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 common seal population in the Dutch Wadden Sea is at carrying capacity, meaning that the population is at its maximum considering currently available food resources. It follows that life and death blur together as the life of one seal might mean the death of another, albeit in different temporalities. While a seal centre was established to care for the common seal population through rehabilitation, ecologists argue that seal rehabilitation might be an act that can weaken, rather than strengthen, the population. Therefore, lungworm parasites as drivers of ‘natural selection’ processes for seals in the Wadden Sea would need to be respected. I argue that lungworm parasites resituate the biopolitical power of the seal rehabilitation centre. Through science and technology, the seal centre explores options of multispecies ‘collaboration’ with lungworms to decide which seal should be rehabilitated and which one should die through euthanasia. This collaboration has the potential to put lungworms in a leading biopolitical role, while the seal centre can assist in medically alleviating the seals’ pain throughout the process. While the seal centre tries to evade public questioning of decisions about life and death through the centring of facts and science, ethical implications and considerations remain complex.
Modern postmortem imaging is increasingly being used to complement conventional autopsy. The integration of these radiological techniques into the forensic investigation process challenges the examination of the corpse and the cause of death investigations. During our long-term ethnography in a Swiss forensic medicine centre, we observed forensic pathologists’ and radiologists’ practices and their regular discussions about discrepancies between radiological interpretations and direct observations of bodies and organs. We argue that these two techniques enact two ‘realities’ of the body and its lesions that are not necessarily congruent. Thus, when radiology and scalpels do not tell the same truth, forensic pathologists work to test and reconcile these two ‘versions’ of the body: they make a distinction between the ‘real’ elements and the ‘artefactual’ ones, discussing the respective demonstrative power of radiological techniques and autopsy. We demonstrate that radiological images have a lower degree of reality within forensic expertise as they must be confirmed by the senses of the forensic pathologist during autopsy, which remains the ultimate visualization technique.
Taking into account that death practices have changed considerably across sub-Saharan Africa over the last century or more, two intertwined aspects of the dying process of spirit mediums in northern Zimbabwe are discussed in the present ethnography: mourning as an emotional response to death loss associated to the materiality of the corpse, and the complexities of disgust. Mourning is not always related to closure but to the continuity of bonds and open-ended processes as the death of mediums suggests. The remains are concealed from the public in a funeral that disallows public display of grief, and celebrates the spirit while burying its host. This ambiguity is emotionally conflicting for relatives in particular. If mourning can be linked to boundness, disgust closely represents the opposite extreme as one of the strongest forms of rejection. And in relation to dying and the deceased, disgust manifests in complex ways as human remains and substances are both subjects and objects shifting in radically unstable ways between the two. The case of spirit mediums in Zimbabwe may illustrate this complexity.
No one and nothing die alone. This volume highlights the socio-ecological relationalities involved in dying and death, revealing complex interconnections among human and more-than-human creatures, environments, geographies, temporalities, narratives and scales of being. This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who shed light on matters and meanings that have remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and deathcare cultures. Organized around three themes (ontologies and epistemologies, care and remembrance, and troubling agencies), this volume presents original work that pushes the boundaries of death studies beyond the scope human death, inviting the reader to explore death and dying in ways that challenge a nature/culture binary.
This chapter outlines several conceptual relationships between the medium of television and death and examines how one televisual text – the French supernatural drama Les Revenants (2012–2015) – functions to depict, explore and trouble a range of sociocultural ideas about death, loss and the dead. Both the series and its medium raise significant questions about the power of the past and the agency of the dead, offering a popular cultural venue through which audiences can encounter ideas that challenge normative assumptions. By unpicking some of these entanglements, it is possible to explore different material-discursive meanings about mortality that popular cultural sources can expound. For example, concerns expressed in the series about climate death raise ethical questions about the role of media in environmental damage and may trouble audiences whose watching of it indirectly imbricates them in that damage. Given cultural texts are always configured in various ways and are then reconfigured by audiences (always plural and always complex) whose own life experiences, hopes and material circumstances inform their engagement, a material-discursive analysis of both medium and text affords a method of unentangling some of the complexities of meaning that circulate in the sociocultural imaginary about death, loss and the dead.
