Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice

The issues involved in poverty, inequality and social justice are many and varied, from basic access to education and healthcare, to the financial crisis and resulting austerity, and now COVID-19. Addressing Goal 1: No Poverty, Goal 5: Gender Equality, Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, our list both presents research on these topics and tackles emerging problems. A key series in the area is the SSSP Agendas for Social Justice.

This focus has always been at the heart of our publishing with the view to making the research in this area as visible and accessible as possible in order to maximise its potential impact.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Poverty, inequality and social justice, we aim to address the following goals: 

Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice

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A Practical Handbook for Public Service Organisations
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Why is it hard to know if you are making a difference in public services? What can you do about it?

Public services throughout the world face the challenge of tackling complex issues where multiple factors influence change. This book sets out practical and theoretically robust, tried and tested approaches to understanding and tracking change that any organisation can use to ensure it makes a difference to the people it cares about.

With case studies from health, community, research, international development and social care, this book shows that with the right tools and techniques, public services can track their contribution to social change and become more efficient and effective.

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Theory, Reflexivity and Practice

For many service users and professionals in the field of social work, shame is an ongoing part of their daily experience.

Providing an in-depth examination of the complex phenomena of shame and humiliation, this book sets out key contextual issues and theoretical approaches to comprehend shame and its relevance within social work. It provides a broad understanding of shame, its underlying social and political contexts and its effects on service users and professionals.

The book uses innovative international scholarship and includes theoretical considerations, as well as empirical findings within the field of social work. It shows the importance of sensitive, reflective and relationship-oriented practice based on a better understanding of the complexity of shame.

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Social Policy, Collective Action and the Common Good
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What does collectivism mean in social policy? What does thinking collectively imply for policy?

In this book, well-respected author Paul Spicker lends a complementary voice to his Reclaiming Individualism, reviewing collectivism as a dimension of political discourse. Breaking down his analysis to examine collectivism through substantive, moral and methodological lenses, he reviews a series of arguments for cooperative effort, solidarity and collective responsibility. Taking a dispassionate and methodical approach, the author explores what collectivism means in social policy and what value it offers to the field.

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Indigenous Criminology is the first book to comprehensively explore Indigenous people’s contact with criminal justice systems in a contemporary and historical context. Drawing on comparative Indigenous material from North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it addresses both the theoretical underpinnings to the development of a specific Indigenous criminology, and canvasses the broader policy and practice implications for criminal justice.

Written by leading criminologists specialising in Indigenous justice issues, the book argues for the importance of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to criminology, and suggests that colonialism needs to be a fundamental concept to criminology in order to understand contemporary problems such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality and the high levels of violence in some Indigenous communities.

Prioritising the voices of Indigenous peoples, the work will make a significant contribution to the development of a decolonising criminology and will be of wide interest.

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With an increasingly bitter secular religious divide, there is a messy, defective relationship between the state and morality in the UK. In response, Morality and Public Policy puts forward proposals to enhance the capacity of public policy to respond more effectively to morality and associated shifts in social mores in different cultural settings. Spanning religion, moral philosophy and scientific understanding of the human condition, this unique book draws together and adds to the latest thinking on morality, its causes, mutations, tensions and common features. It challenges misplaced concepts of ‘moral progress’ and the supremacy of empathy, and puts forward the management of the full span of human impulses - some complementary, some conflicting - as the function of morality with major implications for the interface between morality and public policy.

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Can Exchange Lead to Social Change?
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Welfare reform in the wake of austerity has fostered increased interest in self-help initiatives within the community sector. Amongst these, time banking, one of a number of complementary currency systems, has received increasing attention from policy makers as a means for promoting welfare reform. This book is the first to look at the concept of time within social policy to examine time banking theory and practice. By drawing on the social theory of time to examine the tension between time bank values and those of policy makers, it argues that time banking is a constructive means of promoting social change but is hindered by its co-option into neo-liberal thinking. This book will be valuable for academics/researchers with an interest in community-based initiatives, the third/voluntary sectors and theoretical analysis of social policy and political ideologies.

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Theory and application
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Interest in the contribution narrative can make across many disciplines has been booming in recent years, but its impact in social work has been limited. It has mainly been used in therapeutic intervention such as narrative therapy, social work education or personal accounts. This is the first book to extend the narrative lens to explore the contribution of narrative to social work values and ethics, social policy and our understanding of the self in social, cultural and political context. The book firstly sets out theoretical concerns and then applies them to specific areas of social work, including child protection, mental health and disability. The author argues that narrative is a richly textured approach to social work that can enhance both theory and practice. As such the book will be of interest to social work students, practitioners and educators, policy makers and those interested in the application of narrative to professional practice.

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Contemporary issues in historical perspective
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This is the first book to examine the views of a number of theorists from ancient times to the 19th century on a range of welfare issues: wealth, poverty and inequality; slavery, gender issues, and the family; child rearing and education; crime and punishment; the role of government in society; the strengths and weaknesses of government provision vis a vis market provision. The book also looks at the values of the various theorists as well as their perception of human nature for these tend to underpin their welfare views. The book will make essential reading for students of social policy, gender issues, community care, social work, and sociology.

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