Textbooks

 

Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.

Our content is fully searchable and can be accessed on and off-campus through Shibboleth, OpenAthens or an institutional authenticated IP. For any questions on digital textbook pricing and subscription information, please contact simon.bell@bristol.ac.uk.

We are happy to provide digital samples of any of our coursebooks by completing this form. To see the full collection of all our core textbooks, browse our main website.
 

Books: Textbooks

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Interactive Documentary as a Research Method
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Interactive documentaries, or i-docs, are web based, multimedia documentaries that immerse audiences through dynamic, interactive platforms. This book unlocks the value of i-docs as a creative research method, providing an engaging guide on how to use i-docs to examine and communicate research subjects.

With examples, conceptual discussion, and practical advice, the book explores how i-docs can illuminate topics including temporalities, power and space, affect and feeling, freedom, and epistemic justice. The book addresses i-docs as a digital form but also shows that even just planning an i-doc on paper can open up new analytical perspectives.

Key features of the book include:

- An easy to use template for planning your own i-doc;

- Advice on how researchers can ‘think with i-docs’ without even producing one;

- Discussion of methodological work with i-docs including participatory i-doc making;

Insights into a range of examples of commercial, activist and research i-docs from around the world.

This book is a valuable resource for scholars, students, community researchers, creatives and activists who want to enlist and ignite the possibilities of i-docs.

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A Simple Introduction
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Covering a range of important social theorists – from W.E.B. Du Bois to Judith Butler – this accessibly written textbook encourages critical thinking and critical approaches to social work, providing an entry point for anyone interested in thinking theoretically about practice.

Key features include:

  • essential terms explained throughout;

  • end-of-chapter prompts to promote further thinking from students;

  • suggestions for further reading complete with commentary; and

  • companion website with links to videos, a lesson plan and additional resources.

Written for introductory audiences and experts alike, this book will appeal to students studying social work or other related social and allied professions at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as practitioners engaged in professional development.

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Second Edition

The second edition of this best-selling book provides an essential guide to best practice in adult safeguarding. It has been updated to include recent legislative, guidance and research-based developments and relates them to useful practice examples.

Featuring new support materials and key case studies, it includes:

  • a focus on working with marginalised groups under the safeguarding and prevention duties, including ‘transitional’ safeguarding;

  • an exploration of best practice in light of changes to national guidance and research;

  • findings from a range of Safeguarding Adult Reviews with reflections on the outcomes of two national (England) Safeguarding Review Audits; and

  • an expansion of the concepts of professional curiosity and trauma informed/aware approaches.

Students and practitioners are guided to reflect on practice and to extend their skills, knowledge and values to become confident and competent in the complex area of adult safeguarding.

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A Practical Guide

This practical handbook provides a step-by-step guide for students who are new to phenomenography.

A qualitative research approach within the interpretivist paradigm, phenomenography explores the different ways in which humans conceive a phenomenon and ‘why’ and ‘how’ they do it. It is used in a wide range of academic subject areas from education to social work, physics and medicine. Today it is gaining popularity as a versatile and robust method with the aim of understanding other people’s perceptions.

Our practical guide features:

• advice on how to construct a phenomenographic research project;

• a thorough overview of the approach’s origins and its evolution;

• examples that show the influence it has across a range of subject and practice areas.

This book will empower readers in making informed decisions regarding the suitability of the phenomenographic approach for their research projects and provide them with the necessary tools to embark on their research journey.

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What It Is, and Why We Need It

This book injects a burst of energy into the sociology of work, offering a perspective that is both innovative and deeply informed.

Leading sociology of work scholar, Marek Korczynski, praises the discipline’s comprehensive approach to theory, its focus on uncovering power dynamics and its ability to reveal how social injustices often stem from workplace inequalities. Offering an accessible overview of the field, the book:

  • analyses both the social structures around work and the voice and agency of workers;

  • examines the role and impact of artificial intelligence at work; · provides a consistent thread on gig work, service work and knowledge work;

  • has an end-section in each chapter where students are asked to put their sociological imagination to work on relevant topics.

This is an enlightening exploration of sociology of work, and of the evolving world of work itself.

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Over the past decade, the UK has experienced major policy and policy making change. This text examines this shifting political and policy landscape while also highlighting the features of UK politics that have endured.

Written by Paul Cairney and Sean Kippin, leading voices in UK public policy and politics, the book combines a focus on policy making theories and concepts with the exploration of key themes and events in UK politics including:

  • developing social policy in a post-pandemic world;

  • governing post-Brexit;

  • the centrality of environmental policy.

The book equips students with a robust and up-to-date understanding of UK public policy and enables them to locate this within a broader theoretical framework.

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The fully updated Short Guide to Town and Country Planning provides an concise introductory overview of the practice of planning for those with little or no prior knowledge. This second edition considers who planners are and what they do, showing how planning - as an art, science and system - has evolved as an organised action of the state.

The book discusses the planning system, processes, legal constructs and approaches, taking into account the recent regulatory changes within the UK nations. Restructured to improve readability, it explores the interactions of government and society with the planning system, and the relationship between urban planning, the environment, and placemaking. It encourages the reader to adopt a reflective and inquisitive outlook, and features:

• case study boxes;

• further reading and resources;

• guidance on the recent policy and system updates, including those through devolution.

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A Survival Guide
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Research doesn’t exist in a bubble but co-exists with a multitude of other tasks and commitments, yet there is more need for people to save time than ever before.

Brilliantly attuned to the demands placed on researchers, this book considers how students, academics and professionals alike can save time and stress without compromising the quality of their research or its outcomes. This third edition:

- is fully revised with new chapters on research and evaluation ethics, creative methods of collecting data and how research can make a positive difference;

-includes illustrative case studies throughout the book and each chapter concludes with exercises, discussion questions and a debate topic;

- is accompanied by a fully updated companion website.

This supportive book is designed for any student or practitioner who wants to know how to do research on top of their main job and still have a life.

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The Best Interests Assessor (BIA) Practice Handbook is firmly grounded in real-life practice and remains the only textbook focusing directly on the BIA role. Offering clear and practical advice on the legal elements of the role, and the values and practice elements of working within the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) framework, this is essential reading for BIA students and practitioners.

This fully-updated edition takes account of recent legislative changes, including the planned changes from the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS), recent case law and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on BIA practice.

Packed with advice on delivering effective, person-centred, rights-driven practice, it includes:

  • case studies;

  • legal summaries;

  • decision-making activities;

  • CPD support;

  • examples of new case law in practice.

Looking forward, the book considers the new context for practice in the Approved Mental Capacity Professional (AMCP) role within the LPS and the potential roles that BIAs might fulfil in this new framework in the future.

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Gender is widely recognized as an important and useful lens for the study of International Relations. However, there are few books that specifically investigate masculinity/ies in relation to world politics.

Taking a feminist-inspired understanding of gender as its starting point, the book:

  • explains that gender is both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy;

  • shows how masculinization works via ‘nested hierarchies’ of domination and subordination;

  • explores the imbrication of masculinities with the nation-state and great-power politics;

  • develops an understanding of the arms trade with commercial processes of militarization.

Written in an accessible style, with suggestions for further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students and teachers applying ‘the gender lens’ to global politics.

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