In this chapter, based on ethnographic research from Mexico and Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic, we look at the tensions between institutional immunological acts designed to contain the flow of the virus and individuals’ need to maintain contact with their sick and dying loved ones. For many, institutional practices were seen to dehumanize victims, alive and dead; in the worst cases, inequality and institutional corruption revictimized patients and their families. As a consequence, citizens were forced to find creative ways to exercise their agency in the face of grief, loss and the institutional exercise of biopower. The Latin American context also shows how ‘seeing from the margins’ problematizes the notion that the pandemic was a shared experience. “We may all be in the same ocean”, as one colleague stated, “but we are not in the same boat”.
It has been predicted that, by 2050, 70 per cent of the world’s population will be living in urban settlements. It is no wonder that the United Nations has taken note and is acknowledging cities now more than ever in global frameworks. Efforts to achieve global goals that improve the well-being and quality of life of citizens must now recognize their increasingly urban dimensions, a shift that culminated in the development of Sustainable Development Goal 11, to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. This chapter explores the history of the development of SDG 11 and how this evolved from the narrow focus on cities in the Millennium Development Goals. It also analyses the growing role of city governments as transnational actors, working through an ecosystem of city networks to play a significant part in global environmental governance.
Some 759 million people lack access to electricity, and 2.6 billion are without clean cooking solutions. Yet universal access to modern energy services must be achieved without additional emissions. Therefore, climate targets need to be achieved on the basis of clean energy sources. This chapter first discusses how policy making in developing countries has shifted in the past decade, from viewing energy as a sector to regarding it as an enabler for broader socio-economic goals. The chapter also discusses the pertinent linkages of SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) with other SDGs, and highlights key actors and institutions in that policy domain. Second, the chapter offers best practice in clean energy access policies. The case of Kenya is used to illustrate policy success. Third, the chapter puts a focus on clean cooking, and the specific challenges presented by this aspect of SDG 7. Zooming in on sub-Saharan Africa, the chapter shows how countries struggle to implement adequate policies despite the multifaceted co-benefits in terms of health, gender or environmental protection. Finally, the chapter presents key policy action points from the perspective of the carbon neutrality target and the 1.5 °C scenario, and in light of the latest IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license.
With Agenda 2030, the UN adopted wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that integrate development and environmental agendas. This book focuses on the political tensions between the environmental objectives and socio-economic aspects of sustainable development.
The collection provides an introduction to interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs between the ‘green’ and other goals, such as gender equality and economic growth. It also considers related goals on cities and partnerships as crucial for implementing environmentally sound sustainability. Identifying governance failures and responsibilities, it advocates for a shift towards cooperative economics and politics for the common good.
This chapter critically analyses SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth) and its targets from the perspective of degrowth, and suggests how the economy and work could be reoriented towards socio-ecological transformation. First, it problematizes the goal of perpetual economic growth, which is not compatible with ecological sustainability because of the impossibility of decoupling GDP growth from material and energy throughput at the global level. It also pays attention to injustices entangled with the pursuit of growth. Second, it discusses the understanding of work in SDG 8, arguing that the growth-centrism of societies makes work unsustainable and unjust, while the current targets address the symptoms rather than underlying causes of the problems with work. Third, instead of economic growth, the chapter argues that socio-ecological transformation is a more fitting orientation for societies. In line with this goal, it formulates a vision of regenerative economy focused on well-being, sufficiency and equity, and a vision of work that emphasizes work in regenerative activities, its democratization and working less. In conclusion, it suggests that the overall framework of Agenda 2030 needs to focus on well-being rather than the growth-focused and Western notion of development, and articulates an alternative to SDG 8.
