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

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The Democratic Republic of Capitalism

The ultimate expression of power is the ability to act beyond the confines of law, with contemporary society enabling elite groups to wield “panoramic power”. From the murderous crimes of the corporate giants that provide us with life’s luxuries and necessities to the data gathering activities of media and educational institutions, the authors offer new thinking on damaging structures of power and privilege.

This accessible book provides a comprehensive understanding of elite corporate wrongdoing, and the late capitalist society that enables harm, considering both how we got into this mess and how we get out of it.

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A Human Rights Approach

EPDF and EPUB available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

As many developing countries are facing increasingly higher levels of debt and economic instability, this interdisciplinary volume explores the intersection of sovereign debt and women's human rights.

Through contributions from leading voices in academia, civil society, international organisations and nations governments, it shows how debt-related economic policies are widening gender inequalities and argues for a systematic feminist approach to debt issues.

Offering a new perspective on the global debt crisis, this is an invaluable resource for readers who seek to understand the complex relationship between economics and gender.

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Human Rights, Law, and Society

This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery.

It illustrates how different disciplinary positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view and forms a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation.

Drawing from real-world examples across the world, this is a vital contribution to the study of modern slavery.

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Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush Scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston and racism within the police have all recently captured the public’s attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality, seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system.

This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law’s historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today.

Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.

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Children’s Rights and Resistance

Children in the Global South continue to be affected by social disadvantage in our unequal post-colonial world order. With a focus on working-class children in Latin America, this book explores the challenges of promoting children’s rights in a decolonizing context.

Liebel and colleagues give insights into the political lives of children and demonstrate ways in which the concept of children’s rights can be made meaningful at the grassroots level. Looking to the future, they consider how collaborative research with children can counteract their marginalization and oppression in society.

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With contributions from an international team of experts, this collection provides a much-needed international, comparative approach to mental capacity law.

The book focuses particularly on exploring substantive commonalities and divergences in normative orientation and practical application embedded in different legal frameworks. It draws together contributions from eleven different jurisdictions across Europe, Asia and the UK and explores what productive or unproductive values and practices currently exist.

By providing a detailed comparison of how legal and ethical commitments to persons with disabilities are framed in capacity law across different national systems, the book highlights the values and practices that could lead to changes that better respect persons with disabilities in mental capacity regimes.

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Perspectives on Rights to Participation
Authors: and

This much-needed volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding – the digital arena – in providing a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in supporting vulnerable adults online.

Providing an essential analysis illustrated by recent court rulings and case studies, the authors advocate for the effective support of adults with learning disabilities and/or mental capacity issues in their digital lives without compromising their privacy and participation rights.

The text balances a theoretical exploration of the tensions between participation and protection, legislation, human rights, professional biases and social wrongs. It encourages a critical approach in adopting both a practical and realistic understanding for policy makers, professionals and students in social work, law and adult social care.

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Legal, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives on Justice and Domination

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.

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Comparative perspectives on the right to education for minorities and disadvantaged groups

Thousands of children from minority and disadvantaged groups will never cross the threshold of a classroom. What can human rights contribute to the struggle to ensure that every learner is able to access high quality education?

This brilliant interdisciplinary collection explores how a human rights perspective offers new insights and tools into the current obstacles to education. It examines the role of private actors, the need to hold states to account for the quality of education, how to strike a balance between religion, culture and education, the innovative responses needed to guarantee girls’ right to education and the role of courts.

This unique book draws together contributors who have been deeply involved in this field from both developing and developed countries which enriches the understanding and remedial approaches to tackle current obstacles to universal education.

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Assessing the impact of reform
Authors: and

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.

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