Bristol University Press

What social factors contribute to the tragic state of health care in Africa?

Focusing on East African societies, this book is the first to investigate what role religion plays in health care in African cultures. Taking into account the geopolitical and economic environments of the region, the authors examine the roles played by individual and group beliefs, government policies, and pressure from the Millennium Development Goals in affecting health outcomes.

Informed by existing related studies, and on-the-ground interviews with individuals and organizations in Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia, this interdisciplinary book will form an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to better understand the links between society, multi-level state instruments, and health care in East Africa.

This book dissects the complex social, cultural and political factors which led the UK to take its decision to leave the EU and examines the far-reaching consequences of that decision.

Developing the conceptual framework of securitization, Ryder innovatively uses primary sources and a focus on rhetoric to examine the ways that political elites engineered a politics of fear, insecurity and Brexit nationalism before and after the Brexit vote. He situates Brexit within a wider shift in international political ideas, traces the resurgence in popularity of far-right politics and explores how Britain and Europe now face a choice between further neoliberal reform or radical democratic and social renewal.

Focusing on online facilitated child sexual abuse, this book takes a rigorous approach to existing literature to address some of the most pressing public and policy questions surrounding the evolution of online child sexual abuse.

The authors provide an unparalleled examination of which children are most vulnerable to this type of abuse, how their vulnerability is made, what they are vulnerable to and how resilience, both human and technical, can be promoted. They also consider the changing nature of child sexual abuse in the digital age and the consequences of this for victims and survivors, as well as for practitioners and policymakers working in prevention and response.

Narendra Modi’s energetic personal diplomacy and promise to make India a ‘leading power’ surprised many analysts. Most had predicted that his government would concentrate on domestic issues, on the growth and development demanded by Indian voters, and that he lacked necessary experience in international relations.

Instead, Modi’s first term saw a concerted attempt to reinvent Indian foreign policy by replacing inherited understandings of its place in the world with one drawn largely from Hindu nationalist ideology. Following Modi’s re-election in 2019, this book explores the drivers of this reinvention, arguing it arose from a combination of elite conviction and electoral calculation, and the impact it has had on India’s international relations.

The unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis in Ireland is having profound impacts on Generation Rent, the wellbeing of children, worsening wider inequality and threatening the economy.

Hearne contextualises the Irish housing crisis within the broader global housing situation by examining the origins of the crisis in terms of austerity, marketisation and the new era of financialisation, where global investors are making housing unaffordable and turning it into an asset for the wealthy.

He brings to the fore the perspectives of those most affected, new housing activists and protesters whilst providing innovative global solutions for a new vision for affordable, sustainable homes for all.

The relationship between science and belief has been a prominent subject of public debate for many years, one that has relevance to everything from science communication, health and education to immigration and national values. Yet, sociological analysis of these subjects remains surprisingly scarce.

This wide-ranging book critically reviews the ways in which religious and non-religious belief systems interact with scientific theories and practices. Contributors explore how, for some secularists, ‘science’ forms an important part of social identity. Others examine how many contemporary religious movements justify their beliefs by making a claim upon science. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the United States, the book shows how debates about science and belief are firmly embedded in political conflict, class, community and culture.

This book offers a critical examination of existing cycling structures and the current policy and practices used to promote cycling. An international range of contributors provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the complex cultural politics of infrastructural provision and interrogate the pervasive bias against cyclists in city planning and transport systems across the globe.

Infrastructural planning is revealed to be an intensely political act and its meaning variable according to larger political processes and contexts. The book also considers questions surrounding safety and risk, urban space wars and sustainable futures, connecting this to broader questions about citizenship and justice in contemporary cities.

This is the first full-length biography of Richard Titmuss, a pioneer of social policy research and an influential figure in Britain’s post-war welfare debates.

Drawing on his own papers, publications, and interviews with those who knew him, the book discusses Titmuss’s ideas, particularly those around the principles of altruism and social solidarity, as well as his role in policy and academic networks at home and overseas. It is an enlightening portrait of a man who deepened our understanding of social problems as well as the policies that respond most effectively to them.

Counter-terrorism is now a permanent and sprawling part of the legislative and operational apparatus of the state, yet little is known about the law and practice of how it is reviewed, how effective the review mechanisms are, what impact they have or how they interact with one another.

This book addresses that gap in knowledge by presenting the first comprehensive, critical analysis of counter-terrorism review in the United Kingdom, informed by exclusive interviews with policy makers, politicians, practitioners and civil society.

Radio produced and broadcast behind prison walls is redefining traditional meanings of ‘public service broadcasting’ and disrupting traditional power structures within the prison system.

