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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Tensions between police and diverse communities in both the US and UK require innovation about ways to improve relations. While police diversity is often discussed as a potential solution, these discussions lack theoretical and empirical support.
This volume presents an original discussion of race, gender, sexual orientation and class diversity and shows that police diversity can have meaningful impacts on the decision-making, outcomes and legitimacy of police forces.
Drawing on theoretical and empirical research including interviews with diverse police leaders, this book examines how police diversity can help shift traditional policing cultures. It also considers obstacles to police reform, revealing how championing meaningful diversity can positively impact the lives of policed communities.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
Three decades of neoliberal efficiency thinking about caring and care systems have resulted in a greater need for relationality in healthcare and social work than ever before. These support services extend beyond the giving of care and support to include the development of relationships between caregivers and their care recipients in their socio-institutional contexts.
The culmination of over 30 years of research, this book provides an extensive and critical introduction to relational working in care, education and welfare. It explains what relational work is and proposes a new, human-orientated theory beyond the simple needs provision model. Demonstrating the kind of professionalism required for such work, it explores why it is as important to be present with and for people, especially those in precarious conditions, as it is to give care.
This is essential reading for researchers, educators, quality officers, policy makers, students and practitioners interested in understanding the growing scholarship related to both care theory and presence theory.
Drawing on the perspectives of women and children displaced from Ukraine, as well as local authority policy makers and service providers, this book provides a unique view of the direct and indirect consequences of war in Europe.
Part of the Social Determinants of Health series, this book reviews the socio-economic challenges faced by the UK and other European countries and suggests ways that these ‘wicked issues’ should be addressed. It is essential reading for local authorities, national governments and humanitarian organisations.
Life expectancy is about more than just health – it’s about the kind of society we live in. And in the early 2010s, after decades of continual improvement, life expectancy in the UK, USA and many other rich countries stopped increasing. For millions of people it actually declined. Despite hundreds of thousands of extra deaths, governments and officials remained silent.
Combining robust evidence with real-life stories, this book tells the story of how austerity policies caused this scandal. It argues that this shocking and tragic suffering was predictable, caused by a dereliction of duty from those in power.
The book concludes with an optimistic vision of what can be done to restore life expectancy improvements and reduce health inequalities.
Traffickers are ever more sophisticated in their recruitment and control of victims, their seizure of new opportunities and ability to adapt to changing social conditions and efforts to prevent the trade in human beings.
This book presents a unique model to assist professionals, researchers and policy makers by providing a new theory that describes and explains how patterns of trafficking and exploitation emerge and are sustained over time.
It critically evaluates the international development of current legal, policy and practice developments in the field of anti-trafficking and argues that these are based on overly simplistic and reductive analyses of the problem. As such they are inadequate in addressing the complex, non-linear and adaptive nature of the phenomenon.
Focusing on factors that influence the relationships and interactions between the victim, offender and environment, this innovative model equips professionals to consider prevention, protection, intervention and disruption activity rather than limiting action to criminal justice-related outcomes.
Each point is illustrated with case study examples from the author’s own practice experience and research and from the work of his colleagues involved in investigating, disrupting and prosecuting traffickers and identifying and supporting victims towards safety and recovery.
Looking at how austerity has become embedded in institutional practices, this book offers new critical insights into the uneven geographies created by austerity.
Reflecting on the spatially and socially uneven impacts of austerity on individuals and families, Julie MacLeavy shows how the ‘new normal’ of post-welfare state governance will negatively condition life chances, even in better economic times. She considers the political, economic and social developments that have led us to the present moment and shows how the rhetoric of austerity has pushed social inequality and uneven development off the political agenda.
Pension policy in the UK and US is designed on the assumption that people can make informed financial decisions, can consistently invest in pensions and manage diverse portfolios. Deviating from this is often deemed irresponsible and irrational. However, this assumption overlooks uncontrollable factors like caring duties, employment breaks or income limitations. Even when individuals act as expected, unpredictable market shifts can hinder long-term planning.
This book redefines deviations to “rational behaviour” as logical responses to a dysfunctional system. Challenging existing theoretical discussions and policy approaches, it proposes a fresh perspective on rationality when it comes to financial policy and practices.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is recurrently depicted as an enterprise that unites humanity in a common pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. But how is this enterprise pursued on a planet that is enormously unequal? Drawing on biopolitical theory and rich empirical data from different contexts around the world, this book explores how ESD is unpacked depending on whether people are rich or poor.
The book demonstrates how ESD is adapted to the lifestyles and living conditions of different populations. The implication of this depoliticized sensitivity to local ‘realities’, the book argues, is that inequality becomes accommodated and that different responsibilities are assigned to rich and poor. Ultimately, the book considers alternatives to this biopolitical divide.
To mitigate climate, biodiversity, and public health crises, the global agrifood system needs radical change. The Global North remains central to agrifood innovation but new players in the South, especially Brazil and China, will increasingly determine its pace and direction.
Investigating climate-controlled agriculture and alternatives to animal proteins, John Wilkinson shows that trade, investment, and innovation in agrifood is reorienting to the South. As the global population becomes increasingly urban, he skilfully illustrates the connections between social movements and technological innovation – and the need for consumer acceptance of new food habits.
