Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the 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.
Chapter 1 reflects on the difficulty of transforming unequal organizational settings into more equal and socially just spaces. This critical reflection is crucial, as it clarifies what to avoid when practicing diversity. Drawing on critical diversity, gender, and race literature, the chapter identifies three interconnected blockages that obstruct most efforts to change the inhospitable nature of organizational settings, largely because they fail to address the systematic nature of inequality. First, it discusses the pervasive influence of the neoliberal discourse, which drives instrumentalization and individualization within organizational life. Next, it explores how entrenched societal stereotypes and stigmas extend into organizational settings, perpetuating subtle forms of discrimination. Finally, it analyses the limitations of current diversity initiatives, which struggle to transform inhospitable organizational spaces due to their neutral, instrumental, individual, and cognitive nature.
The Conclusion presents the distinct proposal of practicing diversity with an explicit aim towards social transformation. Drawing on critical practice theory, queer theory, and the integrated research case within the dance world, it combines the conditions of possibility developed in earlier chapters into a politics of organizational worldmaking oriented at multiplicity. The Conclusion begins by revisiting what not to do when practicing diversity, to then introduce the politics of organizational worldmaking that consists of three spaces: a problematizing space, an experimental space, and a collaborative space. Each space is described through an evocative account and a schematic box outlining various dimensions, highlighting each space’s role in worldmaking: an experiential moment of exploration, a playful moment of experimentation, and a collaborative moment of engagement.
This introduction outlines the authors’ reflexive positioning to explain to the reader the premises of their distinct proposal to reimagine the practicing of diversity. It highlights three aspects of epistemic positionality that shaped the proposal’s development. First, it addresses the authors’ personal research experiences, showing how their engagement with the history of diversity and the theoretical turns in social science informs the proposal. Next, it discusses the proposal’s metatheoretical foundation, emphasizing the importance of a relational ontology that highlights the non-binary, performative aspects of social life. Finally, the introduction shares the imaginary endorsed in the book, focusing on the central concepts of multiplicity, its affective layer, and the importance of future worldmaking. It concludes with an overview of the book’s organization.
Chapter 4 presents an integrative research case within the dance world to illustrate and further develop the conditions of possibility for practicing diversity differently. It documents how multiplicity was enabled in three dance productions while simultaneously striving for social transformation within the dance field, ultimately resulting in organizational worldmaking. The case demonstrates how meaningful change can begin with small, personal actions that, over time, evolve into a collective practice. The chapter introduces the case by discussing its purposiveness of bringing diversity to the world of dance, the three practices – mixing, inverting, and affirming – that jointly, over time and space, contribute to playful worldmaking through affective attunement among diverse bodies, the affordances of materiality for experiencing the possibility of worldmaking, and the emergence of a new organizational setting, which serves as an example of organizational worldmaking.
How can diversity be practiced without reinforcing the very inequalities it aims to dismantle?
In this book, Maddy Janssens and Chris Steyaert address this pressing question by critically examining the assumptions behind current diversity initiatives and turning to critical practice theory and queer theory for novel insights. Through imaginative concepts, inspiring illustrations, and an integrative case study within the dance world, the authors articulate the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a fresh, impactful alternative. This book advocates for a shift from individual efforts to collective practices, proposing a politics of organizational worldmaking oriented at multiplicity – a practicing of diversity that aspires to transformative change into livable and just work lives.
As a first theoretical inspiration, Chapter 2 examines how critical practice theory can guide diversity scholars and practitioners to rethink the practicing of diversity. Drawing on practice theory’s processual view on organizing, it introduces new concepts to the field of diversity and reconceptualizes the possibility of multiplicity as the net effect of practices and their associations or nexus. The chapter then illustrates the potential of practice theory for advancing the practicing of diversity through three research examples, demonstrating how the ends of practices, material arrangements, and the nature of the association among the practices are critical in organizing differences. Building on these concepts and examples, the chapter concludes by articulating three conditions of possibility that support the organizing of multiplicity.
Chapter 3 introduces queer theory as a second theoretical perspective to guide diversity scholars and practitioners rethink the practicing of diversity. Drawing on queer theory’s ontological, phenomenological, and political tenets, it proposes a new approach to address identity-related concerns in organizational settings – one that avoids reinforcing reified, negative representations of individuals and groups. The chapter advocates for conceptualizing identity as the formation of a multiplicitous self, acknowledging feeling and knowing otherwise, and viewing transformation as a process of disidentification and worldmaking. It then demonstrates the potential of queer theory through three arts-based examples, illustrating how to possibly live and work along these three tenets. Finally, building on the tenets and examples, the chapter concludes by articulating three conditions of possibility that further support the reimagination of practicing diversity.
This chapter considers how UK university audit processes work, how much interpretive agency academics have in implementation, and the possibility of doing higher education differently, including through being bureaucratically cheeky. Using feminist abolitionist and university abolition work as inspiration, this concluding chapter then imagines what universities might look like after audit, providing four principles for audit abolition and an encouragement to fundamentally reimagine universities in the pursuit of liberatory learning spaces.
This chapter provides an overview of how UK higher education and university audit culture work, situating the project in the broader critical and feminist literature about how UK universities are neoliberalising and exclusionary institutions. The governance and funding structure of UK higher education is briefly explained and put into an international context and the key concepts of precarity, meritocracy, and accountability are introduced.
This chapter examines UK higher education government research funding through an in-depth analysis of the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant application process. Institutional Ethnography concepts are used to analyse the key guidance texts in this application process, alongside interviews with social science applicants. The concept of intentional institutional capture is used to analyse how applicants translate their research into fundable applications using a mixture of technical and academic literacies with the support of professional research officers. The precarious UK higher education sector and the myth of meritocracy are examined as key contextual factors which inform the imperative to apply for highly competitive, low-success funding schemes.
