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.
In this chapter, we identify what a crisis is and argue that under capitalism a permanent tendency towards crisis exists, exacerbated under neoliberal capitalist conditions, which engender other crises. We identify three types of crisis: empirical crises which can be seen and experienced by many (the cost-of-living crisis, for example); actual crises, particularly epidemiological crises (of which the COVID-19 pandemic is a striking example); and the escalating climate crisis. The crisis of work, and the interlinked crises at work which influence it, are underpinned by a profound ‘real’ crisis – the fundamental antagonisms produced by a system of (neoliberal) capitalism, under which work, the self and the environment are degraded and which creates instability and turbulence.
The chapter begins by explaining how the crisis of trade unionism, one that is particularly manifest in reduced union membership, is a product of neoliberalization, before examining how the trade unions have sought to respond to the crisis, including revitalization efforts. The chapter explains that after 2020 the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provided unions with opportunities to build back stronger. It also highlights how unions have sought to demonstrate their relevance by engaging with environmental issues and responding to the climate crisis. Trade unions are playing a key role in facilitating a ‘just transition’ to a net-zero world by ensuring that workers’ interests are represented in the process of change, even though this has generated some notable tensions and challenges. As the chapter shows, unions are better able to demonstrate the important and effective contribution they make to advancing workers’ interests, not least by fomenting activism and challenging employers and governments.
This chapter explores the process of producing an urban café in India, as a women only workspace, which is explicitly attached with a claim of empowering women through employment and skilling. Through an interpretive ethnographic exploration, the chapter analyses various notions of ‘women’ and ‘worker’ and the interconnecting affect that acts upon these notions and is acted upon by them within the production and embodiment of space. The spatial analysis of affect not only exposes the dominating neoliberal forces that prioritize a logic of commodification over other logics but also how they invest human bodies with an intense desire to become a ‘better woman worker’ by skilling oneself towards understanding and submitting to the hierarchical logics that run through various bodies. In doing so, the chapter argues, firstly, that ‘woman worker’ performs a desire to connect with other bodies that are constructed as higher and better in comparison to other bodies, the predominant metric being proximity of the bodies to the market and its embodiment of market logics, and secondly, that ‘woman worker’ attempts to move closer to the market logics and embody them as neoliberal forces tend to become dominant in the café space.
This chapter presents an emerging examination of the impact of financialization on the material design and construction of the contemporary global city and how the altered urban landscape shapes and genders social interaction in Sydney’s Barangaroo development. The scale of urban redevelopment in Barangaroo, as with other global city projects, presents new challenges regarding the potential ceding of public space to financial industries and speaks to wider issues of ‘social cleansing’ of prime urban locales. In this context, the chapter draws on the concept of ‘affective atmospheres’ to examine how people, buildings and technologies, including forms of non-human life, come together within Barangaroo to engender an affections response to place and create, in turn, a gendered ‘energy of feeling’. The chapter focuses on and explores the affective atmospheres of the boundary, temporality, the slippery material properties of glass and light and the gendered effects of these spaces. In doing so, it analyses how Barangaroo’s urban design, framed by a tough exclusionary exoskeleton common to financial place making projects, engenders a sense of alienation and displacement by embodying or projecting finance capital’s culture of masculinist rationality.
This chapter conceptualizes the home conservatory as a gendered and affective workspace in relation to the author’s part-time, paid occupation as a visual artist. Weaving together the author’s reflections with theoretical insights derived from human geography and organization studies, the chapter shows how the gendered dynamics of place making are coloured by past, present and projected meanings of place that are layered and accrue over time, some of which persist and cannot be easily contained by partitioning space into work and non-work zones. Place making can be experienced as a series of ongoing affective ebbs and flows that are sensitive to the dynamics of gender, whereby the historical and cultural associations of the home conservatory as feminine can support and detract from it as a place of paid artistic work that is plant centred. This chapter contributes to extant studies on how and where artists work, and how they are affected by places of work that are located in the home.