Focusing on one of the most interesting developments in UK prisons over the past 10 years, this book examines the early history of the Prison Radio Association and the formation of the first national radio station for prisoners.

Highlighting the enduring importance of social values in broadcasting this book shows how radio can be used as a powerful force for social change. It will be of interest to those involved in media, criminal justice and social activism.

As the population ages, this book reveals how divides that are apparent through childhood and working life change and are added to in later life.

Two internationally renowned experts in ageing look beyond longstanding factors like class, gender and ethnicity to explore new social divisions, including contrasting states of physical fitness and mental health. They show how differences in health and frailty are creating fresh inequalities in later life, with significant implications for the future of our ageing societies.

This accessible overview of social divisions is essential reading for those interested in the sociology of ageing and its differences, diversities and inequalities.

Shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2019.

What’s it really like to be a mother with a career working flexibly?

Drawing on over 100 hours of interview data, this book is the first to go inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly.

The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories.

Taking a sociological and feminist perspective, it explores contemporary motherhood, work-life balance, emotional work in families, couples and housework, maternity transitions, interactions with employers, work design and workplace cultures, and employment policies.

It concludes that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together and offers unique insights from women’s lived experiences on how to do it.

Bringing together the voices of leading experts in the field, this edition offers an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year.

The book considers a range of current issues and critical debates in UK and international social policy field. It contains vital research, including discussions on the changing landscape of occupational as well as corporate welfare in the UK, the continuing impact of austerity on various social policy areas and the challenges currently faced by the NHS.

Published in association with the SPA, this comprehensive analysis of the current state of social policy will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.

The 21st century has witnessed significant changes to the structures and policies framing Higher Education. But how do these changes in norms, values, and purpose shape the generation now coming of age?

Employing a generational analysis, this book offers an original approach to the study of education. It explores the qualitative dimensions of the relationship between academics and students, and examines wider issues of culture and socialisation, from tuition fees and student mental health, to social mobility and employment.

This is a timely contribution to current debates about the University and an invaluable resource for those interested in education, youth, and intergenerational relations.

This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive.

Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating. This book uses a broad range of case studies which place communities at the heart of this exciting development, to illustrate how their experiences are central to our understanding of this new terrain which challenges traditional histories and the control of knowledge and power.

Every household has to perform housework, and researchers know a lot about what predicts who does which chores, drawing frequently from theoretical explanations that highlight the importance of power dynamics.

This book moves beyond the existing scholarship by using quantitative, nationally representative survey data to theorize about how power dynamics as reflected in housework performance help us understand broader family variations. The authors investigate how knowing who cleans the house explains how households of differing forms, demographics and compositions operate, both cross-sectionally and over the life course of the household.

Child poverty is rising across affluent Western societies; how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses.

Seeking to redress this problem, Treanor places children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and to forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.

Leading green criminologist Rob White asks what can be learned from the problem-solving focus of crime prevention to help face the challenges of climate change in this call to arms for criminology and criminologists.

Industries such as energy, food and tourism and the systematic destruction of the environment through global capitalism are scrutinized for their contribution to global warming. Ideas of ‘state-corporate crime’ and 'ecocide’ are introduced and explored in this concise overview of criminological writings on climate change. This sound and robust application of theoretical concepts to this ‘new’ area also includes commentary on topical issues such as the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement.

Part of the New Horizons in Criminology series, which draws on the inter-disciplinary nature of criminology and incorporates emerging perspectives like social harm, gender and sexuality, and green criminology.

How has the Brexit vote affected EU migrants to the UK?

This book presents a female Polish perspective, using findings from research carried out with migrants interviewed before and after the Brexit vote – voices of real people who made their home in the UK. It looks at how migrants view Brexit and what it means for them, how their experiences compare pre- and post-Brexit vote, and their future plans, as well as considering the wider implications of the migrant experience in relation to precarity and the British paid labour market.

Taking an evidence-based approach to understanding police culture, this thorough and accessible book critically reviews existing research and offers new insights on theories and definitions. Tom Cockcroft, an authority on the subject, addresses a range of contemporary issues including diversity, police reform and police professionalisation.

This invaluable review:

- Identifies and discusses differing conceptions of police culture;

- Explores the contribution of different disciplinary and methodological approaches to our understanding of police culture;

- Assesses how culture relates to many different operational aspects of policing;

- Contextualises our understanding of police culture in relation to both contemporary police agendas and wider social change.

For students, researchers and police officers alike, this is an accessible and timely appraisal of police culture.

