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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The Agenda for Social Justice 3: Solutions for 2024 provides accessible insights into some of the most pressing social problems and proposes public policy responses to those problems.
Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the book offers recommendations for action by elected officials, policymakers and the public regarding key issues for social justice. Chapters include discussion of social problems related to criminal justice, the economy, food insecurity, education, healthcare, housing and immigration.
The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems and the pursuit of social justice.
To reduce emissions and address climate change, we need to invest in renewables and rapidly decarbonise our energy networks. However, decarbonisation is often seen as a technical project, detached from questions of politics and social justice. What if this is leading to unfair transitions, in which some people bear the costs of change whilst others benefit?
In this timely and expansive book, Ed Atkins asks are we getting decarbonisation right? And how could it be made better for people and communities? In doing so, this book proposes a different type of energy transition. One that prioritises and takes opportunities to do better – to provide better jobs, community ownership and improve people’s homes and lives.
Sixty years ago an upsurge of social movements protested the ecological harms of industrial capitalism. In subsequent decades, environmentalism consolidated into forms of management and business strategy that aimed to tackle ecological degradation while enabling development to continue. However, the increasing focus on spaces and species to be protected saw questions of human work and histories of colonialism pushed out of view.
This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.
This book analyses the strategies used by public authorities to expand the UK aviation industry in relation to growing political opposition and the negative impact of flying on local communities and climate change.
Its genealogical investigations show how governmental practices and technologies designed to depoliticise aviation and expand airports have generally failed to constitute an effective political will to counter community resistance and environmental protest. Criticising the dominant logics of UK airport expansion, the authors promote a radical rethinking of our attitudes to aviation in terms of sufficiency, degrowth and alternative hedonism, laying the ground for a more sustainable future.
Bringing together the voices of local scholars in the Philippines, this book offers critical insights into one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions.
The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world, with the effects of climate change contributing to rising sea levels and increasingly frequent typhoons and floods. Case studies in this book examine such disasters, including the aftermath of 2013 super typhoon Haiyan. Discussions are centred around four themes: women and empowerment, economics and recovery, community and resilience, and religion and spirituality.
Through its analysis, the book demonstrates the scopes, inequities and inefficiencies of policies and responses, as well as forms of empowerment and resilience, in meeting challenges in disaster-afflicted communities in the Philippines. Its conclusions provide a more nuanced and grounded perspective of policies, practices and approaches in the sociology of disasters today.
The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes practicable international public policy responses to those problems.
Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as education, violence, discrimination, substance abuse, public health, and environment. The volume provides recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice.
The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, journalists, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems, and the pursuit of social justice.
This book is an urgent call to reimagine our social, political and economic systems so that we might transform to a sustainable society.
It considers whether an alternative economic model is possible and examines the factors needed to enable such a transition to occur. The scale and pace of change is unprecedented and the author examines the actions that have to be taken by governments, business and individuals if we are to address the environmental disaster that confronts us. Much needs to change but ultimately, this is a book of hope, believing that evolution to a better, more sustainable society is possible.
How can we create a thriving life for us all that doesn’t come at the price of ecological destruction?
This book calls to explore our collective and personal convictions about success and good life. It challenges the mainstream worldview, rooted in economics, that equates happiness with pleasure, and encourages greed, materialism, egoism and disconnection.
Drawing on science and ancient Greek philosophers the author details how we can cultivate our skills for enjoying life without harming ourselves or others, and can live an autonomous, creative and connected life. Complementary to our intellectual understanding, the experiential method of role play and theatre can powerfully facilitate the exploration of the inner drivers and hindrances of a thriving life.
This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption.
Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis.
Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Reporting on the innovative, transdisciplinary research on sustainable urbanisation undertaken by Mistra Urban Futures, a highly influential research centre based in Sweden (2010-19), this book builds on the Policy Press title Rethinking Sustainable Cities to make a significant contribution to evolving theory about comparative urban research.
Highlighting important methodological experiences from across a variety of diverse contexts in Africa and Europe, this book surveys key experiences and summarises lessons learned from the Mistra Urban Futures' global research platforms. It demonstrates best practice for developing and deploying different forms of transdisciplinary co-production, covering topics including neighbourhood transformation and housing justice, sustainable urban and transport development, urban food security and cultural heritage.
