Newyddion

WISERD Civil Society: Community-level social capital and the provision of public services; the need for a stronger evidence base

WISERD Civil Society WP3.2: Implications of Spatial & Temporal Variation in Service Provision for Inequalities in Social Outcomes This work package will undertake a comprehensive review of the literature on social capital with a particular focus on community level measures at a range of spatial scales. The ultimate aim is to critically assess the suitability of existing secondary…

Making your Marx in research: Reflections on impact and the efficacy of case studies using the work of Karl Marx

Dr Sioned Pearce’s guest blog for The London School of Economics and Political Science: The philosophers have only interpreted the world…The point, however, is to change it (Karl Marx 1888) Drawing from a recent study on how impact occurs in the social sciences, Sioned Pearce looks at some specific issues with the case study approach to understanding impact….

Public Engagement: A liberating experience

Public engagement used to be something I shied away from but in the past month I have taken part in two public engagement events to present the work of the IDEAL study and even discussed them on BBC Radio Wales.  In the past I worried about how to translate research to the public in a meaningful and engaging…

A radical agenda for social innovation

WISERD/CRESC Civil Society Colloquium 18th and 19th May 2016, Cardiff   As part of the WISERD Civil Society programme, WISERD and CRESC jointly organised an international colloquium on 18th and 19th May at Cardiff University for academics, policy makers and civil society organisations involved in Social Innovation (SI) initiatives. As an international event the colloquium was organised in…

Are older voters winging behind Remain? It depends how you ask them…

  On 23rd May the Telegraph published the results of an ORB poll which suggested that the traditional advantage of the Leave campaign among older voters was being eroded. The poll showed that 51% of over-65s were planning to vote Remain in the EU referendum, compared with 44% planning to vote Leave. The finding may well have contributed…

Absent Friends and Absent Enemies: reflections on the Radical Social Innovation Colloquium

  Let me introduce you to Moran’s Law of Academic Conferences: the more a conference draws on a single discipline, the less interesting it is.   The most mind numbingly boring conferences now are those lumbering leviathans, the Annual Conferences of  professional associations, where the only way to survive is to disappear to the bar to…

Education, austerity and elitist political language: the rise of UKIP in understanding the Brex-factor

This article looks at the reasons behind the ‘rise of UKIP’ since 2013 and applies it to our data on young people and the EU referendum under three headings: employment and education; austerity; and political language. The findings show a divide in support between those who left school at 17 or 18 and those still…

Measuring trade union membership: Harder than it may seem?

Declining levels of trade union membership is often cited as evidence that trade unions have become less relevant within the modern UK economy. In 2012, particular attention was given to this issue as levels of union membership among TUC affiliated unions fell to beneath 6 million members for the first time[i].  The recent development and…