News and Blog

On the 3rd and 4th July, we held our WISERD Annual Conference 2024 at the University of South Wales. Here are just some of the photographs taken throughout the event by Michael Hall.

WISERD Co-Director, Paul Chaney, has co-authored a new report in a project led by Dr Steven McCulloch (University of Winchester). The report entitled “Political Animals: The Democratic and Electoral Case for Strong Animal Welfare Policies in UK General Elections”[i] was commissioned as part of a campaign by 23 leading animal welfare NGOs. To locate this…

WISERD Co-Director, Paul Chaney, has co-authored a new report in a project led by Dr Steven McCulloch (University of Winchester). The report entitled “Political Animals: The Democratic and Electoral Case for Strong Animal Welfare Policies in UK General Elections”[i] was commissioned as part of a campaign by 23 leading animal welfare NGOs. To locate this…

Professors Paul Chaney and Sarbeswar Sahoo (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) have secured a new Global Challenge grant from the Academy of Medical Sciences and are commencing a project examining civil society and indigenous languages and cultures in India. They will be working in association with Dr Reenu Punnoose (Indian Institute of Technology, Palakkad). The…

On 2nd March 2024, the 40th anniversary of the coal miners’ strike was marked with a WISERD conference at Cardiff University’s Bute Building, attended by campaigners, trade unionists, researchers and filmmakers. The conference began with a showing of the film, Breaking Point, made and introduced by the acclaimed Swedish director, Kjell-Åke Andersson. The film was made…

As part of the WISERD study ‘New arenas for civic expansion: humans, animals, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ we presented new research at a WHEB event in Brussels last month, that reveals the views and concerns of civil society organisations (CSOs) in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the EU. The European Commission is legislating to…

On 25 January, WISERD and Welsh Higher Education Brussels (WHEB) hosted a workshop for policymakers in Brussels and made a case for civil society research being put at the heart of plans for the European Union. Later this year, members of the European Council will meet to agree the Strategic Agenda for the European Union…

In Anarchical Fallacies (1796), the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham said that the concept of natural rights was nonsense and that to claim rights not prescribed in the laws of the state was ‘nonsense on stilts.’ He argued that to confuse wishing that we possessed a right with the existence of the right itself was…

On 30 November, Professor Mitch Langford, a WISERD co-director based at the University of South Wales (USW), presented WISERD research from the ESRC-funded project, ‘Inequalities, civic loss and well-being’, to the Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee at the Senedd. The Senedd’s Areas of Research Interest (ARI) event comprised a series of speed talks made…

Last year, on the 30th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Special Rapporteur on Minority Rights, Fernand de Varennes, called for a new treaty to better recognize and protect the rights of minorities. On behalf of the Coppieters Foundation, Dr. Anwen Elias has written…