Re-examining C.Wright Mills’s legacy as a jumping off point, this original introduction to sociology illuminates global concepts, themes and practices that are fundamental to the discipline. It makes a case for the importance of developing a sociological imagination and provides the steps for how readers can do that. The unique text:

• Offers succinct and wide-ranging coverage of many of the most important themes and concepts taught in first year sociology courses;

• Has a global framework and case material which engages with decoloniality and critiques an overly white, western and developed world view of sociology;

• Is woven through with contemporary examples, from social media to social inequality, big data to the self-help industry;

• Rethinks and re-imagines what a critically committed, politically engaged and publicly relevant sociology should look like in the 21st century.

This is a lively, engaging and accessible overview of sociology for all its students, teachers and people who want to learn more about sociology today. It is a welcome clarion call for sociology’s importance in public life.

Cohabiting couples and those entering religious-only marriages all too often end up with inadequate legal protection when the relationship ends. Yet, despite this shared experience, the linkages and overlaps between these two groups have largely been ignored in the legal literature.

Based on wide-ranging empirical studies, this timely book brings together scholars working in both areas to explore the complexities of the law, the different ways in which individuals experience and navigate the existing legal framework and the potential solutions for reform.

Illuminating pressing implications for social policy, this is an invaluable resource for policy makers, practitioners, researchers and students of family law.

European colonization of other continents has had far-reaching and lasting consequences for the construction of childhoods and children’s lives throughout the world.

Liebel presents critical postcolonial and decolonial thought currents along with international case studies from countries in Africa, Latin America, and former British settler colonies to examine the complex and multiple ways that children throughout the Global South continue to live with the legacy of colonialism.

Building on the work of Cannella and Viruru, he explores how these children are affected by unequal power relations, paternalistic policies and violence by state and non-state actors, before showing how we can work to ensure that children’s rights are better promoted and protected, globally.

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from thirteenth-century England, the corpus of documents known as the Hundred Rolls for Cambridge have been incomplete until the recent discovery of an additional roll.

This invaluable volume replaces the previous inaccurate transcription by the record commission of 1818 and provides new translations and additional appendices.

Shedding new light on important facets of business activity in thirteenth-century Cambridge, this volume makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the early phases of capitalism.

This unique text will be of interest to anyone working in the fields of economic and business history, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and medieval studies.

A research monograph based on recently discovered historical documents, Compassionate Capitalism: Business and Community in Medieval England, by Casson et al, is also now available from Bristol University Press.

Whether addressing questions of loss, (be)longing, fears of an immigration ‘invasion’ or perceived injustices in immigration policies, immigration debates are infused with strong emotions.

Emotion is often presented as a factor that complicates and hinders rational discussion. This book explores how emotion is, in fact, central to understanding how and why we have the immigration policies we do, and what kinds of policies may be beneficial for various groups of people in society.

The author looks beyond the ‘negative’ emotions of fear and hostility to examine on the politics of compassion and empathy. Using case studies from Australia, Europe and the US, the book offers a new and original analysis of immigration policy and immigration debates.

Although prison suicide is a global problem, there is little knowledge about the investigations occurring after prison suicides. Addressing this gap, this book provides the first detailed case study of the investigations that follow prison suicides: using England and Wales.

Despite the large range of institutions that monitor English and Welsh prisons, suicides reached a record high in 2016, with the rate having doubled since 2012. These deaths represent the sharp end of a continuum of suffering, self-harm, despair and distress within prisons, which affects prisoners, their families and prison staff.

This book details and critiques the lengthy and expensive police, ombudsman and coroner investigations that follow prison suicides. Drawing on extensive document analysis, including analysis of over 100 Prison and Probation Ombudsman fatal incident investigations, and original semi-structured interviews with stakeholders undertaken between 2016-2017, this book provides a novel analysis of prison oversight.

This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption.

Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis.

Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND

Made famous by the Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, the concept of an ‘invisible hand’ might be taken to imply that a government that governs least governs the best, from the viewpoint of society. Here an invisible hand appears to represent unfettered market forces.

Drawing from this much-contested notion, Mittermaier indicates why such a view represents only one side of the story and distinguishes between what he calls pragmatic and dogmatic free marketeers.

Published posthumously, with new contributions by Daniel Klein, Rod O’Donnell and Christopher Torr, this book outlines Mittermaier’s main thesis and his relevance for ongoing debates within economics, politics, sociology and philosophy.

Using new research on higher education in the UK, Canada, Chile and Italy, this rigorous comparative study investigates key episodes of student protests against neoliberal policies and practices in today’s universities.

As well as examining origins and outcomes of higher education reforms, the authors set these waves of demonstrations in the wider contexts of student movements, political activism and social issues, including inequality and civil rights.

Offering sophisticated new theoretical arguments based on fascinating empirical work, the insights and conclusions revealed in this original study are of value to anyone with an interest in social, political and related studies.

