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 1,500 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
In this chapter, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s psychoanalytically inspired works on (neo-)fascism and psychoanalytic theory to outline the threat of castration in contemporary capitalist societies on economic, interpersonal and bodily levels. I then explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened people’s castration anxieties on all three levels in a class- and gender-specific way. Finally, I expose how the right extremist president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the right extremist leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, Norbert Hofer, utilised castration anxieties in their psychologically oriented tricks to strengthen their base and capture new followers.
One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown), to name but a few. This generalised state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making. In this chapter, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Just like standard, spatial cases of disorientation, the non-spatial forms of disorientation prevalent in the current crisis consist in the mismatch between our frames of reference and our immediate experience, and they result in anxiety, helplessness and isolation, but also in the possibility of re-orienting. The current crisis provides a unique environment in which to study non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, existing knowledge about spatial disorientation can shed light on the shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust fear into the heart of political debate and policy making. In the wake of the pandemic, it is critical to clarify the role of fear in these processes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to learn crucial lessons for future crises.
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives from leading and emerging scholars in politics, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the book enables a better understanding of post-pandemic politics for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
This chapter presents results from a comparative and qualitative discourse-historical analysis of governmental crisis communication in Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Sweden, during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown from March 2020 to May 2020 (a ‘discourse strand’). By analysing a sample of important speeches and press conferences by government leaders (all performing as the ‘face of crisis management’), it is possible to deconstruct a range of discursive strategies announcing/legitimising restrictive measures in order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic where everybody is in danger of falling ill, regardless of their status, position, education and so forth. I focus on four frames that have been employed to mitigate the ‘dread of death’ (Bauman, 2006) and counter the ‘denial of death’ (Becker, 1973/2020): a ‘religious frame’, a ‘dialogic frame’, a frame emphasising ‘trust’, and a frame of ‘leading a war’. These interpretation frameworks are all embedded in ‘renationalising’ tendencies, specifically visible in the EU member states where even the Schengen Area was suddenly abolished (in order to ‘keep the virus out’) and borders were closed. Thus, everybody continues to be confronted with national biopolitics and body politics (Wodak, 2021).
In their chapter, ‘The Collective Disorientation of the Covid-19 Crisis’, Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati (2021) reflect on the ‘multifarious state of disorientation’ that many of us have found ourselves in during the pandemic. They provide a rich and insightful account, which ties together complementary strands of research in various disciplines. In particular, they do an excellent job of bringing phenomenology into dialogue with relevant findings in the cognitive sciences. The term ‘disorientation’ can be used to describe a range of experiences, arising in contexts that include illness, bereavement and loss, political change, and migration. What might these experiences have in common? For instance, how does feeling spatially disoriented in unfamiliar surroundings resemble disorientation in the face of political upheaval? In an earlier study of disorientation, Harbin (2016: 13–17) settles for family resemblance between the various forms of disorientation. Instead, Fernández Velasco, Perroy and Casati seek to identify a feature shared by all. Disorientations, they propose, involve a feeling stemming from the ‘evaluation and regulation of processes integrating frames of reference pertaining to a variety of domains’. I have some sympathy with this overall approach and accept that all disorientations may well share something in common. However, in what follows, I want to draw a distinction between two importantly different types of disorientation (both of which accommodate considerable variety). This will involve further reflecting on the interpersonal and social dimensions of disorientation. In finding our way around different ‘domains’, from the spatial to the political, we do not rely exclusively on internalised frames of reference.
This chapter distinguishes between the experiences of Black Americans and white Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this different experience relates to fear. This chapter ultimately argues that policymakers ought to fund the collection and analysis of race-based data, as it pertains to COVID-19, and that these policymakers ought to appeal to the findings of this race-based data to guide their policy and implementation strategy. Without gathering or appealing to such data, policymakers are being negligent in working to protect their constituents.
I distinguish fear from fright and explore the role of both in the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that fear generates strong public demands for protection and that these pressures can constrain or enable leaders depending on the circumstances, capabilities, but above all, their framing of the problem. I focus more on countries that performed badly because their leaders failed to gather or evaluate relevant information. To explain this behaviour I draw on motivational psychology and political ideology. My accounts are merely suggestive as they are not the result of data gathered from carefully paired and exhaustively researched cases. I conclude by offering reflections on four of the six propositions offered by the editors in their introduction.
In both popular culture and academe, renewed interest in conspiracy theories (CTs) has followed in the wake of the recent global rise of far-right extremism. Examples abound: allegations that Hilary Clinton ran a child-trafficking ring from a Washington pizza parlour gained momentum during the 2016 US elections; survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 have been portrayed as crisis actors hired to advance gun-prohibition policies; QAnon supporters aver that Donald Trump has defended US democracy against the ‘deep state’, namely political and economic elites that supposedly control democratically elected governments from behind the scenes; more recently, voter fraud accusations were raised to counter Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election; and during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has furthered theories that the virus was created in a laboratory in China to advance its plans of economic domination, while in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has championed smear campaigns against health authorities and the media, undermining their recommendations for masks and physical distancing. This overlap between CTs and far-right extremism is not that surprising for at least two reasons. On the one hand, CTs flourish in moments of stark social change because they serve as explanatory devices to make sense of events that threaten existing worldviews (Douglas et al, 2019). On the other, studies seem to suggest that right-wingers (and authoritarian ones at that) are more prone to foster conspiracy thinking due to their need to manage uncertainty which, in turn, provides grounds for extremism (Richey, 2017).
At the start of the pandemic, three of us came together out of shared concern for the place of emotions in politics and shared belief that many orthodoxies on fear as an instrument of public administration were just wrong. As the pandemic worked its way through communities and countries across the globe, it became increasingly clear that longstanding rejections of fear as a politically destructive or pre-political emotion failed to grasp the vital role it can play in enabling societies to deal with crises. We set out the ways in which key frames of analysis had been rendered inadequate by the pandemic. We argued that influential critiques of fear as anti-political, irrational, and borne of ignorance, were contradicted by examples of collective action, effective responses to real and concrete threats, and the central role of scientific information in framing the pandemic as a fearful threat (Degerman et al, 2020). Our conclusion was that, as a consequence, there was space for new scholarship on the politics of fear. This volume is the most substantive iteration of that work. COVID-19 reminded us of a truth apparent since our emergence as a species: we are animals vulnerable to communicable disease. In that context, it seems not just arrogant but ridiculous for human beings to have dismissed as pathological an evolutionary adaptation so vital for dealing with threats to existence. Fear stems from perception of threat and serves as a stimulus for action. It is not just a trigger of fight or flight.
To protect against COVID-19, the UK Government imposed a national lockdown that shut schools and business, and required people to stay at home. This lockdown instituted a social coordination problem: it demanded the individual bear a cost – a significant restriction to their movement – in order to achieve a collective good. Initially there were remarkably high levels of social compliance with the lockdown restrictions, but the Government defense of Mr. Cummings corresponded with a notable drop in both levels of compliance and levels of trust in government. By considering the logic of social coordination problems, this chapter offers an explanation as to why these drops in compliance and trust were to be expected.
