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
Michael Drew’s review of the causes and effects of food poverty in Ireland offers the first full-length study of this significant and protracted issue that has been exacerbated by COVID-19.
The book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid. Their pathways into and through food poverty are impacted by the policies and practices of government and employers with wide-ranging implications. The work explores the international landscape of food poverty and situates both experiences and responses in a comparative context. It considers how these results contribute to an understanding of the problem and what action should be taken.
Exploring why food aid exists and the deeper causes of food poverty, this book addresses neglected dimensions of traditional food aid and food poverty debates.
It argues that the food aid industry is infused with neoliberal governmentality and shows how food charity upholds Christian ideals and white privilege, maintaining inequalities of class, race, religion and gender. However, it also reveals a sector that is immensely varied, embodying both individualism and mutual aid.
Drawing upon lived experiences, it documents how food sharing amid poverty fosters solidarity and gives rise to alternative modes of food redistribution among communities. By harnessing these alternative ways of being, food aid and communities can be part of movements for economic and racial justice.
With international human rights under challenge, this book represents a comprehensive critique that adds a social policy perspective to recent political and legalistic analysis.
Expert contributors draw on local and global examples to review constructs of universal rights and their impact on social policy and human welfare. With thorough analysis of their strengths, weaknesses and enforcement, it sets out their role in domestic and geopolitical affairs.
Including a forward by Albie Sachs, this book presents an honest appraisal of both the concepts of international human rights and their realities. It will engage those with an interest in social policy, ethics, politics, international relations, civil society organisations and human rights-based approaches to campaigning and policy development.
‘Resilience’ has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed ‘service hubs’.
The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions – London, Los Angeles and Sydney – in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on ‘resilience’ and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.
