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.
This chapter draws together some of the common themes and areas of crossover produced by the individual contributors. The chapter reflects on some of the key issues identified throughout the book that warrant further investigation, utilizing an intersectional framework to enhance our understanding of such relevant topics. The aim is to centre criminological and Criminal Justice research that is conducted and analysed intersectionally, work that often remains on the margins of criminology in the United Kingdom. This chapter reflects on some of the core tenets of intersectionality and how these have manifested within individual chapters. These chapters are situated within issues of social inequality, social context and social justice. This chapter highlights the lack of intersectional, criminological research in the United Kingdom and calls for further intersectional work to be conducted.
This is the first collection dedicated to the use of intersectionality as theory, framework and methodology in criminological research.
It draws together contemporary British research to demonstrate the value of intersectionality theory in both familiar and innovative applications, including race, gender, class, disability, sexual orientation and age. Experts explore a range of experiences relating to harm, hate crimes and offending, and demonstrate the impacts of oppression on complex personal identities that do not fit neatly in homogenised communites.
Challenging conventional perspectives, it positions intersectionality firmly into the mainstream of criminology.
This edited collection showcases contemporary criminological studies that utilize intersectional frameworks. The collection highlights the utility of the concept of intersectionality and also addresses the current gap in literature on applying intersectionality to contemporary criminological studies in particular. Criminology as a discipline has been slow to employ the application of intersectionality to research, analysis and theory, and yet these chapters demonstrate the contribution it makes to our understanding of victims, perpetrators and social structures. It is at the forefront of feminist studies and this collection offers the opportunity for a long-overdue recognition of it within criminology. This edited collection therefore addresses a topical issue and serves as a strong reminder and evidence that identities cannot be reduced and understood along a single axis.
This edited collection showcases contemporary criminological studies that utilize intersectional frameworks. The collection highlights the utility of the concept of intersectionality and also addresses the current gap in literature on applying intersectionality to contemporary criminological studies in particular. Criminology as a discipline has been slow to employ the application of intersectionality to research, analysis and theory, and yet these chapters demonstrate the contribution it makes to our understanding of victims, perpetrators and social structures. It is at the forefront of feminist studies and this collection offers the opportunity for a long-overdue recognition of it within criminology. This edited collection therefore addresses a topical issue and serves as a strong reminder and evidence that identities cannot be reduced and understood along a single axis.
This chapter examines experiences of hate within neoliberal capitalism through the lens of the critical hate studies perspective. In acknowledging the messy nature of overlapping and multiple identities integral to the formation of the self, intersectionality provides the capacity to explore lived experiences that extend beyond the assumptions bound up within narrow conceptualizations of identity and uniformity of experience within a given category. The chapter draws upon two distinct in-depth, qualitative research projects with Gypsies and Travellers, and with Trans people. Through an appreciation of the intersectional nature of individuals’ identities, this chapter illuminates how contemporary neoliberal capitalism has co-opted oversimplified ideas of one-dimensional identities to the detriment of a full appreciation of the lived realities of victimization and harm, and has therefore both obfuscated attempts at appropriate and effective responses to the issue and been the cause of further harms in and of itself.
There are a variety of complex ways that violence directed towards identity manifests. Ray (2018) argues that violence takes many forms that include collective violence, self-directed violence, interpersonal violence and structural violence. Indeed, it is so entwined with the social world that it appears to be part of the human condition. This conceptual chapter conceives all forms of identity-based violence as belonging to a structure of oppression and marginalization that those targeted navigate as an everyday process. The trauma of such violence on those who are victimized – specifically for the identities they hold and present – is experienced intersectionally based on their social location. For instance, feminist developments have long argued that violence against women and girls is a tool of patriarchal oppression experienced across gendered, racial and class lines (Crenshaw, 1991). While victimological and criminological discourse has posited the nature of violence per se, few have theorized the nature of healing from such violence. Indeed, De La Rue and Ortega (2019) argue that women of colour are often more likely to be blamed for their victimization than white women as they are less likely to fit into the ideal victim model (Christie, 1986). Thus, in order to heal, one must consider the multiple layers of trauma and marginalization that both victims and perpetrators of crime must navigate. This chapter examines the nature of violence enacted against identity through an intersectional lens. The historical and contemporary traumas associated with identity-based violence are then explored, and by so doing this contributes to criminological debates on social harm and identity. It is argued that intersectional healing is gained through self and communal love, which can help marginalized people move towards personal and social justice.