Introduction and conclusion available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

The turn towards a Social Investment approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood.

This edited collection brings regional and local realities to the forefront of social investment debates by showcasing successes, challenges and setbacks of Social Investment policies and services from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. It provides practical, accessible illustrations of good practice, routes to success, and lessons learned. The book is informed throughout by engagement with service users and local communities, and features many previously unheard voices including front-line workers, local decision makers, volunteers and beneficiaries.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and particularities of regional organizations across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe since 1945.

The authors analyze the membership dynamics and policy scopes of 76 organizations, and compare their opportunities and challenges in regional governance. They consider organizations’ competencies in eleven different policy areas, including trade, security and environment, and trace patterns in their development.

For those with interests in comparative regionalism, international relations, political science and international law, this is an essential companion to some of the world’s most significant organizations.

In this seminal book, Krumer-Nevo introduces the Poverty-Aware Paradigm: a radical new framework for social workers and professionals working with and for people in poverty.

The author defines the core components of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm, explicates its embeddedness in key theories in poverty, critical social work and psychoanalysis, and links it to diverse facets of social work practice.

Providing a revolutionary new way to think about how social work can address poverty, she draws on the extensive application of the paradigm by social workers in Israel and across diverse poverty contexts to provide evidence for the practical advantages of integrating the Poverty-Aware Paradigm into social work practices across the globe.

Struggles for environmental justice involve communities mobilising against powerful forces which advocate ‘development’, driven increasingly by neoliberal imperatives. In doing so, communities face questions about their alliances with other groups, working with outsiders and issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, worker/community and settler/indigenous relationships.

Written by a wide range of international scholars and activists, contributors explore these dynamics and the opportunities for agency and solidarity. They critique the practice of community development professionals, academics, trade union organisers, social movements and activists and inform those engaged in the pursuit of justice as community, development and environment interact.

Leading experts in the field present an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year.

This volume considers current issues and critical debates in the UK and the international social policy field. It contains vital research on race in social policy higher education and analyses how welfare states and policies address the economic and social hardship of young people. The contributors also consider the impacts of austerity on the welfare state, homelessness, libraries and other social policy areas.

Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this comprehensive volume will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.

Neoliberalism has been widely criticised because of its role in prioritising ‘free markets’ as the optimum way of solving problems and organising society. In the field of education, this leads to an emphasis on the knowledge economy that can reduce both persons and education to economic actors and be detrimental to wider social and ethical goals.

Drawing on a range of international contexts across informal, adult, school and university settings, this book provides innovative examples that show how neoliberalism in education can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational levels in order to foster a more democratic culture.

This edition brings together specially commissioned reviews of key areas of social policy and considers a range of current issues within the field.

The book contains invaluable research, including discussions on modern slavery, childcare and social justice and welfare chauvinism, as well as a chapter centred on the Grenfell Tower fire. Bringing together the insights of a diverse group of experts in social policy, this book examines critical debates in the field in order to offer an informed review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year.

Published in association with the SPA, the volume will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.

Modern slavery, in the form of labour exploitation, domestic servitude, sexual trafficking, child labour and cannabis farming, is still growing in the UK and industrialised countries, despite the introduction of laws to try to stem it.

This hugely topical book, by a team of high-profile activists and expert writers, is the first to critically assess the legislation, using evidence from across the field, and to offer strategies for improvement in policy and practice. It argues that, contrary to its claims to be ‘world-leading’, the Modern Slavery Act is inconsistent, inadequate and punitive; and that the UK government, through its labour market and immigration policies, is actually creating the conditions for slavery to be promoted.

Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world.

With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Asia and Africa, this book:

• critically reviews the literature on colonialism and economic growth;

• covers a range of different methods of analysis;

• offers a comparative approach, as opposed to a collection of regional histories, deftly weaving together different themes.

With debates around globalization, migration, global finance and environmental change intensifying, this authoritative account of the relationship between colonialism and economic development makes an invaluable contribution to several distinct literatures in economic history.

Bringing together international case studies, this book offers theoretical and empirical insights into the interaction between social work and social policy.

Moving beyond existing studies on policy practice, the book employs the policy cycle as a core analytical frame and focuses on the influence of social work(ers) in the problem definition, agenda setting, policy formulation and implementation of social policy. Twenty-three contributors offer examples of policy making from seven different countries and demonstrate how social work practitioners can become political actors, while also encouraging policy makers to become aware of the potential of social work for the social policy-making process.

Drawing on her long experience as an academic researcher and writer, Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process itself, telling the story of how a research project is undertaken and what happens during it, to both researchers and those who are researched. This remarkable book focuses on a topic of great importance in the provision of health services – caring and social support.

