the unintended consequences of current approaches. It lays bare the structures of power, coloniality and racism that underpin abuse and hinder accountability while charting a path for future action.

This eye-opening book will appeal to academics and students of the politics and practice of peacekeeping and humanitarianism, and to practitioners, policy makers and those working within the field.

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Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security
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In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. This book reveals how understandings of race, sexuality and gender are produced/reproduced through healthcare policy.

Analysing the plasma of paid Mexicana/o donors in the US, airport vomit in Ebola epidemics, and the semen of soldiers with genitourinary injuries, this book shows how security practices focus upon governing bodily fluids.

Using a variety of critical scholarship – feminist technoscience, queer studies and critical race studies – this book uses fluids to reveal unequal distributions of life and death.

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Non-heterosexual Couples, Parents, and Families in Guangdong, China
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Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book asks: what does it mean for Chinese non-heterosexual people to go against existing state regulations and societal norms to form a desirable and legible queer family?

Chapters explore the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. The book unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations. Through its analysis, the book offers a new ethnographic perspective for queer studies and anthropology of kinship.

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Representation, Coalition and Solidarity in UK NGOs

It is increasingly recognized that, to achieve social justice, policies and organizations need to apply an intersectional approach, rather than addressing inequalities separately. However, intersectionality is a challenging theory to apply, as policymakers and practitioners often navigate the confines of divided policy areas.

This book examines the use of intersectionality in UK policy and practice, with a specific focus on NGOs, outlining five distinct interpretations of intersectional practice and their implications.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork with a diverse range of equality organizations, this book offers invaluable insights into how policy and practice can be organized in more (and less) intersectional ways.

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New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence

Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides a foundational guide to queer methodologies in the study of political violence and conflict.

Contributors provide illuminating discussions on why queer approaches are important, what they entail and how to utilise a queer approach to political violence and conflict. The chapters explore a variety of methodological approaches, including fieldwork, interviews, cultural analysis and archival research. They also engage with broader academic debates, such as how to work with research partners in an ethical manner.

Including valuable case studies from around the world, the book demonstrates how these methods can be used in practice. It is the first critical, in-depth discussion on queer methods and methodologies for research on political violence and conflict.

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A Global Perspective

In this book, faith leaders, scholars and activists from around the globe provide their perspective on faith and abortion. They reflect on examples of faith organisations which have provided leadership on the issue as well as examining religious approaches from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and interfaith perspectives.

Challenging the assumption that all people of faith are anti-abortion, this book provides a counterpoint to right-wing faith perspectives and outlines how faith communities reimagine abortion as an issue of social, pastoral and theological concern.

Providing perspectives from the global North and South, it includes settings where abortion is legal, and where it is restricted, and settings where abortion stigma is ever-present to settings where abortion is normalised. It also demonstrates the complex connections between faith and abortion, how women and pregnant people are positioned in society and how morality is claimed and challenged.

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