News and Blog

In October 2023, I started an internship with Victim Support. Part of my role was to conduct a literature review in preparation for the production of an accessible report exploring the experiences of victims of hate crime through recent, pre-existing academic research in the field. The main focus of the internship was to make academic…

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…

Conservative MPs seem increasingly willing to use the rhetoric of conspiracy. Recently, Liz Truss claimed that her brief tenure as prime minister had been ended by the deep state – shadowy forces within the British establishment and the media. A few days later, Lee Anderson, the Conservative party’s former deputy chairman, asserted that London’s mayor,…

  In 1979 at a time of great social and political change I was living in Durham. I was closely involved with the coal miners and the NUM, and also with a group called “Strong Words” that we had set up to record and publish the words and images of working-class people in the North…

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…

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…

In October, as part of WISERD’s civil society and animal welfare research, a workshop was held in New Delhi. Academics present included co-investigators Professors Paul Chaney and Sarbeswar Sahoo, along with Research Associates Dr Pooja Sharma and Dr Debashree Saikia (pictured). Our work involves comparative analysis of developments in Wales, Scotland, England and India. We…

Pictured above: Dr Rose Butler and Dr Victoria Stead, Deakin University, Australia with Professor Michael Woods, Aberystwyth University. Dr Rose Butler and Dr Victoria Stead kindly contributed to the WISERD blog following their visit to Wales from 1–8th October, 2023. We were thrilled to spend a week as guests of the Wales Institute for Social…

Masculinity is complex, diverse and can be expressed in multiple ways. yanik88/Shutterstock Richard Gater, Cardiff University There seem to be as many interpretations of what “toxic masculinity” means as there are uses of the term. Some believe it’s a way to criticise what they see as specific negative behaviour and attitudes often associated with men….