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.
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 introductory chapter sets the scene to the experiences of both Spanish host families and arriving Ukrainians by briefly looking at Russia and the Ukraine, and the general global geopolitical spectrum before making a few statements about how this unexpected study came about. Crucial to consider is the historical attachment between the Ukraine and Russia and how the more recent increase in tensions represent Russian concern for Ukraine’s drift towards democratisation and affiliation with the West, thus representing renewed geopolitical rivalry between major world powers. A focus point is how, within this contested relationship, and despite its democratisation, the Ukraine has historically been prone to continued oligarchic control and influence, high levels of corruption and elite crime.
This chapter considers what life was like for the Ukrainians before the invasion, what happened when they started to hear air raid sirens and missiles and bombs striking their cities and see Russian tanks in the streets. There is also a wider consideration of how rapid invasion invited the rapid intervention from Western powers, subsequently backed by powerful arms producers, eager to take advantage of another war for profit motives. The chapter also considers why the Ukrainians decided to leave in early March 2022 – because many conversely stayed – and how they ended up finding me on a hosting website. Their decision to leave the Ukraine is also framed in reports and articles which consider more widely the Ukrainian refugee exodus: where the millions went and how they were received by European countries. Lastly, the chapter introduces some of the Spanish host families and their motives to ‘help’ in the housing and support of the Ukrainians.
Within a year, my town’s time supporting Ukrainians was over: a brief flirtation with what it meant to fully engage in integrating and supporting refugees from a war-torn country. Since then, the council’s exploitative subcontractors found other migrant workers from Morocco to work the land for pittance, the mayor got re-elected and the experience of welcoming the Ukrainians seemed like a distant experience for the townspeople. In this final chapter, an update is provided two years into the conflict on the whereabouts of the Ukrainians who came to Brunete.
Within six months, the solidarity and willingness to help the Ukrainian families had wilted away and the collective support became burdensome for the Spanish host families. Additional resentment had even crept into a few households when two of the women employed in the exploitative manual labour sectors had got additional cash-in-hand jobs and were earning more than the Spanish host family households, thus interfering with the ideological pecking order. Almost all the Ukrainians had left Brunete and there remained only a few Ukrainian families in the town so this chapter looks at their slow exile as well as where some of the Ukrainians went and why. Most families went back to the Ukraine, often returning to the same risky areas from which they had fled. While there seemed to be a few success stories, in the main, the majority of others who went to other European countries simply sidestepped into similar exploitative working conditions even if they reconciled that things could always ‘improve elsewhere’.
This book documents the intimate lives of Ukrainians as they fled their homeland in search of a safe and stable place to stay. The critical memoirs follow the lives of 16 Ukrainian families in a small Spanish town near Madrid and the local families that volunteered to host them during a time of limited state support and clear EU plan for the refugees.
Through first-hand testimonies, social media messages and photographs, the book reveals the scarring realities of the Ukrainians’ upheaval, displacement and trauma alongside the well-meaning sacrifices made by the host families which quickly mutate into moralistic and meritocratic expectations of their new guests.
In doing so, the book offers a vivid portrayal of how the tensions of war and displacement play out in real life in real time.
This chapter charts how the initial sentiment of solidarity for the Ukrainian families quickly started to subside, leaving in its place a cancerous antipathy which was to form the foundations for more instability for the Ukrainian families. Cultural differences become magnified in the shared spaces, which are exacerbated by the meritocratic expectation for the Ukrainians to ‘get work’ and ‘be independent’. This is all further aggravated by the increasing costs of living, which the Spanish host families attribute to the Ukrainians and their presence – though wider global disruptions to markets and supply chains are more to blame. Two Spanish hosts, in particular, start to become more vocal about the ‘perceived’ lack of appreciation from the Ukrainians in the face of these new challenges and they start to ditch their own support for the Ukrainian cause. ‘Trending solidarity’ is a concept I use to describe this emotive attachment to help coupled with the brittle commitment to see it through.
In this chapter, the Ukrainians’ arrival and early introduction to Spain and Spanish cultural life is documented. On their arrival, my small hometown was simultaneously swelling with other Ukrainian guests so segments of their life in the Ukraine and their journey are also described here, giving particular attention to the invasion and their immediate departure from their country. There is a stoic feeling among the Ukrainians in this period which relates to their inherent belief that they will prevail against the Russians and it is this resistance which feeds their rejection of the ‘refugee’ label, particularly when it was mentioned in reference to being ‘poor’ or ‘needy’. This chapter looks at these feelings as the Ukrainians start to engage with the relevant systems to register themselves for temporary ID, access to healthcare and find out about the lack of state handouts.
As the dystopian honeymoon period started to diminish, Oksana and her family, as well as the growing number of Ukrainians in Brunete, assumed the mountainous administrative tasks that now loomed on the horizon. Relief that safety had been achieved was replaced by a panging guilt and a reluctant necessity to obtain things which symbolically confirmed they now resided in another country. It was at this point that the cultural integration began but also simultaneously started to end at the same time. In this chapter, I consider how early steps were taken towards learning the language, finding work and adapting to cultural life in Spain. Work, in particular, is at best limited and generally bound to exploitative conditions. Some get cash-in-hand jobs cleaning houses while a pool of eight are contracted out, working long hours for low pay maintaining public spaces for a private company subcontracted by the local council. This compromises their childcare and puts pressure on a few people like myself to step in to further support the families. Here we also therefore account for some of the other Ukrainians and their experiences in this true-to-life storybook.
Inequality is an ever-present danger in our society. This important book addresses the crucial nexus between the lived experience of inequality and how it shapes political responses.
With contributors from the UK and Continental Europe, the book compiles case studies with theoretically informed discussions of the relationship between affective polarisation, social inequality and the fall-out from Brexit and COVID-19. Using a broad concept of social inequality, the book incorporates aspects of economy and society, language and emotion culture as well as interviews and film in historical and transnational perspective.
The contributors offer a powerful examination of the ways in which the politics of the UK and the lived experiences of its residents have been reframed in the first decades of the 21st century.
The films I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019) by director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty make for a viable case study to investigate social, economic and political divisions in contemporary Great Britain, not least because social realist cinema is strongly interrelated with the contexts from which it emerges. While the films do not address Brexit or the COVID-19 pandemic on their story levels, they highlight social divisions and problems that have resulted from a decade of austerity politics. Creating vignette narratives of the everyday realities among the White working classes in northern England, the films show characters struggling to survive in a society shaped by neoliberalism and global capitalism. What keeps the protagonists going is a dissatisfaction with their ways of life, their anger at the status quo and a sense of injustice.