Setting neglect of this topic in the wider context of an ongoing crisis in gendering knowledge, Social support and motherhood is now reissued for a contemporary audience. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and in the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.

Critically assessing growth-based models of innovation policy, this enlightening study sparks new debate on the role and nature of responsible innovation.

Drawing on insights from economics, politics, and science and technology studies, it proposes the concept of 'responsible stagnation' as an expansion of present discussions about growth, degrowth, responsibility and innovation within planetary limitations.

This important intervention explores real-world relationships between the political economy, innovation policy and concepts of responsibility, and will be an invaluable resource for individuals and civil society organizations who seek to promote responsible innovation.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up-to-date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels. The contributors critically examine part-time employment in different institutional settings across Europe, the USA, Australia and Korea.

This analysis serves as a prism to investigate wider trends, particularly in female employment, including the continued increase in part-time work and processes that are increasingly creating dualisation and inequality between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs.

Steven Threadgold’s study represents the first comprehensive engagement of Pierre Bourdieu’s influential sociology with affect theory.

With empirical research and examples from sociology, it develops a theory of “Affective Affinities,” deepening our understanding of how everyday moments contribute to the construction and remaking of social class and aspects of inequalities. It identifies new ways to consider the strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieusian principles and their interaction with new developments in social theory.

This is a stimulating read for students, researchers and academics across studies in youth, education, labour markets, pop culture, media, consumption and taste.

What makes some people more likely to initiate positive change within their organizations? Can this behaviour be influenced by management?

Employee proactivity has largely been understood in terms of employees changing their environment or changing themselves. In this novel study Wu offers an alternative lens through which to examine such behaviour – the concept of attachment theory.

Wu integrates the current understanding of motivational factors in shaping proactive workers, through his introduction to attachment theory, and development of it as a theoretical framework.

This compelling approach provides academics with a new way of thinking about employee behaviour while also acting as a guide for practitioners and managers.

Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining ‘Big Data’, this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings.

Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress.

Building substantially on the earlier, landmark text, What Works? (Policy Press, 2000), this book brings together key thinkers and researchers to provide a contemporary review of the aspirations and realities of evidence-informed policy and practice. The text is clearly structured and provides sector-by-sector analysis of evidence use in policy-making and service delivery. It considers some cross-cutting themes, including a section of international commentaries, and concludes by looking at lessons from the past and prospects for the future.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of social science researchers, students and practitioners as well as those interested in supporting more evidence-informed policy and practice.

In the wake of the financial crisis, and with increasing numbers of people in precarious and low paid jobs, there has been a surprising surge of support for populist right-wing political parties who often promote an anti-welfare message. Tougher approaches and welfare chauvinism are on the agenda in many countries, with policies which reduce the welfare state for those seen as undeserving and changes that often disproportionally benefit the rich.

Why are voters seemingly not concerned about growing inequality? Using a mixed-methods approach and newly released data, this book aims to answer this question and to show possible ways forward for welfare states.

Offering a perceptive study of the urgent human rights issue of trafficking in persons, this important book analyses the development and effectiveness of public policies across Eurasia.

Drawing on multi-method research in the region, Laura A. Dean explores the factors behind anti-trafficking strategies and the role of governments and activists in combating labour and sexual exploitation. She examines the intersection of global strategies and state-by-state approaches, and uses the diffusion of innovation framework to cast new light on the impetus and implementation of different policy typologies.

Identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and best practices in human trafficking policies around Eurasia, Dean’s book will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers.

Pussy grabbing; hot mommas; topless protest; nasty women. Whether hypersexualised, desexualised, venerated or maligned, women’s bodies in public space continue to be framed as a problem. A problem that is discursively ‘solved’ by the continued proliferation of rape culture in everyday life.

Indeed, despite the rise in research and public awareness about rape culture and sexism in contemporary debates, gendered violence continues to be normalised.

Using case studies from the US and UK – the de/sexualised pregnancy, the troublesome naked protest, the errant BDSM player – Fanghanel interrogates how the female body is figured through, and revolts against, gendered violence.

Rape culture currently thrives. This book demonstrates how it happens, the politics that are mobilised to sustain it, and how we might act to contest it.

Research into minimum income standards and reference budgets around the world is compared in this illuminating collection from leading academics in the field.

From countries with long established research traditions to places where it is relatively new, contributors set out the different aims and objectives of investigations into the minimum needs and requirements of populations, and the historical contexts, theoretical frameworks and methodological issues that lie behind each approach.

For policymakers, practitioners and social policy and poverty academics, this essential review of learnings to date and future prospects for research is all the more relevant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, testing health and social protection systems around the globe.

