Collection: Bristol University Press and Policy Press complete eBook collection

 

The complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press collection gives your institution access to the wealth of the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,700 titles, from over 25 years of our award-winning portfolio. It includes a rich archive of our unrivalled Policy Press publishing across Sociology, Social and Public Policy and Social Work. When Bristol University Press was formed in 2016, we expanded our subject areas and international focus; the Bristol University Press list now includes leading research in Politics and International Relations, Urban Studies, Law and Business and Management. 

Subscription to this collection also gives you access to past and future publishing over 220 books a year across the range of social sciences and aligned disciplines.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press Complete Collection

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 1,758 items

The Political Roots of the Public Engagement Agenda
Author:

Public trust in the scientific community is under extraordinary pressure. Crucial areas of human activity and public policy, such as education, universities, climate and health care are influenced by populist political strategies rather than evidence-based solutions. Moreover, data-driven methods are becoming increasingly subject to de-legitimisation.

This book examines potential remedies for improving public trust and the legitimacy of science. It reviews different policy approaches adopted by governments to incentivise the empowerment of stakeholders through co-production arrangements, participatory mechanisms, public engagement and interaction between citizens and researchers.

Offering an original analysis of the political roots of the governmental impact and engagement agenda, this book sheds much-needed light on the wider connections to democracy.

Open access

A realistic economics may take as some of its empirical content the institutions of an economy. In neo-classical economics, in contradistinction, it is the choices of individuals that constitute the empirical content of theory. Institutions and choices, however, belong to two different orders of fact, according to the conceptual framework developed in this book. Choices belong to the ex post order of facts, and institutions belong to the ex ante order of facts. The former are mere records of past events, whereas the latter have to do with structure and causation. Economic theory presents preferences as if they were in the nature of ex ante facts, giving rise to choices, but in the absence of observing preferences, it infers them from the choices. Accordingly, the empirical content of economics are in the nature of ex post facts. Preferences are ex ante facts to the operating individual, but to the observing theorist, they are in the domain of ex post facts. This book shows how a confusion between ex post and ex ante facts has manifested itself in micro-economics.

Open access
Prevention in Practice

How big a problem is torture? Are the right things being done to prevent it? What does the UN do, and why does is appear at times to be so impotent in the face of torture?

In this vitally important work, Malcolm D. Evans tells the story of torture prevention under international law, setting out what is really taking place in places of detention around the world. Challenging assumptions about torture’s root causes, he calls for what is needed to enable us to be in a better position to bring about change.

The author draws on over ten years’ experience as the Chair of the United Nations Sub-Committee for Prevention of Torture to give a frank account of the remarkable capacities of this system, what it has achieved in practice, what it has not been able to achieve – and most importantly, why.

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Critical Questions of Youth, Gender and Race On-Road
Editors: , , and

‘On-road’ is a complex term used by young people to describe street-based subculture and a general way of being. Featuring the voices of young people, this collection explores how race, class and gender dynamics shape this aspect of youth culture.

With young people on-road often becoming criminalised due to interlocking structural inequalities, this book looks beyond concerns about gangs and presents empirical research from scholars and activists who work with and study the social lives of young people. It addresses the concerns of practitioners, policy makers and scholars by analysing aspects and misinterpretations of the shifting realities of young people’s urban life.

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The Auroville Experiment

Auroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, is an internationally recognised endeavour in prefiguring an alternative society: the largest, most diverse, dynamic and enduring of intentional communities worldwide.

This book is a critical and insightful analysis of the utopian practice of this unique spiritual township, by a native scholar. The author explores how Auroville’s founding spiritual and societal ideals are engaged in its communal political and economic organisation, as well as various cultural practices and what enables and sustains this prefiguratively utopian practice.

This in-depth, autoethnographic case-study is an important resource for understanding prefigurative and utopian experiments – their challenges, potentialities, and significance for the advancement of human society.

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Religious Inequality and the Struggle for Sustainable Development

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Freedom of religion and belief is crucial to any sustainable development process, yet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) pay little attention to religious inequalities.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of how efforts to achieve SDGs can be enhanced by paying greater attention to freedom of religion and belief. In particular, it illustrates how poverty is often a direct result of religious prejudice and how religious identity can shape a person’s job prospects, their children’s education and the quality of public services they receive. Drawing on evidence from Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the book foregrounds the lived experiences of marginalized communities as well as researchers and action organizations.

Open access
How Technology Discourses Quantify, Extract and Legitimize Inequalities

We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.

Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimise exploitation and increase inequalities.

Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalised and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.

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What Every Practitioner Should Know
Author:

This book aims to make clear the interconnections between social policy and criminal justice practice, bringing together key social policy concepts within a framework for reducing reoffending rates. The book focuses on the key social policy issues of employment, health and mental health, low income and poverty, housing and family. It shows how understanding and treating these as issues interconnected to criminal justice outcomes can and does lead to improvements in criminal justice practice.

This book enables students and criminal justice practitioners to understand how a social policy focus can better inform practice with those involved in the criminal justice system. It features:

  • A 10 point summary of key points for learning;

  • Chapter heading questions to support independent learning;

  • Tables and graphs to illustrate the text.

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A Prison Island in Europe
Author:

The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee ‘crisis’, but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence.

The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalised and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees’ human rights.

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A Utopia for Radical Interdependence

In the context of sustained economic and environmental crises, marked by extreme inequalities of wealth, rising xenophobia, racism and precarity, never has the need for a radical change of system been so pressing.

This book is an invitation to think the world otherwise. The author breathes new life into socialist thought through the deployment of an intersectional lens, bringing diverse struggles for emancipation both within and outside the Global North into dialogue with one another.

In doing so, he offers the kind of bold and holistic thinking the present situation calls for.

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