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 of over 1400 titles.
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
The last chapter provides a summary of the study’s main findings and highlights their theoretical significance. By including the input of migrant, non-migrating relatives, and migration and health service providers, the chapter addresses the relevance of taking this research into account for health and migration policymaking, and migrant advocacy and assistance transnationally. While acknowledging the study limitations, the chapter provides practical recommendations and emphasizes the urgency to advance migrant rights, collective health, and social justice across borders.
This chapter focuses on the 11 psycho-sociocultural mechanisms that migrants and non-migrating relatives utilized to cope with the effects of outward and return migration that were identified and conceptualized in the study of the Ecuadorean case in the context of other similar Latin American migratory processes. Disillusion adjustment, paralyzing nostalgia, motivating nostalgia, denied migrant health, normalization of malaise, pain encapsulation, well-being ideal, transgenerational goals, strategic return, settling readjustment, and involuntary return rebound are explained including significant portions of stories of health and migration shared by research participants in individual and group interviews and community workshops. The psycho-sociocultural coping mechanisms are explained in relation to one another and health processes, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health, and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter introduces the research project by explaining the relationship between migration and health, the particularities of the Ecuadorean case, and the unique interdisciplinary and critical theoretical and methodological angle of the study. Moreover, it maps the conceptual framework that emerged from the transnational investigation of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain, and back, and highlights its contribution to the body of literature on health and migration. Finally, it provides a detailed account of the sample of migrants, non-migrating relatives, and health and migration service providers from which the research was developed, a reflection on activist research and ethics, and outlines the rest of the book.
Drawing from an activist research project spanning Loja, Santo Domingo, New York, New Jersey, and Barcelona, this book offers a feminist intersectional analysis of the impact of migration on health and well-being.
It assesses how social inequalities and migration and health policies, in Ecuador and destination countries, shape the experiences of migrants. The author also explores how individual and collective action challenges health, geopolitical, gender, sexual, ethnoracial, and economic disparities, and empowers communities.
This is a thorough analysis of interpersonal, institutional, and structural mechanisms of marginalization and resistance. It will inform policy and research for better responses to migration’s negative effects on health, and progress towards greater equality and social justice.
This chapter focuses on the seven health processes triggered by migration that were identified and conceptualized in the study of the Ecuadorean case in the context of other similar Latin American migratory processes. Reflective mourning, active migrant trauma, passive migrant trauma, migratory stress, migrant crises triggers, return shock, and unrecognized migratory resilience are explained through excerpts from stories of health and migration shared by migrants and non-migrating relatives in individual and group interviews and community workshops as well as quantitative and qualitative data collected through surveys. The health processes are explained in relation to one another and psycho-sociocultural coping mechanisms, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health, and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter explains how migrants and non-migrating relatives dealt with the relational effects generated by outward and return migratory processes, which included novel family dynamics, members, ties, and conflicts. The psycho-sociocultural mechanism of family de/re-construction, at the core of migrants’ and relatives’ ability to cope with their altered family realities, is analyzed together with the set of five complementary mechanisms of communication distortion, subordination to concealment and deception, unspoken pacts, resentment and detachment, and sensible comprehension. This chapter incorporates significant portions of stories of health and migration from individual and group interviews and community workshops held during the transnational research. Post-migration family coping mechanisms are explained in relation to other mechanisms and health processes, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter explores how migrants and non-migrating relatives interact with formal border politics, including geographical boundaries between countries; national and international policies regarding migration, residency, and citizenship; and racial/ethnic, gender/sexual, class, and other intersecting social structures and practices of inequality in places of origin, transit, and destination. Migrants and non-migrating relatives learn how to navigate formal border politics and can maintain, recreate, contest, and change them. In doing so, they enact their own informal border politics. When these informal border politics result in challenging and dismantling formal border politics, a transformative border politics is unearthed. By including significant portions of stories of health and migration from individual and group interviews and community workshops held during the transnational research, this chapter shows how migrants and non-migrating relatives traverse, rework, and transcend geopolitical, gender/sexual, ethnoracial, and socioeconomic borders.
This concluding chapter reflects on what the next steps might be for social scientists and humanities scholars interested in using VR within projects. While VR is sometimes fiddly and frustrating to use, it can create ‘wow’ moments of experiencing a new type of environment. The key lesson discussed here is that significant research using VR can be undertaken without the apparent complexities of creating original content. Ethical researchers need to proceed with caution, however, particularly given the dominance of the consumer VR market by Meta, a corporation that minutely tracks the behaviour of consumers and erodes privacy. Nonetheless, given falling costs and increased ease of use, VR has great potential for application across a range of disciplines and topic areas to create tremendously innovative research.
This chapter examines the production of 360° photography and video as a simple means of creating original content for VR. Images from two or more cameras with fish-eye lenses are stitched together to make a photo sphere. When viewed through a head-mounted display, users can turn their heads and look around these images as if from a fixed point at the centre of the scene. The technology has become popular for virtual field tours, journalism and tourism, allowing users to explore a site in the round. Existing 360° content can be reused within research projects, but it is also relatively cost-effective and straightforward for researchers to generate their own materials for use within specific projects. The chapter explores how 360° content can be combined with other mechanisms for sensory stimulation in VR. We examine this through a case study of a pilot project examining therapeutic landscapes and how the well-being effects of exposure to nature might be reproduced and interrogated through 360° video and audio.
This chapter examines more complex forms of content creation for VR, including the use of games engines to program original materials. Rather than covering the specifics of coding and 3D design, the chapter reflects on different approaches to building original content, including opportunities for collaboration with skilled practitioners. In exploring why researchers may wish to develop original VR materials, the chapter reflects on two overlapping types of projects: those testing specific scenarios with participants and those exposing users to novel environments. The chapter then reflects on a case study where we created very simple VR content featuring two historic landscapes for use in a workshop examining memory and memorialisation.
