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 3 further explores neoliberalism’s interest in ‘aspirational politics’, encouraging us to think of who we want to be, not who we actually are, thus misjudging our needs and political interests, with alienating and divisive results. Neoliberalism doesn’t only divide us from others but also sets up conflicts and divisions within us, isolating and damaging us and making us more reliant on chance. We’re encouraged to see ourselves as better than we are and others as worse. The result is isolating and damaging. Finally, we return to neoliberal approaches to causation and solution and their individualistic, disconnecting and self-blaming logic.
The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.
Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.
Chapter 7 chapter moves from the macro to the micro, while retaining a focus on connecting the personal and the political. Before looking at how the personal may change the political, we consider the impact of neoliberalism on intimacy as a case study. We explore neoliberalism’s effects on emotions, including intimacy, how it uses them and responds to the emotional world. We see the consequences for intimacy of neoliberalism’s reliance on the market, commodification and exchange relationships. We focus particularly on three international contexts where the two come into close relation: social care, pornography and a high-profile start-up company, OneTaste.
Chapter 8 looks at how people have tried to oppose neoliberal politics and ideology and why the traditional strategies adopted have been unsuccessful, suggesting that a radically different approach is now needed. The big so far unanswered question is how do we get rid of neoliberalism? The suggestion here is that neither acquiescence to it, opposing it with grand theory, nor seeking support by returning to old welfare state ideas is likely to offer a way forward. More root and branch renewal involving us all is required and we focus on what that might look like.
Chapter 18 concludes the book, identifying key themes and outlines next steps for renewal. While confirming neoliberalism’s bankruptcy, it treats with caution growing suggestions that we’re seeing its end. The book calls instead for us to work for and reconnect through a new participatory and sustainable politics. It sets out a series of principles drawing on ideas from new social movements (NSMs) and beyond, which offer means and ends for a reconceived participatory and sustainable politics, reconnecting us with ourselves, each other and the planet.
We look here at some of the consequences of such neoliberal politics for us and our relations with each other. We are divided and set against one another, using fear, snobbery, ‘othering’ and internalised oppression to divide and rule by encouraging a diversionary culture of blame, fear and suspicion among us. We see how such a division works. A range of out-groups are regularly stigmatised in right-wing ideology and media. Many disempowered groups are thus stereotyped – from refugees to disabled people, unemployed people to teenage mothers, undermining our fellow-feeling and increasing social dislocation.
Chapter 15 focuses on the need for more equal and inclusive education as part of our move to an inclusive and egalitarian politics, exploring different philosophies of education. It calls into question a neoliberal approach to knowledge development based on social control. The chapter considers the importance of education for change, framing it in terms of liberation and inclusion, which extend beyond school to lifelong and emancipatory approaches to learning. It offers a series of international examples of such a pedagogic and anti-racist approach, exploring the ideas of Freire, Fanon and James Baldwin.
Chapter 3 highlights the contradiction of how a politics and ideology – neoliberalism – which seems to benefit very few, has achieved widespread support internationally over a long period. We see how this has happened with consent and deception through the manipulation of ideology and new technology. We explore our distant relationship with ideology and the recasting of politics through privileging the market. We introduce issues of communication, highlighting the growing gaps between formal politics and public understanding and political and personal values and moralities.
This chapter moves us on from the individual, to the global consequences of neoliberalism and its bedmate globalisation. It focuses on four key interconnected issues, all of which massively affect our lives. It also develops a central concept in this book, making connections and connecting as human beings. The four issues addressed are pandemics, climate change and the future of the planet, technological change including artificial intelligence (AI), and war, conflict and terrorism. Each is highly controversial, all have life-changing implications for us all. While all have their own inherent major global effects, each in turn is related to and significantly influenced by neoliberal ideology.
