Newyddion

On May 12th WISERD was pleased to welcome Professor Filippo Barbera (University of Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto) who gave the latest seminar in the WISERD Civil Society series. Chaired by WISERD Co-Director Prof Paul Chaney, his interesting and well-attended presentation explored the role of “social innovators” in Italy. Drawing on a qualitative research design…

With the dust settling on the devolved election results last week and showing a 3% increase in turnout in Wales, now is a good time to explore the links between devolution and political engagement, particularly among young people, and ask what can we learn from this in the run-up to the EU referendum? In terms…

  Telling stories has always been a good way to grab people’s attention and get them to understand what is important, but it’s not something that academic researchers are very accustomed to doing – after all, is it not a normal part of their training. However, carefully worded and nuanced academic reports – however precise…

  Wednesday 25th November saw the launch of ‘Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales’ at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. “Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales” is the tenth in a series of publicationsproduced by the Academy of Social Sciences and its Campaign for Social Science in order to celebrate the real and important…

As part of the Representing Communities project I worked with a group of Year 10 pupils for four months. The aim of this part of the research was to engage with the young people through photography to explore their perceptions of community life. This included some discussion of their feelings towards media representations of their community, which…

How young people make choices about university, where and what to study has been a question asked by many social researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike. Research has shown that when young people make choices about going to university, a range of factors come into play including peer influences, their families’ experience of university and their…

What effects do different environments have upon stress levels in the human body? What affect does it have upon our well-being and health? In order to test this in June 2014 WISERD’s biomapping project was invited by BBC Coast to ‘stress-test’ its presenter Nicholas Crane. The WISERD funded biomapping research project, led by Professor Chris Taylor(WISERD) and Dr Jon Anderson (CPLAN), ‘stress-tested’ the BBC…

Last week the 6th Annual Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) Conference took place at Cardiff’s iconic Millennium Stadium. The WISERD Conference is the largest of its kind in Wales, and brings together practitioners, policy makers and social scientists to discuss and debate a range of topical themes such as health; social care; wellbeing;…

On May 21st 2015 Magnox announced that 1600 jobs would be lost across its 12 UK nuclear sites. This news came as no great surprise to the workforce at Wylfa on Anglesey, which has been facing decommission for the last few years. The timeline for the final decommission of the plant has stretched considerably, originally anticipated in 2012 and…

Our lives, and the landscapes in which we live in, are storied in nature. These stories come in many different forms: from policy materials, census data, media reports, official documents and scholarly insight, to authorial fantasy. According to Piatti and Hurni (2011: 218), these stories form a ‘rich geographical layer’ that ‘hovers… above the physically…