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
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Despite the urgency to understand how ‘other’ cultures encounter ‘the West’ in academic and political spheres, feminist economics has yet to tackle critiques from postcolonial and decolonial feminists about Western-centric modernism in the field.
This book introduces a decolonizing approach to feminist economics, offering insights that move beyond the boundaries of modern Eurocentrism. The author explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ecological degradation, while offering critical feminist and decolonizing tools. By investigating global struggles, the author illuminates our hijacked present and imagines a decolonizing feminist economic landscape that is under transformation.
Transdisciplinary and innovative, this book fills a vital gap by exploring the interplay between decolonization and feminist economics, challenging the growth logic, capitalism and Western-centrism, and imagining new possibilities for more just futures.
Chapter 8 outlines eight interconnected strategies for developing a decolonizing feminist economics framework: embodying feminist economics; recognizing Indigenous sovereignty and freedom; interrogating Orientalism, Eurocentrism and developmentalism; advocating for plural economic knowledges; questioning the meaning of value; resisting capitalist growth economies; advancing economic justice through reparations, land return and wealth redistribution; and embracing a common world as a political commitment. This map offers both theoretical and practical tools and methodologies, drawing on concepts such as ecoSImies of care, mestiza methodology and radical solidarity to foster alternative economic thinking.
Building on themes discussed throughout the book, Chapter 8 aims to transcend existing feminist economics paradigms. It offers a decolonizing perspective on how feminist economics can break free from mainstream economic frameworks and create possibilities for just futures.
Three big shifts have shaped modern housing conditions dating from the 18th century. First, urbanisation began in the 16th and 17th centuries but greatly accelerated as the Industrial Revolution got underway in the 18th century. Second, industrialisation led to the mechanisation of production and a great increase in wealth, alongside extreme poverty. The industrial revolution was coupled with an agricultural revolution, which drove people off the land and fuelled extremely rapid urban and industrial growth in the 19th century. Third, the emergence of modern local government and democracy in response to rapid social change generated action on living conditions. We look at early interventions by philanthropists, social reformers, and non-profit landlords in tackling atrocious housing conditions. The models of housing provision which we describe evolved and proved their worth in this turbulent era of explosive growth, leading to housing reform and the building of millions of bylaw, terraced homes.
This introductory chapter sets the scene to the experiences of both Spanish host families and arriving Ukrainians by briefly looking at Russia and the Ukraine, and the general global geopolitical spectrum before making a few statements about how this unexpected study came about. Crucial to consider is the historical attachment between the Ukraine and Russia and how the more recent increase in tensions represent Russian concern for Ukraine’s drift towards democratisation and affiliation with the West, thus representing renewed geopolitical rivalry between major world powers. A focus point is how, within this contested relationship, and despite its democratisation, the Ukraine has historically been prone to continued oligarchic control and influence, high levels of corruption and elite crime.
This chapter considers what life was like for the Ukrainians before the invasion, what happened when they started to hear air raid sirens and missiles and bombs striking their cities and see Russian tanks in the streets. There is also a wider consideration of how rapid invasion invited the rapid intervention from Western powers, subsequently backed by powerful arms producers, eager to take advantage of another war for profit motives. The chapter also considers why the Ukrainians decided to leave in early March 2022 – because many conversely stayed – and how they ended up finding me on a hosting website. Their decision to leave the Ukraine is also framed in reports and articles which consider more widely the Ukrainian refugee exodus: where the millions went and how they were received by European countries. Lastly, the chapter introduces some of the Spanish host families and their motives to ‘help’ in the housing and support of the Ukrainians.
In Chapter 4, the focus is on extractivism and its fundamental logics, aiming to deepen critiques of the concept of ‘sustainability’ within economics. The chapter argues that comprehending the extensive reach of extractivist economic practices enables a more profound exploration of their effects on individuals, ecosystems, societies and economies.
Through this exploration, the chapter delineates six key characteristics inherent in extractivist and productivist economic logics, drawing on real-life examples from resistance movements to examine avenues for subversion and alternative approaches.
Fiscal crisis is a period in the trajectory of state finances when the relationship between states and social structures is under extreme stress and deficits have the potential to destabilise the social order. It describes the contradiction between collecting enough tax to fund welfare, including education and health, and the willingness of taxpayers, especially elites, to pay. This chapter shows how the wealthy in high-income countries have waged a war on tax systems, reduced their own taxes and transferred tax to regressive consumption taxes and taxes on labour incomes while benefitting from tax expenditures. It examines the relationships among taxation, public expenditure and public debt and shows how debt holders have come to exercise enormous power over public expenditure and seek to restrict the power of democracy to deal with all forms of inequality and the costs of confronting impending climate catastrophe.
In today’s world, there are interwoven crises affecting us at every level. This book explores the impact of these crises on applied social research. It shows how using a complexity framework in research is key to tackling global challenges effectively.
By featuring illustrative examples from the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa and the US, the authors demonstrate how an action research programme based around the use of existing social research methods embedded in processes of co-production and participation can drive real-time social change.
In doing so, the book highlights the transformative role of action-oriented research in addressing today's complex global challenges.
Chapter 4 explores how the drive to provide a decent home for all, at a price within their means, created the ambition to design and build ‘homes fit for heroes’, capturing the successful elements of the late Victorian garden city and model village movements. But this bold ambition was undermined by the start of World War I. The outbreak of war put an abrupt stop to all building and led to draconian, long-lasting rent controls. With five million soldiers demobilised at the end of the war in 1918, acute shortages resulted from the wartime brake on building and rapid disinvestment in private renting due to tight rent control. The government responded to the housing crisis through state action. Local authorities received effectively blank cheques to build council housing for whoever needed a home. But by 1930, council housing had become far more modest, due to high costs, and it was increasingly targeted at overcrowded families. The most extreme conditions were tackled by ambitious slum clearance programmes, and virtually all rehousing was targeted at poorly housed, displaced residents.
