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
Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, this book examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands.
Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ‘sides.’ This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.
This book provides an important lens for understanding how interlocking humanitarian crises caused by armed conflict, natural disasters, forced displacement and, more recently, a global health pandemic have adversely impacted teaching and learning.
It brings together evidence from multiple, diverse research-practice partnerships in seven countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The authors provide a clear account of the key academic, policy and practice questions on education in crisis contexts and consider our capacity to develop just and resilient education systems.
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia’s educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when ‘decolonization’ has become a buzzword, the book demystifies ‘critical anti-racism praxis,’ advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches.
Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.
This collection shifts the focus of higher education research away from the traditional urban centre and onto small island contexts across the world. Introducing the small island as a context for higher education delivery this book extends beyond the existing literature on higher education in small states, arguing for the value specifically of the small island as a conceptual frame for exploring multiscalar dynamics between global, national and local contexts in higher education provision. Drawing on examples from around the world, the book identifies how the small island opens critical questions relevant to higher education scholarship much more widely about the purposes and functions of higher education especially in relation to national, regional and local development, as well as questions about specific issues in higher education such as quality and management. The insights offered by the contributions in this book will be relevant to higher education scholars as well as scholars in the field of island studies, and especially those concerned with the relationship of higher education provision to regional and island development.
Viv Ellis, Lauren Gatti and Warwick Mansell present a unique and international analysis of teacher education policy.
Adopting a political economy perspective, this distinctive text provides a comparative analysis of three contrasting welfare state models – the US, England and Norway – following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Arguing that a new political economy of teacher education began to emerge in the decade following the GFC, the authors explore key concepts in education privatisation and examine the increasingly important role of shadow state enterprises in some jurisdictions.
This topical text demonstrates the potential of a political economy approach when analysing education policies regarding pre-service teacher education and continuing professional development.
Bringing together the perspectives of researchers, policy makers, activists, educators and practitioners, this book critically interrogates the Western-centric assumptions underpinning education and development agendas and the colonial legacies of violence they often uphold.
The book considers the crucial connection between the idea of sustainable futures and the demand to decolonise education. Containing an innovative mixture of text, stories and poetry, it explores how decolonised futures can be conceived and enacted, offering theoretical and practical examples, including from practice in educational and cultural organisations. In doing so, the book highlights education’s potential role in facilitating processes of reparative justice that can contribute to decolonised futures.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
The transition to more just and sustainable development requires radical change across a wide range of areas and particularly within the nexus between learning and work.
This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training that goes beyond the narrow focus of much of the current literature and policy debate. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this issue through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups, and in public and private educational institutions.
Offering new insights and ways of thinking about this field, the book draws out clear implications for theory, policy and practice in Africa and beyond.
India will soon be the world’s most populated country and its political development will shape the world of the 21st century. Yet Hindu Nationalism – at the helm of contemporary Indian politics – is not well understood outside of India, and its links to the global neoliberal trajectory have not been much explored.
This important book shows for the first time why it is education, not a failed political system, that led to the rise of Modi and the right-wing nationalist ideology of Hindutva. It provides in depth insight into contemporary Indian politics and wider societal acceptance of India’s Hindu nationalist trajectory, as well as examining the role of class.
The first five years of Modi rule failed to bring about the development that had been promised and have seen India’s rapid change from a largely inclusive society to one where minorities are denied their basic rights.
Increasingly it is not just the state that determines the content, delivery and governance of education. The influence of external actors has been growing, but the boundaries between internal and external have become blurred and their partnerships have become more complex.
This book considers how schooling systems are being influenced by the rise of external actors, including private companies, NGOs, parent organisations, philanthropies and international assessment frameworks.
It explores how the public, private and third sectors are becoming increasingly intertwined. Introducing new theoretical frameworks, it examines diverse sites – including Cambodia, Israel, Poland, Chile, Australia, Brazil and the US – to study the role of policies, institutions and contextual factors shaping the changing relationships between those seeking to influence schooling.
