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 book is a manifesto for change that showcases new policy ideas for the next government.
Organised by the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Labour Party’s legal think tank, the contributors inspire debate about Britain’s future, exploring a wide range of issues from access to justice to family law reform, housing, employment, EU and trade law, asylum and refugee law, immigration and citizenship, international law and constitutional reform.
As Britain may see a change in government, this book is a must-have collection of new insights into how a Labour government can renew Britain.
In this book, faith leaders, scholars and activists from around the globe provide their perspective on faith and abortion. They reflect on examples of faith organisations which have provided leadership on the issue as well as examining religious approaches from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and interfaith perspectives.
Challenging the assumption that all people of faith are anti-abortion, this book provides a counterpoint to right-wing faith perspectives and outlines how faith communities reimagine abortion as an issue of social, pastoral and theological concern.
Providing perspectives from the global North and South, it includes settings where abortion is legal, and where it is restricted, and settings where abortion stigma is ever-present to settings where abortion is normalised. It also demonstrates the complex connections between faith and abortion, how women and pregnant people are positioned in society and how morality is claimed and challenged.
Despite recent achievements in the South Korean economy and development within welfare institutions, new forms of precarious work continue to prevail.
This book introduces the concept of ‘melting labour’, which refers the blurring of boundaries between traditional forms of work and workplace and the dissolution of standard employment relationships. Presenting a theoretical framework at the intersection of ‘melting labour’ and institutional protection of workers, it addresses how and why the Korean welfare state has failed to protect precarious workers.
Based on rich, in-depth interviews with over 80 precarious workers in Korea, from subcontracted manufacturing workers to platform workers, it provides a real depiction of how workers lose control over their lives and experience precariousness in labour markets.
Even though legal aid is available for people seeking asylum, there is uneven access to advice across Britain.
Based on empirical research, this book offers fresh thinking on what has gone wrong in the legal aid market. It presents a rare picture of the barristers, solicitors and caseworkers practising immigration law in charities and private firms. In doing so, this book examines supply and demand and illuminates what constitutes high-quality legal aid work/provision, subsequent conflicts with financial rationality and how practitioners resolve these issues.
Challenging existing legal aid policy, this book presents innovative insights to ensure public service markets around the globe function well for all those involved.
At a time when gender diversity is gaining increasing public attention, this book presents a poignant account of the current policy approaches to self-determining sex and gender in the UK and beyond.
Davy shows how legal, medical and pedagogical policy developments are interconnected, while unique interviews with parents of sex/gender expansive children reveal how policy affects and is affected by experiences and advocacy.
Written by an internationally renowned scholar, this book sparks new debate on the challenges and opportunities surrounding sex/gender self-determination.
With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book reviews a wide range of existing and future policies across Europe.
Seventeen contributors provide case studies and legal, sociological and philosophical perspectives from around the continent, building a rich picture of welfare to work policies and their impact. They show how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination.
For anyone interested in the justice of welfare to work, this book is an important step along the path towards more fair and adequate legislation.
Originally introduced as a form of social welfare with near-universal eligibility, legal aid in the UK is now framed as a benefit external to the legal system and understood in primarily economic terms. This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy.
Written by experts in the field, it focuses on the rise in people representing their own legal case and argues that the reforms effectively ‘delawyerise’ disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process.
Arguing for a more holistic concept of the reforms, the book will be of relevance to students, academics, policy-makers, judges, campaigners and social workers, not just in England and Wales, but in other jurisdictions instituting cuts to their legal aid budgets, such as Australia, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
In a world dominated by austerity politics and policies, Advising in austerity provides a lively and thought-provoking account of the conditions, consequences and challenges of advice work in the UK, presenting a rare and rich view of the world of advice giving. Based on original research it examines how advisors negotiate the private troubles of those who come to Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) and construct ways forward. Exploring how advisors are trained, the strong contributor team reflect on the challenges facing Citizens Advice Bureaux in the future, where austerity will ensure that the need for advice services increase, while funding for such services declines.
