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.
In Chapter 10, the relationship between art and the gift is discussed. It is argued that aesthetic experiences can lead to more freedom and self-determination. Without freedom, alterity, and imagination there can be neither gift relationships nor aesthetic experiences. Art, too, ultimately builds on the aesthetic dimensions inherent to the gift. And in some projects, such as those pursued by the Invisible Committee, the poetics and politics of the gift merge.
World history is peppered with population displacements, forced migrations, and expulsions, and European colonialism was implicated in the forced movement of countless people from the 15th century onwards. The founding of many instruments of international law dealing with forced migration, including the current international refugee regime, were drafted by imperial powers and informed by colonial logics, including ideas of racial hierarchy and civilizational difference. While colonialism may seem, to some, as something of the past, this book argues that colonial logics and assumptions about the world and the various peoples who inhabit it, continues to shape the present in profound ways. This book contributes to an emergent research agenda on postcoloniality and forced migration by bringing forth a thoroughly interdisciplinary collection of chapters dealing with postcolonial contexts from around the world. It explores various histories and geographies of colonial-era forced migration, and the ways in which their legacies continue to shape displacements and our responses to them today. It unsettles presentist and Eurocentric epistemologies, and offers novel insights into the colonial continuities within forced migration governance across the world. In this way, this book urges refugee and forced migration studies, and migration studies more generally, to begin to take seriously the influences of colonialism.
The project of a politics of the gift points to the domain of civil society, the subject-matter of Chapter 9. Practices of conviviality are mostly self-organized, emerge beyond the grasp of markets and state, and are frequently utopian in character. Such utopian practices may best be put to the test, and eventually realized, in social experiments.
Whoever speaks of the gift cannot remain silent about value, commodity, and money, the interconnections of which are the subject of Chapter 6. Following Mauss and Karl Polanyi, it is demonstrated that non-capitalistic gifts foster the capitalist economic process. No economy can do without gifts given for free; in fact, it is the non-symmetry and non-equivalence inherent to the gift that form the very basis of our coexistence. Even money contains aspects of gift giving, and it is these aspects that would become more important in a reformed money system.
Finally, in the conclusion, current developments like the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. While a convivialist transformation of society is badly needed, it will doubtless take some time to accomplish it—time that humanity has almost run out of. Therefore, the mission must be to fight for a cultural and political change that is as broad and swift as possible, and that includes positive visions for a new, convivial society.
World history is peppered with population displacements, forced migrations, and expulsions, and European colonialism was implicated in the forced movement of countless people from the 15th century onwards. The founding of many instruments of international law dealing with forced migration, including the current international refugee regime, were drafted by imperial powers and informed by colonial logics, including ideas of racial hierarchy and civilizational difference. While colonialism may seem, to some, as something of the past, this book argues that colonial logics and assumptions about the world and the various peoples who inhabit it, continues to shape the present in profound ways. This book contributes to an emergent research agenda on postcoloniality and forced migration by bringing forth a thoroughly interdisciplinary collection of chapters dealing with postcolonial contexts from around the world. It explores various histories and geographies of colonial-era forced migration, and the ways in which their legacies continue to shape displacements and our responses to them today. It unsettles presentist and Eurocentric epistemologies, and offers novel insights into the colonial continuities within forced migration governance across the world. In this way, this book urges refugee and forced migration studies, and migration studies more generally, to begin to take seriously the influences of colonialism.
Chapter 5 revisits Mauss and recalls his political activism. A socialist who championed individual freedoms and democracy, his political arguments have lost none of their relevance. They are of value especially to current concepts of post-growth and a solidarity economy, which defy the traditional dichotomy of capitalism vs. state socialism. While the principle of the gift is of utmost importance in interpersonal relationships, it can have just as much impact in the realm of the economy.
It is argued in Chapter 8 that nature does not have to be regarded as mere material, as a passive “resource” that is at the disposal of humanity. The new materialism as well as some novel approaches within the sciences already transcend this traditional view, and in the era of the Anthropocene it indeed makes sense to talk about the gifts of nature. Once we conceive of nonhuman beings as quasi-subjects, we will be able to forge alliances with “Gaia,” and a new politics of the gift can come into being.
Chapter 3 temporarily leaves the Maussian gift and makes a detour leading towards the alternative anthropology of the homo donator. In particular, Mauss’ approach will be contrasted with the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. A model of human action is here developed that breaks with utilitarianism and the Western idea of a subject-object dualism. Moreover, it integrates affects and affective valuations into the action model, and addresses the problems of intersubjectivity, empathy, cooperation, and prosociality, drawing conclusions for normative democratic theory.
The introduction of the book launches the themes of the volume. It presents the social and ecological double crisis of capitalism and explains how a politics of conviviality, based on Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift, can offer an alternative positive vision of living together.