This chapter draws on the concept of affective practice to show how kitchens and gardens – usually thought of as humble domestic spaces – can become liminal spaces that enable women to take up public identities as chefs and businesswomen alongside their private identities as wives, mothers and daughters. The contexts of this study are women’s social enterprises in two Palestinian refugee camps (established in 1948–49, following the displacement of Palestinians from what is now the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories). The social and spatial boundaries between the camps and their environs are strong and impermeable, leading to a situation where women are doubly confined, both within the camp and within domestic space and roles. We find that the kitchen and gardens allow the simultaneous enactment of traditional and novel affective practices, providing distinctive forms reassurance to family members and external stakeholders. The mutability of the spaces makes it possible for women to transgress both domestic and camp boundaries, and simultaneously redefine their gendered identities.
This concluding chapter draws the different strands from our 14 chapters together to throw further light on our organizing themes of attachment, disruption and belonging and how these key affective-geographical formations are imbued with gendered dynamics. It explores how chapters speak in different ways to affect’s relationality, transmissibility and bodily capacity, furthering our understanding of the dynamic interplay between the transpersonal processes of affect and gender in the making and experiences of place. With a focus on place as both material and processual, and with an emphasis on gender as spatial, relational and embodied – a corporeal and affective process of becoming that is inseparable from context – this chapter explores the affective and spatial dimensions of advantage and disadvantage. With an inclusive categorization of gender and other categories of difference, such as race, class, sexuality and/or whiteness, this chapter examines how the affective processes of place are shaped, encountered and experienced. It concludes with a discussion of place making, atmospheres and intensity, highlighting a view of gender as spatial, relational and embodied.
This edited volume draws on affect theory, and through key themes of attachment, disruption and belonging, to examine the multiple ways in which our placed surroundings shape and form experiences of gender. Bringing together key debates across the fields of sociological, geographical and organization studies, this book marks new theoretical ground to help examine, across a variety of cases, shared experiences of what it means to be in or out of place. In doing so, the book examines how we, as gendered selves, encounter place, and critically examines the way in which experiences of gender shape meanings and attachments to place as well as how place produces gendered modes of identity, inclusion and belonging. By engaging such themes, the volume advances critical debates surrounding the gendering of place, symbolic manifestations of inclusion and exclusion as well as, in affect theory, bringing a new approach to the core notion of spatiality as a product of gendered relations. After all, it is important to remember, as we move through and encounter place, we do not encounter neutral containers in which we write our social selves, but we engage and interact with material, symbolic and cultural orders of meaning. It is in this entwined balance, of how we hold the capacity to both affect and be affected, that this book examines the gendering of place and the placing of gender.
This edited volume draws on affect theory, and through key themes of attachment, disruption and belonging, to examine the multiple ways in which our placed surroundings shape and form experiences of gender. Bringing together key debates across the fields of sociological, geographical and organization studies, this book marks new theoretical ground to help examine, across a variety of cases, shared experiences of what it means to be in or out of place. In doing so, the book examines how we, as gendered selves, encounter place, and critically examines the way in which experiences of gender shape meanings and attachments to place as well as how place produces gendered modes of identity, inclusion and belonging. By engaging such themes, the volume advances critical debates surrounding the gendering of place, symbolic manifestations of inclusion and exclusion as well as, in affect theory, bringing a new approach to the core notion of spatiality as a product of gendered relations. After all, it is important to remember, as we move through and encounter place, we do not encounter neutral containers in which we write our social selves, but we engage and interact with material, symbolic and cultural orders of meaning. It is in this entwined balance, of how we hold the capacity to both affect and be affected, that this book examines the gendering of place and the placing of gender.
Drawing on affect theory and the key themes of attachment, disruption and belonging, this book examines the ways in which our placed surroundings – whether urban design, border management or organisations – shape and form experiences of gender.
Bringing together key debates across the fields of sociology, geography and organisation studies, the book sets out new theoretical ground to examine and consolidate shared experiences of what it means to be in or out of place.
Contributors explore how our gendered selves encounter place, and critically examine the way in which experiences of gender shape meanings and attachments, as well as how place produces gendered modes of identity, inclusion and belonging. Emphasizing the intertwined dynamics of affect and being affected, the book examines the gendering of place and the placing of gender.
