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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The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.
Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.
This book explores how girls negotiate girl power discourses in international development, taking a campaign focused on fundraising for girls’ education and adapting it to match their own activist goals within their communities. The book traces the evolution of the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign in its first decade from 2010 to 2020, showing how it has developed from a focus on fundraising for girls’ education in the Global South to supporting girls’ activism globally. Using focus groups with Girl Up members in the UK, the US and Malawi, the book shows how they negotiate participating in the campaign, and the stigma they often face as a result, with creativity, humour and pragmatism. They gave talks on feminism to their fellow students, supported and mentored other girls, resisted hostility towards Girl Up and engaged in the wider feminist movement, despite the many barriers to their activism that adults placed in their way. Unlike spectacular media and nongovernmental organization (NGO) narratives of girls saving the world all by themselves, these girl activists frequently struggled to be heard and respected. They continued their activism regardless, and the book concludes with suggestions for some of the many ways in which adults, schools, NGOs and allies might better support them to make the world a fairer place for girls.
The beauty industry thrives on creating a sense of dissatisfaction with appearance, with social media adding pressure to conform to idealized images of beauty. One solution to remedy this dissatisfaction has been found in the normalization and growing use of products for bodily improvement such as facial injectables and weight loss drugs.
The Harms of Beauty investigates the toxicity of consumer culture driving individuals’ willingness to harm themselves, others and the environment in their pursuit of image and body perfection. The data presented in this book is a product of an ethnographic study that, in part, responds to the lack of work offering a lived-experience perspective of the ways in which macro-level socio-economic changes and pressures exert themselves on young people.
This ethnographic study provides insight into the wider life-worlds of consumers and sellers, following them not only as they engage with licit and illicit beauty markets, but also through their attempts to navigate contemporary society. It provides an insight into one facet of the harmful beauty industry, highlighting the nature of counterfeit consumption and supply, and the interconnection between the various spheres of consumers and sellers, supply and demand, online and offline and work and leisure. The empirical data uncovers the ways in which the pervasiveness of hyper-comparison in contemporary society is a key catalyst behind beauty use and its widespread harm, one that is further intensified in virtual spaces.
Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. University audit culture has infiltrated academic life, but how should we respond?
Drawing on a five-year Institutional Ethnography of UK universities, the author provides a feminist take on the neoliberal university and abolitionist reflections on audit culture.
For feminist and other critical academics, the interpretative power involved in audit processes provides an opportunity to collectively challenge and subvert, re-read and re-write institutions. This book challenges the myths and misinterpretations around how academic audit processes work, arguing that if we are complicit then we have agency to do them differently.
This volume brings together a selection of chapters from social scientists who use various interpretive lenses and analytic/theoretical perspectives to analyze the sociology of identities. Drawing on theories of power, intersectionality, un/markedness, and the sociology of nothing, the book explores the ways in which identities are socially constituted, negotiated, and reinforced in complex and multidimensional ways that are tied to cognitive and interactional dimensions of privilege and marginalization. The first section of the book contains chapters that address themes of power, privilege, and intersectional dis/advantage. The second section’s chapters focus on experiences of absence, loss, and missed symbolic objects that form negatively defined identities. In the Afterword, we draw out some common themes across these contributions and discuss how they contribute to new interpretive understandings of social identities.
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.
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.
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.
Drawing on affect theory and the key themes of attachment, disruption and belonging, this book examines the ways in which our placed surroundings – whether urban design, border management or organisations – shape and form experiences of gender.
Bringing together key debates across the fields of sociology, geography and organisation studies, the book sets out new theoretical ground to examine and consolidate shared experiences of what it means to be in or out of place.
Contributors explore how our gendered selves encounter place, and critically examine the way in which experiences of gender shape meanings and attachments, as well as how place produces gendered modes of identity, inclusion and belonging. Emphasizing the intertwined dynamics of affect and being affected, the book examines the gendering of place and the placing of gender.
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.
