The Centre for Poverty and Social Justice is the home for poverty research in the department. Centre members teach and conduct research across a wide range of disciplines and policy areas, providing an integrative perspective on poverty and social exclusion, inequality, migration, social harm, criminal justice and socio-legal studies, for four undergraduate programmes, two postgraduate programmes and, at any one time, over 20 doctoral students.   

Centre members works in collaboration with the Bristol Poverty Institute, whose mission is to provide research and data to governments, NGO and private sector bodies striving to reduce poverty in the UK and internationally. It previously housed the University's Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, launched in 1999 in honour of Professor Peter Townsend’s work, which hosts a bi-annual conference in dedicated to multidisciplinary poverty research.