The need to reimagine religion and belief is precipitated by their greater visibility in public life. Meanwhile, social policy responses often see them from a problem-based, rather than an asset-based, approach. However, with growing diversity of religion and belief in every sector comes the potential for new dialogues across previously impermeable policy and disciplinary silos.

This volume brings together leading international authors to critically consider these challenges within legal and policy frameworks, including security and cohesion, welfare, law, health and social care, inequality, cohesion, extremism, migration and abuse. It challenges policy makers to re-imagine religion and belief as an integral part of public life that contains resources, practices, forms of knowledge and experience that are essential to a coherent policy approach to diversity, enhanced democracy and participation.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Health literacy addresses a range of social dimensions of health, including knowledge, navigation and communication, as well as individual and organizational skills for accessing, understanding, evaluating and using information. Particularly over the past decade, health literacy has globally become a major public health concern as an asset for promoting health, wellbeing and sustainable development.

This comprehensive handbook provides an invaluable overview of current international thinking about health literacy, highlighting cutting edge research, policy and practice in the field. With a diverse team of contributors, the book addresses health literacy across the life-span and offers insights from different populations and settings. Providing a wide range of major findings, the book outlines current discourse in the field and examines necessary future dialogues and new perspectives.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived.

LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire.

Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.

This book reviews how local social and employment policy fields react to the European Social Fund (ESF) to determine the role of the ESF in local activation policies. Drawing on both sociology and political science literature on welfare state reforms, the author examines what shapes local policy reactions to ESF and what effects these reactions have on change in local policy fields.

Comparing data from 18 local case studies across 6 European countries, and deploying an innovative mixed-method approach, the book presents comparative evidence on everyday challenges in the context of the ESF and discusses how these findings are applicable to other funding schemes.

In 1915 Robert Park penned his seminal paper “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment”. This essay provided an agenda for the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, which formed the basis of urban research for decades.

Given that China’s urban centres now occupy the spotlight that once belonged to American cities, Park’s essay is a platform and point of departure for this volume, which gathers together reflections from a broad range of urban China specialists to consider Park’s (ir)relevance today – for cities in China, for questions about the social life of the city and for urban research more generally.

Essential for a broad range of urban studies scholars, this book is an invaluable teaching resource and a useful tool for policy-makers and planners.

Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) was a pioneer in the field of social administration (now social policy). In this reissued classic, listed by the New York Times as one of the 10 most important books of the year when it was first published in 1970, he compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.

Titmuss’s argument about how altruism binds societies together has proved a powerful tool in the analysis of welfare provision. His analysis is even more topical now in an age of ever changing health care policy and at a time when health and welfare systems are under sustained attack from many quarters.

Questions of migration and citizenship are at the heart of global political debate with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump having ripple effects around the world.

Providing new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US, this book challenges the increasingly prevalent view of migration and migrants as threats and of formal citizenship as a necessary marker of belonging. Instead the authors offer an analysis of migration and citizenship in practice, as a counterpoint to simplistic discourses.

The book uses cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates – borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging. Through this analysis a clearer picture of the roots of these politics emerges as well as of the consequences for mobility, political participation and belonging in the 21st century.

Impact has become a central part of the assessment criteria for academic worth. It has been adopted by many research funding bodies, and it is firmly embedded in the British Research Excellence Framework. However, a clear definition of impact remains elusive and guidance on how exactly to achieve it is often superficial.

This concise, informative book analyses impact across the social sciences. It draws on the analysis of the most highly ranked British impact case studies from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, as well as fifteen interviews with senior academics, providing a longitudinal and critical framing of impact. The author concludes with valuable recommendations of how and when scholars can achieve impact.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development makes climate change and responsible consumption key priorities for both industrialized and emerging economies. Moving beyond the Global North, this book uses innovative cross-national and cross-generational research with urban residents in China and Uganda, as well as the UK, to illuminate international debates about building sustainable societies and to examine how different cultures think about past, present and future responsibility for climate change.

The authors explore to what extent different nations see climate change as a domestic issue, whilst looking at local explanatory and blame narratives to consider profound questions of justice between those nations that are more and less responsible for, and vulnerable to, climate change.

Ann Oakley is a pioneer in the field of sociological research. In this classic re-issue, she interviewed 60 women to find out what it’s really like to have a baby. Covering pregnancy, birth and child care, she relies on the stories mothers tell to discuss whether and why women want to become pregnant, how they imagine motherhood to be, the experience of birth, post-natal depression, feeding and caring routines and the challenges for the domestic division of labour and to fathers.