Issues around gender identity have gained increasing prominence in the United Kingdom within academia, politics and social life. Transgender people have become the focal point of ‘debates’ surrounding ‘sex-based rights’ vs ‘gender-based rights’. Criminology has been slow to respond to the experiences of transgender people in relation to hate crime and discrimination, and has been overshadowed by issues relating to race, religion and faith, and sexuality. Possessing multiple, marginalized identities not only impacts upon transgender people’s experiences of hate and discrimination, but it also has material consequences for what social spaces and support services people can offer. This chapter provides an analysis of transgender people’s experiences of hate, discrimination and prejudice through an intersectional lens. The analysis presented in this chapter highlights how identity characteristics are imposed on transgender people as their ‘master identity’ within the context of different social spaces. As such, it is demonstrated how transgender people may be seen firstly as transgender and secondly as religious in particular contexts, but religious first and transgender as second in other. This will highlight the complex challenges that transgender people face when experiencing hate, but also in relation to accessing support and establishing a sense of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’.
This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which the prison estate in the United Kingdom has expanded so rapidly, locating the social and political influences that have resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of particular groups (Prison Reform Trust, 2005; McAvinchey, 2011). The chapter explores some of the issues identified within previous research examining how issues experienced within the prison system can be compounded by factors such as race, class, gender and sexuality (Van Hout, Kewley and Hillis, 2020; Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Cheliotis and Liebling, 2006). In doing so, this chapter calls for more empirical work to be done that explicitly engages with intersectionality as a framework and highlight the benefits of adopting this approach. In utilizing an intersectional framework, we will be able to better understand the unique, complex and nuanced experiences of those who are incarcerated.
Originating in the work of Crenshaw, in her ground-breaking feminist research on the multiple forms of discrimination and oppression experienced by African-American women (1991), intersectionality is more than a ‘buzzword’ of feminist researchers (Davis, 2008). Rather, contemporary researchers have utilized an intersectional approach to explore oppression not simply on the basis of gender and race but also of other sources of discrimination and oppression, such as class, sexual orientation and ability. This chapter charts the development of intersectionality, from the work of Black critical race scholars in the US to its global embrace within feminist academic literature and research. Within criminology, intersectionality is surprisingly late to embracing its utility, yet applying intersectionality advocates for a consideration of the multiple, intersecting layers of oppression or subordination, demonstrating how the impact and experiences of crime, deviance, social harm and inequalities can vary. Its approach to researching minority groups offers much to our constructions and interpretations of the meaning and consequences of multiple, structured and overlapping categories of identity, difference and disadvantage. This chapter provides the foundation for future sections to demonstrate how much intersectionality offers to contemporary criminological fields.
This chapter provides the historical background to intersectionality as a concept paying particular attention to its black feminist roots. The chapter then discusses how it might be possible to engage with intersectionality as a research practice, as white people. Lisa Overton sets forth the discussion as a white woman, and Joshua Hepple problematizes how to engage with a feminist term as a white man. As a queer femme white woman and as a gay disabled man we move into our shared yet very different research areas around sexualities, broadly exploring ‘gay bars’ and ‘queer entertainment venues’ with an intersectionalities lens. The chapter unpacks assumptions and lived realities of these spaces, demonstrating how sexualities intersect with race, gender, disability, class, access, age, space, autonomy, danger and even different ‘types’ of queer identities in very different ways, yet an intersectionalities lens reveals to us what can sometimes be hidden. The chapter explores the intersectionalities of our own identities through a section around positionalities.
