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 introductory chapter draws on Massumi’s notion of the felt force of affect as an ‘echo’ to construct place as a ‘constellation of processes’. This is the way that spatial ecologies are framed by variable events – twists and fluxes of interrelation – rather than specific moments of encounter, fixed in space and time. In doing so, the chapter frames affect within the social and material ordering of space before going on to discusses the ‘in between’ nature of these reverberations through encounters with bodies, objects and space. Here, the chapter visits the multiple ways in which we move through the material and social world, highlighting how the intersection of gender and place are woven into affective experience. Finally, the chapter sets out the rationale and aims of the book, positioning gender as inclusive of cis-gender, trans, gender queer and non-binary identities. The chapter concludes with a summary of contributions that make up this edited volume, outlining the structuring themes.
This chapter explores the ‘gendering’ of landscape and how it is claimed through affective experiences of belonging. It draws on a recent study of male manual workers in a ‘struggling’ UK seaside town: Hastings in East Sussex. It highlights how the physical and cultural attributes of landscape help to generate attitudes of inclusion and exclusion through, in part, the claiming of landscape as well as through ideologically charged and dominant ways of seeing and defining. From this perspective, landscape is not just as a set of physical and topographical features but is also interrelational, marked by history and culturally produced, bound up with personal and affective experience. The chapter explores gendered understandings of landscape and highlights how, in a recursive sense, it generates and reflects affective experiences of belonging, exclusive of ‘outsiders’ and which relate to how landscape is both inhabited and claimed.
This chapter examines experiences of queer bodies and the liminal spaces they navigate between being intelligible and illegitimate. These unscripted bodies become expressions of possibility models outside of prescribed gender scripts. These queer bodies offer hope and create space for belonging, authenticity and understanding. This chapter posits that there is a direct link between affect and space for queerness in a way that creates a sense of belonging among unscripted bodies. Community creates space to see possibility models, but also to find connection between each other. By examining the relationship between queer bodies, this chapter argues that these bodies and the relationship between them allows bodies to feel valid and real. The chapter highlights the lack of inclusivity within queer spaces for members of the queer community, including people of colour and people with disabilities. Lastly, the chapter encourages more research to further examine the relationship between affect and intersex bodies, as well as to explore binary systems of sex and the impact on access to resources. This chapter initiates a conversation while emphasizing the need for ongoing research around creating space for queer bodies to be in relationship with one another, and for access to possibility models for unscripted bodies.
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.
Fear of crime has generally been measured, assessed and discussed through the use of large-scale cross-sectional surveys. While, when designed with nuance, such surveys can produce data offering general insights into perceptions and subsequent behaviours down to neighbourhood level, they provide little insight into how individuals’ affective engagement, encounters and resonances with places and spaces serve to nonconsciously influence negative (or indeed positive) perceptions of safety. Indeed, the proxies for affect in such surveys tend to confuse it with emotion – and even more reductively, deal with it simply as a component of fear (which it is, but it is of course also much more than this). This chapter explores affect in perceptions of safety, drawing on a range of empirical projects, and assesses how the environments we engage and interact with provide nonconscious cues and codes for individuals and dividuals that serve to (re)produce hierarchies of security and safety.
This chapter brings together notions of postfeminism and place to explore the affective positivity and affective dissonance of the identity work of leaders working in the City of London. While leadership as an activity has conventionally been characterized as a realm saturated by masculine norms, a social transformation in our understanding of the ‘good’ leader means that culturally feminine relational behaviours are increasingly expected alongside masculine-marked practices. Postfeminism has produced the cultural conditions that reframe leadership as ‘contradictorily gendered’, as the reconfiguration of subjectivities characterized by the simultaneous uptake of masculine and feminine norms is fundamental to this discursive formation. The interpellation to invest in a postfeminist subjectivity is revealed in the disciplined performance of a set of life regulations alongside affective attachments expressed in the form of ‘feeling rules’, shaping the way individuals manage the demands and contradictions of a leadership identity. Research attention has been directed at postfeminism’s interpellation of women in organizational contexts, with significantly less consideration given to men’s engagement with this cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, this chapter develops a nuanced and context-specific analysis of postfeminism as a psychic and affective phenomenon and its call to men in leadership positions to invest in hybrid postfeminist subjectivities.
With reference to London’s Soho, this chapter explores some of the ways in which working communities are composed of sociocultural, material and affective references that are spatially and temporally situated in ways that enable particular settings to ‘take place’. It considers how Soho ‘takes place’ – that is, is both performatively enacted as a meaningful location and colonizes or dominates a particular setting, seizing it through a specific yet dynamic and evolving set of associations. Drawing on insights from feminist sociology, phenomenology and geography, the chapter concludes that sociocultural, material and affective configurations of gender operate as sites both for exposing and for displacing the reified connotations of Soho as a place of gender exploitation. This line of argument is situated in an emphasis on Soho as a setting that brings together elements of its past, present and future (its ‘then and now’), and of reference points within and beyond its physical and perceptual boundaries (its ‘here and there’), into a constellation of affects, meanings and materialities that provide opportunities for gender to ‘take place’ in complex, contradictory and often critically reflexive ways.
This chapter explores the affective strategies of homeless women and how they use buildings and public spaces in Russia to construct a ‘home’ on the street. Research suggests that there is an important gender dimension to the problem of homelessness and that women’s homelessness has remained largely invisible because of the particular stigma attached to the ‘unaccommodated woman’ – representative of a form of deviance, even if she may be simultaneously viewed as a victim and in need. Homeless women, therefore, ‘disappear’ from the institutional spaces of homeless shelters and frequently rely on precarious arrangements to be ‘housed’. This chapter is based on research conducted in Russia (2018–21) on homeless women. It explores the gender specifics and affective strategies of coping on the street and gendered differences afforded to meanings and constructions of ‘home’.
As McDowell argues, the physical construction of the workplace affects, as well as reflects, the social construction of work and places its inhabitants within a relation to power. This is to both place and understand bodies and their socially encoded meaning in relation to the specific spatial, temporal and cultural context in which they are placed. In global financial centres, the spatial frame has served only to promote and reify a dominant vision of masculinist aggression, greed and competitive one-upmanship. For example, McDowell and Zaloom both highlight the impact of the traditional open-outcry exchanges on performative financial relations. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of London has largely fallen dormant, as its trading work force has been shifted from the masculine placing of finance work to the feminized sphere of the home. In this context, this chapter capitalizes on COVID-enforced work relocation to offer a unique insight into the challenges. Specifically, it focuses on experiences of conducting a masculinist occupational endeavour in the largely feminized sphere of the home, examining key themes of detachment, loss, tension and negotiation as well as opportunism and possibility.
Mobility is a key trope framing how we understand the lives of gender- and sexually diverse youth who grow up in rural and regional environments. It is only through leaving unwelcoming small towns and hostile rural environments that LGBTIQA+ youth begin to live a full and connected queer life. A lack of stories about LGBTIQA+ connections and queer belonging in the regions reinforces this perception and has ramifications for the availability of LGBTIQA+ specific services and public health initiatives outside urban environments. This chapter reports on a collaboration with LGBTIQA+ youth living in a regional town located approximately one hour from Melbourne, Australia, and our attempt to co-create a transformative intervention that would foster positive queer feelings of place, connection and belonging. It explores how creative methods can reveal alternative stories which better align with how young queer lives are lived and experienced in regional towns and isolated rural areas. These positive stories of queer emplacement unsettle normative understandings of queer youth in the regions as out of place and make available more hopeful narratives that can be harnessed to facilitate connection and belonging for LGBTIQA+ young people who choose to live outside of metropolitan areas.
