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.
Books: Research
This chapter presents a summary of the issues that are central to the book’s concern, its orientation, and the ground and arguments covered through the chapters.
This chapter outlines the main purpose and focus of the book. It sets the contextual scene for the debates that the subsequent chapters engage and establishes the main orientation to book takes. It charts debates over multiculturalism and its social and political relevance, including challenges to it that have suggested we are or should be post-multiculturalism as in past or beyond multiculturalism. It argues that despite these challenges, multiculturalism remains an important approach for thinking about diversity but that it does require critical self-reflective thinking in relation to the position and place of religion in society and politics. In this the chapter introduces the idea of post-multiculturalism as conceived for this book, which takes its lead from Habermas’s notion of the post-secular and indicates such a reflexive position. The chapter then provides an overview of the chapters and introduces the framework of post-multicultural recognition that the book develops.
This chapter discusses multiculturalism and religion. It discusses how prominent multicultural theorists have, or haven’t, included religion in relation to their frameworks and concerns and identifies a certain equivocation in this. It then suggests that one form of multicultural theorizing, the Bristol School of Multiculturalism, emanating from the British context, does include religion as a more central consideration. However, it argues that here too, there is a great deal of ambiguity in how religion is included. This then sets the ground from which the rest of the book and the development of the book’s post-multicultural recognition framework develop.
This chapter focuses on the issue of multiculturalism and religious identity. It first outlines multiculturalism’s concept of recognition in relation to social group identity, in both negative (ascribed) and positive (claimed) terms, and identifies the core concept for the Bristol School of Multiculturalism of ethno-religious. It argues that ethno-religious can represent a form of misrecognition of religious identities for two main reasons: in how the religious more often serves as a proxy for the ethnic and in questions of the adequacy of the notion of identity itself. It suggests the implications of this for wider considerations of public religion, which then sets up the subsequent chapters. In this, it begins to set out the argument of how the post- works in relation to the issue of identity, so core to multicultural theorizing, acknowledging the important overlaps but not conflating ethnic with religious identity categories (especially where the latter becomes reduced to the former) and the need to at times consider these categories separately and as distinct. Through this discussion the chapter also sets out the initial parts of the framework of recognition that this book develops.
What role and place, if any, religion should have in public, especially in public institutions, is a vexed issue. Secularists often see religion as something that can and should be separated from politics and public life. Multiculturalists, or at least some multiculturalists, take a different view and emphasize the public good of religion and state-religion connections, yet arguments from some political theologians ask critical questions of the character of these connections. Responding to these critiques, this chapter further elaborates the framework of post-multicultural recognition with a focus on institutional accommodations of difference and religious freedoms, and how this relates to support for and interference in religious groups as part of their recognition. This chapter explores the significance of this for thinking about the inclusion and accommodation of religion in the public institutions, and including discussion of faith schools and minority legal orders.
This book examines the evolving relationship between multiculturalism, religion and diversity in Western Europe, proposing a shift towards a post-multicultural approach to address religious and secular pluralism.
The author responds to criticisms of multiculturalism's approach to public religion, including perceived group reification and limited focus on intra-group domination, gender and sexuality equalities. Through a critical dialogue between multicultural theory and political theology, the book offers an original framework for post-multicultural recognition.
Enriching multiculturalism by integrating religious reason and institutional pluralism, this book contributes crucial new insights to debates on religion, equality and diversity in public life.
A major sub-theme of literature on religion and politics has been the issue of the permissibility of religious reasons and language in public and political debates. Yet, this is something that multiculturalists have said little about, and so this forms the central concern of this chapter. The chapter begins by developing its discussion in relation to Habermas’s well-known notion of the post-secular and debates around it, developing a post-multicultural position in relation to these debates.
The chapter addresses how a lack of dialogue has been a central point of critique of multiculturalism for some, but how this criticism overlooks that dialogue has been a central feature of the writings of figures such as Taylor, Parekh and Modood. It then discusses how dialogue is conceived by multicultural theorists, and building from Taylor’s discussion of Gadamer, the final piece of the framework of recognition is put into place: multilogue, which itself is crucial to how the framework as a whole operates.
The chapter then develops the character of multilogue through considering issues that have been significant points of debate and controversy in this area: free speech, hate speech and legitimate criticism, and the idea of religious literacy.
This chapter maps out recent developments in conceptualising abortion stigma. The chapter begins with the dominance of psychological and quantitative understandings of abortion stigma, and the tendency in this work to frame abortion stigma as a static attribute that one can possess or impose onto others. The remainder of the chapter offers alternative approaches to conceptualising abortion stigma that understand stigma as an operation of power. To do so, it proposes a typology of four ‘power-attendant’ approaches to understanding abortion stigma: discursive; intersectional; biopolitical; and embodied. The chapter explains how these overlapping approaches understand stigma as a regulatory function of power, often State-sanctioned, rather than an unfortunate social ill that might be solved by ‘raising awareness’. Understanding how abortion stigma is produced and maintained – that is, stigma as a productive and political concept (Tyler and Slater, 2018) – has material consequences globally for individuals, communities, and societies.
This chapter extends thinking about how stigmas emerge and change over time, arguing that a dynamic network theory best reflects the complex, local, and global processes of stigma change. At the core of ‘stigma mutation’ are three dimensions of stigma (Farrimond, 2021): lineage (how stigma emerges in relation to histories and other stigma); variation (how stigma changes in relation to culture or location); and strength (how stigma intensifies and/or weakens over time). The chapter argues that these dimensions are interrelated dynamically, allowing for multiple connections which are predictable (territorialised) and unpredictable (de-territorialised). This theory enables an understanding of why stigmas cluster around already marginalised groups, but also of how unexpected connections or events can disrupt stigma. This theory is illustrated using the example of long COVID stigma, which has emerged out of COVID-19 stigma, but has its specific lineage, variations, and strengths at this cultural moment.
Within social studies of health and illness, the concept of ‘stigma’ is often under-defined, used as vague catch-all term, and treated simply as an ever-present feature of particular illnesses/conditions. In this chapter, the authors argue that there is, therefore, a need to recalibrate stigma. The chapter begins by returning to Erving Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma, and particularly his contention that stigma is rooted in interactions and relationships. The chapter then turns to recent scholarship on rethinking the sociology of stigma (such as Scambler [2018] and Tyler [2020]), which attempts to recognise and study the political economy of stigma. From here, the authors outline their priorities for recalibrating stigma, namely, as operating at both the symbolic (micro) and structural (macro) levels in society. In so doing, they intend to rescue what is often lost or unaccounted for in current analyses of stigma, health, and illness.
