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
‘Panic buying’ at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic generated enduring media images of empty supermarket shelves and calls for food rationing. The fragility of the Just-in-Time food system was seemingly exposed yet, as the pandemic progressed in the UK, there were remarkably few food shortages. This book reveals the changing patterns of food provision in the UK during that period, looking at how diets changed, and retail, processing, distribution and production businesses adapted. But beneath the apparent logistical success story, there were injustices as the more vulnerable struggled to access good quality food and some businesses received inadequate help.
The authors consider the winners and losers in a time of rapid social change, the lasting impacts on the UK food system, and lessons to be learned for a food system dependent on imports and large retailers and with a high burden of diet-related health issues.
Consumerism, unsustainable growth, waste and inequalities continue to ail societies across the globe, but creative collectives have been tackling these issues at a grassroots level.
Based on an autoethnographic study about a free food store in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book presents a first-hand account of how a community is organized around surplus food to deal with food poverty, while also helping the reader to see through the complexity that brings the free food store to life.
Examining how alternative economies and relations emerge from these community solutions, the author shows it is possible to think, act and organize differently within and beyond capitalist dynamics.
Poverty is perceived as an urban problem, yet many in rural Britain also experience hardship. This book explores how and why people in rural areas experience and negotiate poverty and social exclusion. It examines the role of societal processes, individual circumstances, sources of support (markets; state; voluntary organisations; family and friends) and the role of place.
It concludes that the UK’s welfare system is poorly adapted to rural areas, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and cutbacks exacerbating pressures. Voluntary organisations increasingly fill gaps in support left by the state. Invaluable to those in policy and practice, the book recommends a combination of person-based and place-based approaches to tackle rural poverty.
It is critical that the wellbeing of society is systematically tracked by indicators that not only give an accurate picture of human life today but also provide a window into the future for all of us.
This book presents impactful findings from international longitudinal studies that respond to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 commitment to “leave no-one behind”. Contributors explore a wide range and complexity of pressing global issues, with emphasis given to excluded and vulnerable populations and gender inequality.
Importantly, it sets out actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioners to help strengthen the global Sustainable Development Goals framework, accelerate their implementation and improve the construction of effective public policy.
Home and care are central aspects of everyday, personal lives, yet they are also shaped by political and economic change. Within a context of austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resource rationing, the policies and experiences around these key areas are shifting. Taking an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective, this book illustrates how economic and political changes affect everyday lives for many families and households in the UK. Setting out both new empirical material and new conceptual terrain, the authors draw on approaches from human geography, social policy, and feminist and political theory to explore issues of home and care in times of crisis.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How has austerity impacted on health and wellbeing in the UK? Health in Hard Times explores its repercussions for social inequalities in health.
The result of five years of research, the book draws on a case study of Stockton-on-Tees in the north-east of England, home to some of the starkest health divides. By placing individual and local experiences in the context of national budget cuts and welfare reforms, it provides a holistic perspective on countrywide inequalities.
Edited by a leading expert, this is an important book for anyone seeking to understand one of today’s most significant determinants of health.
How do people deal with diversity in deprived and mixed urban neighbourhoods? This edited collection provides a comparative international perspective on superdiversity in cities, with explicit attention given to social inequality and social exclusion on a neighbourhood level.
Although public discourses on urban diversity are often negative, this book focuses on how residents actively and creatively come and live together through micro-level interactions. By deliberately taking an international perspective on the daily lives of residents, the book uncovers the ways in which national and local contexts shape living in diversity.
The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of poverty, segregation and social mix, conviviality, the effects of international migration, urban and neighbourhood policies and governance, multiculturality, social networks, social cohesion, social mobility, and super-diversity.
From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements’ contexts. Whether erected in a park in Istanbul or a street in Mexico City, the significance of political encampments rests in their position as distinctive spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state.
Written by a wide range of experts in the field the book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action.
With more than half the world’s population now living in urban areas, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ within the city are key concepts in contemporary political debate. This book examines the theory and practice of justice in and of the city through a multi-disciplinary collaboration, which draws on a wide range of expertise. By bringing diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives into conversation with each other to explore the (in) justices in urban environment, education, mobility and participation the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of justice and fairness in and of the city. It will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and students across a range of disciplines including urban and environmental studies, geography, planning, education, ethics and politics.
‘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.
