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
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is recurrently depicted as an enterprise that unites humanity in a common pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. But how is this enterprise pursued on a planet that is enormously unequal? Drawing on biopolitical theory and rich empirical data from different contexts around the world, this book explores how ESD is unpacked depending on whether people are rich or poor.
The book demonstrates how ESD is adapted to the lifestyles and living conditions of different populations. The implication of this depoliticized sensitivity to local ‘realities’, the book argues, is that inequality becomes accommodated and that different responsibilities are assigned to rich and poor. Ultimately, the book considers alternatives to this biopolitical divide.
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 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.
There is an enduring belief amongst some that segregation is worsening and undermining social cohesion, and that this is especially visible in the growing divides between the schools in which our children are educated.
This book uses up-to-date evidence to interrogate some of the controversial claims made by the 2016 Casey Review, providing an analysis of contemporary patterns of ethnic, residential and social segregation, and looking at the ways that these changing geographies interact with each other.
Austerity’s impacts on the healthcare, social care and education professions are under the spotlight in this important book.
From scarcer resources to greater stresses, and falling training budgets to rising risks, it charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. It combines research and practice experience to assess the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years and how workers have responded.
This book is a vital review of how austerity has resculpted our notions of professionalism.
Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. Nevertheless, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice. Drawing on empirical data from the field of education governance, the book traces how scales are crafted and mobilised in policymaking practices, demonstrating that ‘scalecraft’ is key to understanding the production of hegemony.
The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula.
It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices.
Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.
Are you a practitioner, supervisor, practice educator, mentor or university tutor supporting students who are struggling on, or failing, their practice placement? Here is the practical guidance you need.
Jo Finch draws on both her own experience training Practice Educators, and international multi-disciplinary research and literature. Chapters examine the signs and symptoms of a struggling student, emotional impact and emotional processes of decision making, and strategies for working effectively with students and academic institutions. Reflective exercises enable you to bring these methods to your own practice.
The ideas here will further knowledge and engender confidence for any teachers, assessors and supervisors on courses with a practice learning component.
How do education systems shape educational inequalities and differences in educational outcomes? And how do advantages and disadvantages in educational attainment translate into privileges and shortcomings in labour market and general life chances? Education systems and inequalities compares different education systems and their impact on creating and sustaining social inequalities.
The book considers key questions such as how education systems impact educational inequalities along such variables as social origin, gender, ethnicity, migration background or ability and what social mechanisms are behind the links between education system and educational inequalities and provides vital evidence to inform debates in policy and reform.
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.
