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
This innovative interdisciplinary collection confronts the worldwide challenge of women's under-representation in science through an interrogation of the field of physics and its gender imbalance.
Leading physicists and sociologists from across Europe collaborate to adopt a comparative approach. They draw on theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence to explore the reasons behind low participation levels, from entering the field to sustaining a career, emphasising the importance of social perspectives over biological explanations.
Evaluating policy solutions implemented in various European contexts, this book offers key insights into the world of women physicists and sheds light on their life stories.
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.
Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts.
Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, this book explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education.
By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations.
Education in India concentrates on exam performance and consequently the teacher in India often acts as a disseminator of textbook material, as well as maintaining class discipline and respect. This book explores low-income female teachers’ speech and syntax as a crucial resource in which agency, freedom and empowerment is enacted within a strong oral tradition in India.
The book demonstrates how this socially and economically marginalised group overcome prejudices to develop relational agency and embed their authority. It shows how they establish their values and why their beliefs shape attitudes to aspiration, achievement and freedom of choice. It concludes with recommendations for policy and improvements to reflective practice in teaching.
The liberal arts approach to higher education is a growing trend globally. We are told that the mental dexterity and independent, questioning spirit cultivated by such interdisciplinary degrees are the best preparation for the as-yet unknown executive jobs of tomorrow.
This book explores the significant recent growth of these degrees in England, in order to address an enduring problem for higher education: the relationship between meritocracy and elitism.
Against the view that the former is a myth providing rhetorical cover for the latter, it argues that these are two entangled, but discrete, value systems. Sociology must now pay attention to how students and academics attempt to disentangle them.
Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.
Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges.
Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
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.
How is your institution enabling Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff and students to thrive? Is your institution effectively tackling racism?
Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the higher education sector has started making bold commitments to dismantling structural racism. However, big questions remain about how higher education can combat institutional racism and achieve real change.
This book disrupts the higher education sector through ambitious actions and collective, participatory and evidence-informed responses to racism. It offers a roadmap for senior leaders, staff and students to build strategies, programmes and interventions that effectively tackle racism.
Arising from current staff and recent student experiences, this book supports institutions driving equality, diversity, inclusion and intersectional programmes in higher education.
Anchored in accounts of young people’s personal experiences of loneliness, this book addresses important questions about tackling today’s epidemic of loneliness among young people.
It explores experiences of loneliness in early life, how it is navigated when first encountered and considers how social conditions of poverty, precarity, inequality and competitive pressures to succeed can dramatically influence these feelings.
Presenting diverse and nuanced social accounts of loneliness, the authors explore ways to harness the creative and positive potential of loneliness and provide evidence-based recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and young people to help tackle the crisis.
This book presents a crisis of religion and belief literacy to which education at every level is challenged to respond.
As understanding different religions, beliefs and influences becomes increasingly important, it fills a gap for a resource in bringing together the debates around religious literacy, from theoretical approaches to teaching and policy.
This timely publication provides a clear pathway for engaging well with religion and belief diversity in public and shared settings.
