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.
Digital food technologies carry promise for better food futures but they are often problematic in their impact on food cultures. While proponents suggest that food-tech products such as smart kitchenware or diet personalisation services can support efficient food practices, critics highlight various risks. This chapter presents our findings from Edible Speculations, a long-term design research project exploring the contested space of food-tech innovation through a series of speculative design (SD) events situated in everyday public contexts. We illustrate the opportunities and limits of eventful SD in supporting critical engagements with food-tech issues through an Edible Speculations case study called the Parlour of Food Futures. Our discussion of selected Parlour events can inform readers interested in food-tech themes as well as those keen on experimenting with eventful approaches to SD research.
In 1867, American William Torrey Harris founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, proposing that thinking should transcend politics, cultural issues and racial differences to uncover systemic roots of problems. Harris envisioned a future where multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary cultures of problem-solving were prevalent. This utopian ambition, initially criticised as naïve, is now relevant in today’s academic climate, of inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary research. This edited volume explores the idea of Utopian Methods, which involves speculating into the future to find alternative solutions to systemic challenges. The concept of system transition is inherently future-oriented, focusing on the potential of future possibility and radical rejection of current systems. The ideas in this book offer an alternative way to explore social and environmental challenges, which are leading to the collapse of ways of living and the preservation of the most privileged.
Drones are increasingly understood and imagined as important actors, inhabiting and transforming aerial space. From their entrenched establishment within battlefield operations, drones have spawned into a diverse ecosystem of platforms and applications, increasingly punctuating domestic urban airspace. While occupying a status as exemplars of urban innovation, the drone poses, and remains bound to, a range of techno-cultural contestations – from challenges around airspace integration, to concerns around privacy, safety and pollution. Thinking with commercial drone futures, and specifically the logistics sector, this chapter interrogates the role of speculation in this unfolding techno-landscape. In so doing we turn to two key sites through which the drone is anticipated – namely patents and adverts – as lenses through which to investigate projected visualisations underpinning the emergent, envisioned and anticipated drone. We argue that such drone speculations do not simply and solely envision new means of circulating goods, people and information, but rather embody and act to promote a particular set of aerial desires and social relations. Critically unpacking envisioned notions of frictionless mobility, instant consumption, and the appropriation of vertical spaces and spectra, we argue that such speculative sites and practices importantly participate in a techno-fetishist agenda positing drone technology as a privileged and panacea agent of futurity, while often eliding its implications.
Critical contemporary discourses on extinction, climate change and planetary boundaries are needed to counter and reject our current ways of living on this planet. But they often end badly. Therefore, we also need to tell the stories that create openings and generate more desirable alternatives. This chapter contributes to the effort of resituating design as less anthropocentric and much more of a multispecies affair. Following scholars such as Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Anna Tsing and John Law, this text does so by unpacking the notion of ‘multispecies worlding’ for speculative design practices that involve other living entities. By carrying multiplicities into design processes and rethinking how other species can become a more deliberate part of our (re)worlding efforts, this text articulates the importance of advancing decolonial design aims to generate interspecies harmonies rather than reinforcing oppressive relations. The annotated illustrations and examples of multispecies design projects that appear in this chapter involve an additional effort in identifying ‘big-enough’ stories and already existing multispecies design speculations. As such, this work offers merely one collection of enactments that can allow further worlding and further design work. Such a repertoire of speculative multispecies design work can thereby knot together different realities, from different actors, that can propose and embody other kinds of worlding relations between species. They thereby slowly but steadily break down existing grand narratives that seem all-explanatory to speculate about different ways in which humans and other species already make worlds together.
Speculative realism is a major element of the recent speculative turn in the humanities. The four original speculative realist philosophers are united in their rejection of correlationism. Correlationism implies that there can be no knowledge of reality beyond knowledge of how human beings happen to experience reality. This chapter reconstructs the main tenets of correlationism and the consequences for research once it gains axiomatic status. It then discusses the four original speculative realists and explores the consequences of adapting their respective theories, rather than a correlationist perspective, as guiding frameworks for research. It turns out that two of these theories – Grant’s naturephilosophy and Meillassoux’s speculative materialism – are ‘non-interventionist’ in that they do not prescribe any significant changes to current practices in fields beyond philosophy. Conversely, Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Brassier’s eliminativist nihilism are highly ‘interventionist’ in that they explicitly prescribe significant (though very different) changes to a variety of fields.