She shows that most women are unprepared for the birth or the work of caring for a baby, but also for the joys that a baby can bring. As topical today as the day it was written, this important book was the first to examine first-time motherhood in the words of those experiencing it, and it continues to influence generations of researchers today.

The issue of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) is firmly in the public spotlight internationally and in the UK, but just how well is it understood?

To date, many CSE-related services have been developed in reaction to high profile cases rather than being designed more strategically. This much-needed book breaks new ground by considering how psychosocial, feminist and geo-environmental theories, amongst others, can improve practice understanding and interventions.

Edited by one of the leading scholars in the field, this is an essential text for students and those planning strategic interventions and practice activities in social, youth and therapeutic work with young people, as it supports understanding of how CSE arises and how to challenge the nature of the abuse.

After years of research and reflection on the work of the interdisciplinary family justice system Mervyn Murch offers a fresh approach to supporting the thousands of children every year who experience a complex form of bereavement following parental separation and divorce. This stressful family change, combined with the loss of support due to austerity cuts, can damage their education, well-being, mental health and long-term life chances.

Murch argues for early preventative intervention which responds to children's worries when they first present them, without waiting until things have gone badly wrong. His radical proposals for reform involve a much more coordinated and joined up approach by schools, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

This book encourages practitioners and academics to look outside their professional silos and to see the world through the eyes of children in crisis to enable services to offer direct support in a manner and at a time when it is most needed.

As the percentage of people working in the service economy continues to rise, there is a need to examine workplace harm within low-paid, insecure, flexible and short-term forms of ‘affective labour’. This is the first book to discuss harm through an ultra-realist lens and examines the connection between individuals, their working conditions and management culture.

Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, it investigates the reorganisation of labour markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. It highlights working conditions and organisational practices which employees experience as normal and routine but within which multiple harms occur.

Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.

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.

Moral order is disturbed by criminal events. However, in a secularized and networked society a common moral ground is increasingly hard to find.

People feel confused about the bigger issues of our time such as crime, anti-social behaviour, Islamist radicalism, sexual harassment and populism. Traditionally, issues around morality have been neglected by criminologists.

Through theory, case studies and discussion, this book sheds a new and topical light on these concerns. Using the moral perspective, Boutellier bridges the gap between people’s emotional opinions on crime, and criminologists' rationalized answers to questions of crime and security.

In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed sociologist Ann Oakley undertook one of the first serious sociological studies to examine women’s work in the home. She interviewed 40 urban housewives and analysed their perceptions of housework, their feelings of monotony and fragmentation, the length of their working week, the importance of standards and routines, and their attitudes to different household tasks. Most women, irrespective of social class, were dissatisfied with housework – an important finding which contrasted with prevailing views. Importantly, too, she showed how the neglect of research on domestic work was linked to the inbuilt sexism of sociology.

This classic book challenged the hitherto neglect of housework as a topic worthy of study and paved the way for the sociological study of many more aspects of women’s lives.

Throughout history there has always been an ‘other’, often based on culture, race, gender or class, that has been demonised by the majority. This attribution of negative features onto others affects everyone, but Whitehead challenges the idea that this is an inevitable fact of life.

While looking at the historical criminalisation of the ‘other’ and the subsequent modernising transformations in criminal justice and penal policy, such as ‘Big Society’, Whitehead also questions if this is the most effective way to dismantle the conditions of existence responsible for ‘othering’.

This important book not only looks for the origin of the ‘other’ but also offers insights for a resolution that benefits society as a whole rather than just the powerful few.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This comprehensive collection discusses topical issues essential to both scholarship and policy making in the realm of lifelong learning (LLL) policies and how far they succeed in supporting young people across their life courses, rather than one-sidedly fostering human capital for the economy.

Examining specific yet diverse regional and local contexts across Europe, this book uses original research to evaluate differences in scope, approach, orientation, and objectives. It examines the embedding of LLL policies into the regional economy, the labour market, education and training systems and the individual life projects of young people, with a focus on those in situations of near social exclusion.

“Julia” nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe’s most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services.

Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingómez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge entered this area with only their patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone and collected vivid testimonies and images of Julia and others like her who live there. This important book documents what they found, locating these people's stories and situations in a political, economic and social context of spatial inequality and oppressive mechanisms of social control.

There were more colons used in legislation in 2015 than there were words enacted in 1900. Using analysis from machine readings of all legislation enacted between 1900 and 2015, this book discusses the social impact of increasingly elastic legislative language on the contemporary workings of the British constitution.

The hot-button debates of our time — from immigration to European integration, to the creeping power of judges — have, at their core, battles over what policy instructions are authoritative.

