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
Chapter four looks at i-doc aesthetics, showing how designing aesthetic features can help researchers to focus on dimensions of affect, mood, atmosphere, emotion, and feeling in their topics. It also examines how aesthetic design for i-docs, as a mode of encountering the world, can do important work of illuminating entanglements of moods and affects at different scales, revealing how localised moods and affects connect to more pervasive structures of feeling. The chapter explores this by focusing on the i-docs The Lockdown Game and The Temporary City.
Chapter 6 focuses on co-creative processes of i-doc making, arguing for the value of i-docs as a participatory and activist method. The chapter explores how i-doc making can create shared worlds without homogenising differences and can counter ‘epistemic injustice’ by allowing publics to co-create knowledge that might contest dominant narratives. It also suggests that i-docs can tell stories with multiple heroes, emphasising collaboration over conflict. It focuses on The Lockdown Game as a participatory i-doc project and 18 Days in Egypt and Athens Report as activist i-docs.
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.
Chapter 5 shows how designing the interactive capacities of i-docs can focus attention on issues of freedom and compliance while inviting both researchers and audiences to consider their own complicity and agency in research topics. While i-docs, as a non-linear medium, are often associated with openness and potential, the chapter emphasises how i-docs are defined as much by what’s fixed as by what’s open and as much by frustrations of agency as by invitations to act. The chapter focuses on The Lockdown Game as well as briefly exploring several other i-docs.
Chapter 1 introduces i-docs as a creative method. It places i-docs in a lineage of creative technologies that have, across history, reformulated human perception, and it argues that researchers can deliberately harness i-docs to develop and engage the new ways of seeing that are crucial when addressing contemporary challenges in society. It argues that the interactive, multi-perspectival, and co-creative capacities of i-docs can help us to untangle complex trajectories of multiple entangled crises, see avenues for connection and collaboration, and create shared visions that accommodate differences.
Chapter three explores how designing the spatial infrastructures of i-docs – the layout of their pages and of content within those pages – can shed light on the ways that power dynamics are embedded spatially. I-docs can illuminate power dynamics that relate to spatial markings – for example, borders, boundaries, locations, and routes. They can also expose politicised tensions in how different people imagine and navigate space and problematise relationships between mobility and fixity. The chapter focuses on the i-docs Gaza Sderot, Refugee Republic, and The Lockdown Game.
Chapter two addresses the ‘temporal architectures’ of i-docs. Temporal architecture is a term developed by Sarah Sharma that draws attention to the politics of temporal systems, including the unequal valuing of different people’s time. This chapter will show how i-doc making has helped me to interrogate and analyse the politics of time with precision as well as critique disciplinary assumptions and convictions about temporality. The chapter focuses on the i-doc The Temporary City as well as A Journal of Insomnia, Hollow, and The Last Generation.
Chapter 7 shows how the modes of encounter developed through i-doc making can be extracted from the process of creating a digital interface. This way, the value of i-docs as a method can be more widely taken up and used by researchers. The chapter provides a practical template for how you can ‘think’ with i-docs that can be used by readers in their own research. It also suggests user-friendly platforms that enable low-tech and low-budget experiments with i-doc making.
Everything in life is inextricably interconnected. Yet, there is global dominance of neoliberalism, an ideology that is fundamentally based on disconnection. We are living a contradiction, treading a tightrope between cooperation and competition, trying to reform a worldview that is fundamentally at variance with the wellbeing of humanity and the planet. This is a remarkable moment in history: never before has a political system been this successfully destructive; but never before have the ideas, knowledge and skills to build a world of sustainability, peace and justice been at our fingertips.
Crisis is a chance for change
The choices we have made have consequences that have taken life on Earth into a multiplicity of crises, shunting humanity and the natural world of which it is part to the brink of extinction. Climate change, a coronavirus pandemic, species extinction, rising sea levels, environmental degradation … are not limited by national boundaries, but reminders of our planetary interdependence, our responsibility for the health of each other and the planet. At the same time, White supremacy is expressing itself in a resurgence of a Far-Right politics of disconnection, of individualism, greed, Brexit, the nationalistic building of walls, targeting all those other than the privileged. This intersectional, neoliberal project interweaves in a tapestry of structural discrimination its threads of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, disablism … and a strange hatred of our next generation, the hope for humanity’s future! We have, quite literally, been stitched up!
The Map is not the Territory. (Bateson, 1972)
We see the world, not as it is but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it. (Covey, 2004)
We have explored so far two elements of participatory practice that are key to transformative change and, in doing so, we have indicated that neither can achieve that potential without the third element: critical reflection. While we can start to open up the spaces for engagement with story and dialogue, to sow the seeds of individual and collective learning for change, reflection and reflexivity need to be interwoven into those elements to create the fabric of critical knowledge and thoughtful action. This cannot be an added extra but has to be integral to all we do. We can encourage people to tell their stories of lived experience and we can enter into dialogue together about what we hear, but this will remain a surface activity unless we add critical reflection for learning to happen. So, this chapter will explore what we mean by critical reflection and offer some conceptual ideas taken from critical and other theorists to help in the facilitation of critical reflection, particularly concerning power, both for ourselves and others.
At the core is the art of questioning the taken-for-granteds of everyday life and going ever deeper in that exploration through the continual cycling of reflection and action that underpins praxis and is the basis of transformation, encouraging us all to look below the surface and nurture the development of a sense of curiosity about why things are as they are.
