Textbooks

Understanding childhood is a fresh look at how childhood has changed in recent years and reveals how children's needs and experiences have achieved a new visibility

The book offers insights into childhood by focusing on accounts of home and family, school, public spaces and sites of work in local and global settings.

This interdisciplinary textbook examines children's lives across the world, acknowledging the great differences as well as points of comparison, between childhoods in different contexts.

This book presents the perspectives of 22 leading figures involved in shaping the field of Childhood Studies over the last 30 years. They reflect on the changes that have taken place in the study of children and childhood, discuss ideas underpinning the field, examine current dilemmas and explore challenges for the future.

Shows how the effects of new forms of managerialism penetrate the state, local governments, welfare institutions as well as professional work and citizens rights. It facilitates a discussion about how basic values are put at stake with new reforms and managerial tools.

How is social work shaped by global issues and international problems and how should it address them? Taking a radical perspective, this book reveals what we can learn from different approaches from across the globe.

Co-authored by an international team of experts across disciplines, this important book is one of the first to demonstrate the enormous benefit creative methods offer for education research. It illustrates how using creative methods, such as poetic inquiry, theatre and animation, can support learning and illuminate participation and engagement.

This book provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.

Janice Morphet sets out and analyses the key components of infrastructure delivery in Britain, both at national and neighbourhood level, situating this within international, European and domestic economic, territorial and social policy.

This book challenges the official discourse that shapes the debates on Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EO&D) at national, regional and European level and will be a key text for students and researchers of EO&D in many fields.

Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.

Using core concepts of policy analysis "Understanding the policy process" builds up a full explanation of social policy change that can be applied to any aspect of welfare policy, public and social policy. This second edition of the book updates the first edition for the post-Blair era with international case studies from numerous countries.