The book encourages readers to connect the dots of British statecraft, and to understand how, exactly, public demands are transferred into laws that are then implemented with greater and lesser degrees of success. Crucially, it shows that vague legislation has a tremendous impact on policy delivery, disproportionately affecting the weakest, in areas including immigration, homelessness and anti-discrimination.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

Long term resident migrants to the UK, who often possess valuable skills for the economy, still face significant barriers to citizenship. In this important book, Dr Prabhat captures the experiences of those who successfully become British citizens through stories of belonging, citizenship and the law; beautifully illustrated by artist Sam Church. Speaking to contemporary times of Brexit, the book exposes the challenges which become insurmountable for many migrants, and illuminates the gap between policy and practice in gaining British citizenship.

What role does emotion play in child and family social work practice?

In this book, researcher Matthew Gibson reviews the role of shame and pride in social work, providing invaluable new insights from the first study undertaken into the role of these emotions within professional practice. The author demonstrates how these emotions, which are embedded within the very structures of society but experienced as individual phenomena, are used as mechanism of control in relation to both professionals themselves and service users.

Examining the implications of these emotional experiences in the context of professional practice and the relationship between the individual, the family and the state, the book calls for a more humane form of practice, rooted in more informed policies that take in to consideration the realities and frailties of the human experience.

With contributions from distinguished authors in 14 countries across 5 continents, this book provides a unique transnational perspective on intellectual disability in the twentieth century. Each chapter outlines different policies and practices, and details real-life accounts from those living with intellectual disabilities to illustrate their impact of policies and practices on these people and their families.

Bringing together accounts of how intellectual disability was viewed, managed and experienced in countries across the globe, the book examines the origins and nature of contemporary attitudes, policy and practice and sheds light on the challenges of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD).

Understanding how creative interventions can help develop social connectivity and resilience for older people is vital in developing a holistic cross-sector approach towards ageing well.

Academics with a wide range of expertise critically reflect on how the built environment, community living, cultural participation, lifelong learning, and artist-led interventions encourage older people to thrive and overcome both challenging life events and the everyday changes associated with ageing.

The book uses a range of approaches, including participatory research methods, to bring the voices of older people themselves to the foreground. It looks at how taking part in creative interventions develops different types of social relationships and fosters resilience.

Policing and security provision are subjects central to criminology. Yet there are newer and neglected forms that are currently unscrutinised.

By examining the work of community safety officers, ambassador patrols, conservation officers, and private police foundations, who operate on and are animated by a frontier, this book reveals why criminological inquiry must reach beyond traditional conceptual and methodological boundaries in the 21st century.

Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary and international book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously.

Comedy and Critique explores British professional stand-up comedy in the wake of the Alternative Comedy movement of the late twentieth century, seeing it as an extension of the politics of the New Left: standing up for oneself as anti-racist, feminist and open to a queering of self and social institutions.

Daniel Smith demonstrates that the comic sensibility pervading contemporary humour is as much ‘speaking truth to power’ as it is realising one’s position ‘in’ power. The professionalisation of New Left humour offers a challenge to social and cultural critique. Stand-up comedy has made us all sociologists of self, identity and cultural power while also resigning us to a place where a comic sensibility becomes an acknowledgment of the necessity of social change.

In this engaging and original book, John Clarke is in conversation with 12 leading scholars about the dynamics of thinking critically in the social sciences. The conversations range across many fields and explore the problems and possibilities of doing critical intellectual work in ways that are responsive to changing conditions.

By emphasising the many voices in play, in conversation with as well as against others, Clarke challenges the individualising myth of the heroic intellectual. He underlines the value of thinking critically, collaboratively and dialogically.

The book also provides access to a sound archive of the original conversations.

The ‘Bedroom Tax’ has been one of the most contentious aspects of the UK government’s austerity politics. In this book, Kelly Bogue provides an authoritative assessment of its social impacts.

The Divisive State of Social Policy traces the links between housing resources and societal tensions by looking closely at one housing estate. The book explores issues related to Housing Benefit reform, including housing precarity, poverty and damage to social networks.

This is a vivid picture of the sharp end of austerity politics and welfare reform, and it gets to the heart of the meanings of home and community in the UK today.

Scale is an overlooked issue in the research on interactive governance. This book takes up the important task of investigating the scalar dimensions of collaborative governance in networks, partnerships, and other interactive arenas and explores the challenges of operating at a single scale, across or at multiple scales and of moving between scales.

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, the volume explores the role of scale and scaling in a wide range of policy areas, including employment policy, water management, transportation planning, public health, university governance, artistic markets, child welfare and humanitarian relief. Cases are drawn from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America and span all levels from local to global. Together, the theoretical framework and the empirical case studies sensitize us to the tensions that arise between scales of governance and to the challenges of shifting from one scale of governance to another.