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 of over 1500 titles.
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
With contributions from an international team of experts, this collection provides a much-needed international, comparative approach to mental capacity law.
The book focuses particularly on exploring substantive commonalities and divergences in normative orientation and practical application embedded in different legal frameworks. It draws together contributions from eleven different jurisdictions across Europe, Asia and the UK and explores what productive or unproductive values and practices currently exist.
By providing a detailed comparison of how legal and ethical commitments to persons with disabilities are framed in capacity law across different national systems, the book highlights the values and practices that could lead to changes that better respect persons with disabilities in mental capacity regimes.
This textbook offers students and practitioners an accessible introduction to strengths-based approaches in Social Work and Social Care practice. Covering the theory and research in support of these approaches, and packed full of case studies, the book will allow readers to develop a critical understanding of how strengths-based approaches work, and how they can be successfully applied in order to improve outcomes for people with lived experience.
Covering the five main models of strengths-based practice, the text presents international research and evidence on the efficacy of each approach, enabling students and practitioners to apply the benefits in their own social work practice. The guide features the perspectives of people with lived experience throughout and includes the following key learning features:
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case studies of best practice;
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points for practice: succinct tips for practitioners and students on practice placement;
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further reading list and resources;
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glossary.
Outlining the key developments of the Disability Hate Crime policy agenda, Seamus Taylor brings together a unique consideration of the theoretical and practical questions at its heart. This book analyses the contributions of activists, politicians, policy makers and criminal justice system practitioners to policy development, and critiques both the under-recognition of disability prejudice fuelled by ableism and the challenge of vulnerability in addressing disability hostility.
Concluding that a critically reflective approach on the part of policy makers and practitioners can lead to progress, the author gives clear policy recommendations to address current challenges in the Criminal Justice System.
Disabled people report high levels of harassment worldwide, often based on intersectional characteristics such as race, gender and age. However, while #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have highlighted ongoing experiences of sexual and racial harassment, disability harassment has received little attention.
This book focuses on legal measures to combat disability harassment at work. It sets disability harassment in its international context, including its human rights framework, and confronts the lack of empirical information by evaluating the Irish legal framework in practice.
It explores the capacity of the law to address intersectional harassment, particularly that faced by disabled women, and outlines the barriers to effective legal solutions.
Drawing from an activist research project spanning Loja, Santo Domingo, New York, New Jersey, and Barcelona, this book offers a feminist intersectional analysis of the impact of migration on health and well-being.
It assesses how social inequalities and migration and health policies, in Ecuador and destination countries, shape the experiences of migrants. The author also explores how individual and collective action challenges health, geopolitical, gender, sexual, ethnoracial, and economic disparities, and empowers communities.
This is a thorough analysis of interpersonal, institutional, and structural mechanisms of marginalization and resistance. It will inform policy and research for better responses to migration’s negative effects on health, and progress towards greater equality and social justice.
This much-needed volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding – the digital arena – in providing a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in supporting vulnerable adults online.
Providing an essential analysis illustrated by recent court rulings and case studies, the authors advocate for the effective support of adults with learning disabilities and/or mental capacity issues in their digital lives without compromising their privacy and participation rights.
The text balances a theoretical exploration of the tensions between participation and protection, legislation, human rights, professional biases and social wrongs. It encourages a critical approach in adopting both a practical and realistic understanding for policy makers, professionals and students in social work, law and adult social care.
This original collection explores how critical gerontology can make sense of old age inequalities to inform and improve social work research, policy and practice and empower older people.
With examples of practice-facing research, this book engages with key debates on age-related human rights and social justice issues. The critical and conceptual focus will expand the horizons of those who work with older people, addressing the current challenges, issues and opportunities that they face.
Spanning the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on childcare, work and gender.
The book illustrates how maternal workers continue to organize against low pay, exploitative working conditions and state retrenchment and provides a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities.
Bringing together social reproduction with maternal studies, this is a resonating call to build a cross-sectoral, intersectional movement around childcare. Maud Perrier shows why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.
In this much-needed text, leading international experts explore crucial aspects of people’s experience of long-term recovery from substance use.
Centred around the voices of people who use substances, the book examines the complex and continuing needs of people who have sought to change their use of substances, investigating the ways in which personal characteristics and social and systemic factors intersect to influence the lives of people in long-term recovery. With perspectives from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Iceland and the United Kingdom, it also considers the role and needs of family members, and puts forward clear recommendations for improving future research, policy and practice.
Establishing a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue, this text engages with the typically disparate fields of social gerontology and disability studies. It investigates the subjective experiences of two groups rarely considered together in research – people ageing with long-standing disability and people first experiencing disability with ageing.
This book challenges assumptions about impairment in later life and the residual nature of the ‘fourth age’. It proposes that the experience of ‘disability’ in older age reaches beyond the bodily context and can involve not only a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life, but also ongoing efforts in response.
