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.
Books: Research
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This chapter summarises the contributions made by this book, with particular attention to the roles and limits of parents’ [often ephemeral] agency in relation to algorithms. The chapter outlines a set of recommendations for sectors interfacing with parents, including state sectors, educational and childcare settings, local government, technology companies and the media. The chapter draws out the importance of adopting a relational, and life-course perspective to making sense of families’ experiences of datafication and emerging technologies.
This chapter considers how parents experience algorithmic curation, in its diverse forms, across social media platforms, and how the world of parenthood is filtered for parents in ways which are inherently recursive. While architectures and logics of personalisation diverge across platforms, and amidst broader conversations on sharenting, the chapter notes how parents in this work often presented a deeply individualised understanding of algorithmic environments, where they imagined themselves almost as sole players in the system, not often recognising the aggregate environment of curation. Examples in the chapter demonstrate that parents’ agentic feedback into social media platforms is not free of context such as gendered care roles, and algorithmic filtering itself produces and maintains invitations to care, and parent, along socially structured routes already set in motion. The chapter draws attention to the notion of presences and absences of parenting content and the clustering of certain parenting content on some timelines and news feeds and what that might reveal. The chapter also discusses practices of care that some parents speak of, in managing their own feedback into algorithmic environment, in ways that care for other parents.
This introductory chapter considers the relationships of mutuality between parents and algorithms in in digital societies. It draws attention both to the inequalities of power between parents and platforms, as well as parents’ agency in navigating everyday life and parenting, as mediated increasingly by algorithms. The chapter draws upon recent advances within user-centric algorithm studies as part of broader conversations with communications, sociology, critical data studies, and related fields. It introduces the methodological framework of the project as well as the 30 parents who took part in it. The introduction provides an overview of all chapters in the book, encompassing parents’ negotiations of search algorithms, their understandings of algorithms in their children’s lives, algorithms involved in sharing and sharenting, news recommendation algorithms, parents’ algorithm literacies, and parents’ hopes and fears about their children’s algorithmic futures.
This chapter explores contextual factors, dimensions, and key markers of parents’ algorithm literacies within a broader context of parenting and parenthood in a datafied age. The chapter draws on media and digital literacies scholarship to examine the competencies, conversations, and events that shape parents’ literacies with algorithmic interfaces. The chapter identifies four intersecting dimensions of parents’ algorithm literacies: algorithm awareness, technical competencies, critical capacities, and parents’ abilities to advocate for their own and their children’s best interests. The chapter notes that algorithm literacies are unequal, and shaped by the various resources and constraints parents face in their daily lives, also drawing attention to the power held by platforms and other institutions and the importance of holding them accountable.
This chapter considers parents’ engagement with the news, as the world in which they are raising children often appears replete with crises, risks, and much fodder for anxiety. The chapter unpacks parents’ negotiations of algorithmic news recommendations using the metaphor of the gateway, where parents’ behaviours as users, work as part of complex and wider aggregated environments, in the generation of fine-tuned and tailored news recommendations in a recursive loop. The chapter speaks of the gateway not as a site where parents’ agency dissipates, or where they are passive recipients of platform power. Instead, the chapter reveals the often fleeting and ephemeral strategies and tactics parents employ to negotiate news recommendations into their everyday parenting journeys. Parents’ practices of negotiating news recommendation algorithms ranged widely between some parents being very aware of algorithmic presence but not necessarily able to articulate its roles, and others actively training and tweaking things, to curate a particular view of the news for themselves. The chapter draws attention particularly to the role of time and the shaping role of children growing up, in terms of the changing rapport between algorithmic news recommendations and parents’ hopes and worries about their children.
In today's digital societies, parenting is shaped by algorithms daily - in search engines, social media, kids' entertainment, the news and more. But how much are parents aware of the algorithms shaping their parenting and daily lives? How can they prepare for children’s futures in a world dominated by data, algorithms, automation and AI?
This groundbreaking study of 30 English families sheds light on parents’ hopes and fears, their experiences with algorithms in searching, sharing and consuming news and information, and their awareness and knowledge of algorithms at large.
Looking beyond tech skills and media panics, this book is an essential read for social scientists, policy-makers and general readers seeking to understand parenting in datafied societies.
This chapter explores how parents navigate and interpret opaque and constantly evolving search algorithms, as they seek information, advice and support online. The chapter examines how parents make sense of, manage, and work within or against search algorithms across various platforms, positioning these as relational, rather than individual practices. Using several examples, the chapter illustrates how parents interpret search results and rankings, and how these interpretations function within the broader contexts of family, domestic labour, parenting cultures, and societal norms. The chapter speaks about engaging with search and search algorithms as a relational task, embedded in parents’ daily routines and interactions. It discusses how parents perceive the credibility and sequencing of search results, sometimes naturalising and personifying algorithms in their talk. The chapter argues that parents’ negotiation of search algorithms is a relational interpretative practice, involving complex interplays between commercial influences, family life, parenting cultures, platform power, and parents’ agency, however ephemeral, as users.
This chapter examines parents’ talk about algorithmic futures, particularly focusing on algorithms and automated decision-making within the public domain, as it unpacks parents’ hopes, fears, and current and planned actions. The chapter suggests that, while risks are perceived and managed individually, parents also present visions and hopes for the collective good, revealing expectations of institutions and stakeholders across various domains. The chapter draws out parents’ concerns about children’s visibility in algorithmic systems, including both invisibility and heightened visibility. The chapter highlights the binaries parents present between humans and technology, while articulating their preference for human intervention. Parents value the nuanced, complex, and potentially sometimes flawed input of humans, over the perceived coldness of algorithmic processes. The chapter notes how little was said, if at all, about the presence of human input and intervention behind the very systems of automation and datafication that parents appeared to critique. Parents’ talk reveals broader societal expectations for transparency, accountability, and ethical considerations in the deployment of data-driven technologies. The chapter outlines the importance of understanding these parental perspectives as part of centring the best interests of publics, amidst the increasing influence of algorithms in public and private life.
This chapter explores how parents perceive and interpret their children’s interactions with social media algorithms, drawing upon user-centric research on algorithms, as well as research on sharenting amidst datafication. The chapter focuses on parents’ understanding and subsequent strategies regarding platform algorithms in the context of their children’s lives. It identifies four modes of understanding: misunderstanding the logics of platform algorithms, parking or delaying thinking about algorithms till children are older, understanding children’s and families’ relationships with platforms as transactional, and proactive stances in directly shaping children’s interfaces with algorithms. The chapter notes that the same parent might occupy different positions at different points in their child-raising journey, or indeed, in relation to different platform environments. The chapter argues that parents’ sometimes flawed perceptions of their children’s interactions with algorithms should be examined not through a lens of blame or individual parental responsibility, but within the broader contexts of the diverse resources and constraints families face.
Using the National Socialist Order ([NSO], previously known as the Atomwaffen Division), as a case study, it is argued that the academic and policy literature regarding the NSO tends to inflate the actual threat posed. Significantly, prevention and countering actions by this group seem to lack an evidence-based approach. This chapter addresses a gap in the literature on the NSO by engaging critically with the group’s literature and that of individuals influencing its activities, highlighting key indicators that evidence a reluctance for terrorist violence. Research conducted on the publication Siege by James Mason and NSO propaganda highlights how it propels neo-Nazis towards violent action; however, little evaluation has been conducted foregrounding the indications within both which steer the NSO’s membership away from violent activism. Drawing on Beck’s ‘risk society’ and Busher et al’s ‘internal brakes’ this study illustrates the tension between inflated perceptions of risk and actual threat.
