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.
The integration of collaborative methods into project design and implementation is a growing ethical concern within Romani-related research. This chapter features a dialogue between a non-Rroma scholar and a Rroma activist. They reflect on the opportunities and challenges arising from a research project in which they collaborated to create an ethnographic record of Spanish Rroma’s experiences during the COVID-19 health crisis. The chapter interrogates the role of academia in reinforcing or questioning (mis)representations of Rroma groups and offers insights into how Rroma activists and scholars in the field of Romani studies may work together in joint endeavours. In the conversation, the global COVID-19 pandemic is suggested as a disruptive event with the potential to lead researchers to question the usefulness of their research and involve themselves in explicit forms of politically engaged scholarship.
How can the social sciences be an arena where positive social changes are achieved and not just discussed? How can social science help to shape social priorities in the post-pandemic world? These are immediate, practical questions for scholars planning and implementing research projects. Any answer must necessarily revolve around methods, since change starts close at hand, in the immediacy of one’s daily work, and it starts with practice and action, not with theory and argument. By paying close attention to research methods, it is possible to carry out engaged research – research that is relevant, reflexive, responsible and responsive – even in the midst of a global pandemic.
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This collection scrutinizes the methodological and ethical challenges that researchers face when working with and for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in the context of global crises.
Contributors assess the impact of the pandemic on their engaged research, evaluating novel methods and technologies. They reveal how current research practice blurs the borders between activism and scholarship, and they argue the need for innovative collaborations with local communities.
Showcasing emerging aspects of GRT-related scholarship, this book makes a key contribution to larger debates on the positionality of researchers and the politics of research, and affirms the continued value of rigorous ethnography.
This chapter discusses the transformation of research methods that has been generated or accelerated by the pandemic, and its likely effects on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller-related research. The chapter focuses on the changing roles of researchers and their ethical and political implications. It highlights the affordances and limits of emerging, remote research methodologies and their potential impact on existing power differentials and hierarchies. The chapter suggests that ethnography may become impoverished if it is reduced to the collection of textual and oral data (interviews, online texts and videos). Lastly, the chapter explores the advantages of collaborative research and of the involvement of research participants and assistants when planning, implementing and disseminating projects. It points to problems that may arise from conflicting goals and expectations in such collaborations.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated or brought about changes in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller-related (GRT) ethnographic research. This chapter explores the concrete methodological implications of these developments, focusing on a series of key elements: the shifting roles, capabilities and accountabilities of researchers; the development of collaborative approaches to project design, implementation and dissemination; the flexible combination of research methods; the ongoing reconfiguring of ‘the field’ from a locale to an evolving set of relations and processes; the foregrounding of doubt, ignorance and failure in the research process; the transformation of ethnographic writing to incorporate the work and perspectives of non-academic GRT interlocutors; and shifting ideas of what outputs of academic value might look like. The chapter introduces the book as a companion to those interested in GRT issues.
The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the ‘experimental collaborations’ that guided the authors in designing and conducting a collaborative ethnography of the social and geographical mobilities of disadvantaged European youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter is based on 30 online video conversations between the two authors: an Italian white male postdoctoral researcher and a Romanian Roma woman who spent most of her youth homeless in Madrid. Together, they examine the practical and conceptual implications of collaborative methodologies involving individuals with diverse socioeconomic and experiential backgrounds. They do so by tracing the multiple origins, arrangements and meanings of their collaboration through a deeply reflexive dialogue that recovers and validates their situated memories, emotions and experiences as legitimate sources of ethnographic knowledge. The chapter particularly emphasizes the potential of digital technologies in reconfiguring the modes of ethnographic collaboration, shedding light on the positive role of uncertainty and failure in reducing power asymmetries within participatory research encounters.
In this chapter, an insider researcher reflects on methodological challenges regarding power, positionality and emotions in a study conducted with Irish Travellers during COVID-19. The chapter highlights a notable gap in the literature on the intersection of emotional labour and insider positionality within Irish Traveller scholarship. It explores three central themes: emotional labour in research, the insider position and the challenges posed by social distancing. The chapter explains how during the pandemic emotions were heightened, leading to unique methodological challenges and opportunities in research with minority groups. On the basis of this reflexive account, the chapter discusses the use of critical participatory action research and a decolonial perspective in a new, post-pandemic research project with Irish Travellers that aims to address their marginalization in research and associated action.
This chapter provides a brief overview of the application of graphic facilitation methods to support increased engagement from diverse audiences (including Traveller and Roma communities) in a range of educational and community development environments. It provides examples of ways to incorporate methods into practice, such as the development of the visual abstracts included in this book. Graphic facilitation offers a way of communicating with diverse audiences using a combination of words and text. It provides opportunities for educators to rethink ways of delivering text-heavy content.
This chapter discusses loss and grief during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an amalgamation of ethnographic and autoethnographic insights into Roma lives. The ethnographic material follows the grief experiences of the researcher and her long-term fieldwork interlocutor. The analysis of the pandemic interventions of the state interfering with the quotidian, ritual and kin nature of loss and grief intertwines with questions about methodology and ethics in unforeseen moments. When ‘accidental ethnography’ happens, it is captured through reflexive autoethnography and participatory listening to make way for Roma agency and reciprocity.
The final chapter provides a summary of the previous chapters and concluding remarks. It looks back on the process of researching, collecting material and writing the book. The chapter offers final reflections about why equality, diversity and inclusion matter, and that much can be achieved by drawing from experiences of equality interventions from various disciplines and research fields. It considers inevitable aspects of EDI work, such as resistance to change, and reflects on how to embark on any programmes of institutional change in research organisations.
