Policy Press

Technology, data and society

Reflecting on UN Sustainable Development Goal 9: Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure, Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, our list looks at the potential for innovation and creative solutions to global social problems, whilst critically engaging with the risks, such as worsened social inequality and damage to human rights.

Subjects covered include the development of sustainable technology to help combat climate change, the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data more efficiently, the way social media creates a space for people to organise international social activism and the need to balance our digital lives and retain data sovereignty, especially for the most vulnerable in society.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Technology, data and innovation, we aim to address the following goals:

SDG Publishers compact logoSDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructureSDG 10: Reduced inequalitiesSDG 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions

Showing 25-36 of 87 items.

The Public and Their Platforms

Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media

Cutting across multiple disciplines, this book maps out a new role for the public sociologist in the post-COVID world. It envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together “the digital” and "the physical” to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way.

Bristol Uni Press

The Political Economy of Digital Monopolies

Contradictions and Alternatives to Data Commodification

As outrage over the socially damaging practices of technology companies intensifies, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and offers an in-depth analysis of how these corporate giants are produced, financialized, and regulated.

Bristol Uni Press

Guerrilla Democracy

Mobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century

Combining cutting edge theories with empirical research, this timely book offers an in-depth analysis of current platform-based radical movements to show how digital technologies revolutionise political and economic organising. This is an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.

Bristol Uni Press

The Pre-Crime Society

Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age

We live in a pre-crime society where technological strategies and techniques are employed to achieve hyper-securitization. Exploring theories, technologies and institutional practices, this pioneering book explains how the pre-crime society operates in the ‘ultramodern’ age and proposes new directions in crime control policy.

Bristol Uni Press

Supporting New Digital Natives

Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing in a Hi-Tech Age

How can we support children’s and young people’s mental wellbeing in a digital age? This essential guide for improving wellbeing offers practical ideas for parents/carers and professionals working with children.

Policy Press

We Have Always Been Cyborgs

Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism

This visionary new book explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalisation, gene technologies and ethics. It examines the history and meaning of transhumanism, offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia.

Bristol Uni Press

Gender Inequalities in Tech-driven Research and Innovation

Living the Contradiction

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume centres on the lived experience of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries.

Bristol Uni Press

Safeguarding Adults Online

Perspectives on Rights to Participation

This volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding - the digital arena - in providing a comprehensive and accessible analysis of best practice in safeguarding vulnerable adults online.

Policy Press

Resisting AI

An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Calling for the restructuring of AI, Dan McQuillan sets out an anti-fascist approach that replaces exclusions with caring and outlines new mechanisms that support collective freedom.

Bristol Uni Press

Robots and Immigrants

Who Is Stealing Jobs?

This book scrutinises the narratives created around stealing jobs, opening new debates on the role of automation and migration policies. The authors reveal how the advances in AI and demands for constant flow of immigrant workers eradicate political and working rights, propagating fears over job theft and ownership.

Bristol Uni Press

Regional Organizations and Their Responses to Coups

Measures, Motives and Aims

Using a mixed methods approach, this book examines the role played by regional organisations (ROs) following the occurrence of a coup d’état. It analyses which factors influence the strength of reactions demonstrated by ROs and explores which different post-coup solutions ROs pursue.

Bristol Uni Press

The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking

Automation, Intelligence and the Politics of Knowing

In this pioneering book, David Beer redefines emergent algorithmic technologies as the new systems of knowing. He examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable.

Bristol Uni Press