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.
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).
This chapter explores the emergence in recent decades of so-called ‘new essentialist’ theories of property which seek to re-establish the idea of property as thing-ownership. This particular chapter focuses on the work of the new essentialists operating from within the analytical jurisprudential tradition. It notes the highly abstract nature of much of this work: it seeks to abstract both from specific sets of property institutions and from different kinds of resources (personal possessions/productive resources; tangible/intangible property). It notes that this work tends to universalise some of the specific features of the property institutions of modern capitalist societies and, as a result, tends to naturalise private property in all resources and to legitimate the property status quo. This work also tends to be underlain by an implicit account of how our property system operates that is ideological and inaccurate.
This chapter looks at the ‘new essentialist’ theories of property that have emerged from within law-and-economics. It begins by looking at the perceived threat to private property rights in productive resources posed by the increasingly social nature of productive activity and the rise of the modern public corporation. In this context, it looks at the attempts by early exponents of law-and-economics to reconceptualise the public corporation as a (private) nexus of contracts; at the reconcentration of shareholdings in financial institutions; at the reassertion from the 1980s of shareholder primacy (in the new guise of ‘shareholder value maximisation’); and at the highly financialised nature of contemporary corporate governance. It moves on to critique the information-cost theory of property developed by Merrill and Smith, arguing that it too ignores the empirical realities of property and provides a deeply misleading and ideological account of how our property system actually works.
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 looks at the difference between property considered to be wealth and property that is not, examining what has been called the ‘dual nature’ of property and the distinction drawn by some theorists between private property in personal possessions and private property in productive resources. As historians and anthropologists have shown, this is a distinction that has often been drawn in empirical reality. This prefaces a discussion of the nature of capital and of the historical emergence and content of the concepts of ‘capital’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘capitalism’. Capital, it is argued, is property which is ‘invested’ in search of a pecuniary return, hence the idea of ‘property-as-capital’.
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.
