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.
This chapter explores the presence of the absence; the silences and secrets in the HIJXS’ testimonial narratives and the impacts in their lives. It presents an account of the ways in which writing the HIJXS’ testimonios negotiated silences and the use of secrecy. The emphasis is not on revealing the content of such silences and secrets, a departure from ‘interpretation’ well-established in the testimonio scholarship, but on the changing relationship with silences in each testimonio. In acknowledging the presence and absence of certain silences and hushed voices, the chapter explores what silences were doing and the excuses they provided for other conversations.
This chapter discusses space and place as something more than the backdrop of memory practices. It starts by laying out how place has been understood in Latin American memory studies and continues exploring different ways to understand place through analysing specific ethnographies of place and space with the HIJXS de Perú group. I use three ethnographic encounters where I participated for this purpose: a walk through the city where memories are anchored; a search for a father’s grave to unleash imagination; and a visit to a maximum-security prison to explore embodied memories. The chapter ends by proposing that space and place’s entanglements become apparent when researchers use them to visualize the memory struggles of diverse actors, when these actors demand something from spaces and places regarding their memories, or when spaces and places may even ‘talk back’, transforming us.
The chapter traces the story of the inquiry and its turning points through the series of encounters with the protagonists and with academia over nine years across three countries. It details the journey as a series of movements and the different understandings of testimonio they produced as pedagogy, methodology and practice. The story introduces the reader to the inquiry as a methodological challenge, where each new encounter triggered changes in the way we engaged with our memory work. The purpose is to display a book that is written narratively as the unfolding of a methodology.
The third movement engages with ideas and theories to revisit the problems of/with the process of writing memory, and particularly testimonio (and its politics) in its realist and its fictionalized attempts. It includes a further troubling of the fact/fiction binary particularly for the making of testimonio (the writing and reading of it) but moreover for qualitative inquiry and memory work.
The poetics of memory explores the ‘troubling’ strategy deployed in the second movement and the troubles it produced as well as its productivity resulting in diverse writing practices for a more creative understanding of the process of doing memory work, and of memory as artful.
Overall, it reflects on writing (about) violence and the crisis of representation in the aftermath of war and the persistence of state violence
This chapter explores the challenges raised by using an approach that ‘troubles’ (Lather, 1997) testimonio and its research from the ‘borderlands’, a concept introduced by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) to capture those in-between spaces. It considers this ‘troubling’ both necessary and problematic and explores its implications for testimonio and memory work.
This chapter discusses Willy’s troubling memories about his aunt after visiting her in a maximum-security prison and learning she was tortured. The presence of imagined and borrowed memories of torture are a large part of his life and will influence his search for other characters entangled in his aunt’s life that will also become part of his own.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the difficulties of writing from and about violence including my own dilemmas of what to include and what to erase from the testimonios given our concerns to avoid reproducing the effects of violence, unintentionally implicating other people, and to avoid censoring details for a general audience. It also discusses specific writing practices deployed throughout the book and their effects at different moments depending on motives, contexts and desired audiences.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
This chapter is the first of three chapters which focus on research data based on interviews with staff working in schools and early years settings with food banks. The chapter explores how schools supply food to families, including where food comes from and how it is distributed to families. It is argued that schools use their knowledge of the local community to decide how food is given out, and the role of choice in affording families dignity. The ‘origin stories’ of the food banks are also explained, in order to consider in more depth why schools have decided to offer this provision. Central to this chapter is the concept of policy enactment which emphasises the importance of context. We discuss how context guides the operation of a school’s food bank, even though a policy is not being enacted in the strictest sense. Schools and early years settings can be vastly different, and this necessitates food bank provision on different scales and of different types.
