News and Blog

In our last blog post we looked at how WISERD’s free interactive mapping tool UnionMaps reveals the complex patterns in trade union membership that exist across Great Britain. Analysis revealed that the overall downward trend in union density that is observed across Great Britain as a whole masks very different local fortunes for the trade…

Recent waves of strike action by nurses, train drivers, ambulance drivers, university lecturers, teachers and others besides has highlighted the prominent position that trade unions continue to hold within the UK. An important factor that determines the power and influence of trade unions, either within an organisation or across a sector, is the proportion of…

A new WISERD paper by Andrew Price, Mitchel Langford and Gary Higgs at the University of South Wales has recently been published in the journal, Case Studies on Transport Policy. Using sports facility data from Sport Wales and open-source data on green spaces, the team examine variations in potential access to recreational opportunities by different…

Professor Michael Woods presented findings from the CWPS-WISERD-led Horizon 2020 project IMAJINE to the Third Joint EU Cohesion Policy Conference in Zagreb in November. Jointly organized by the European Commission Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG-Regio), the Regional Studies Association and the Croatian Government, the conference brought together 150 academics, EU policymakers and member…

  The future of work In recent years, media headlines such as: ‘Robots are coming for your job: and faster than you think’ have become increasingly prominent. Such media coverage derives from research on the future of work and the impact of new technologies and automation, which sets out competing arguments that are widely contested….

As part of WISERD’s ESRC-funded Civil Society Centre research programme, a team of WISERD researchers have published a new report on the process of developing and implementing the North Wales Growth Deal (NWGD), based on observations from a series of interviews with stakeholders between July-December 2021. Fifteen remote interviews were conducted by three researchers: Dr…

With over 40 delegates and more presenters and delegates joining online, the hybrid conference launched the Foundational Alliance project of building alliances for change and foundational renewal in Wales. A combination of presentations and workshop discussions highlighted foundational objectives and ways of working which can sustain household liveability and responsible providers within planetary limits.

Hundreds of working hours are wasted due to schoolteachers lacking a centrally shared language resource. Despite recent developments in use of the virtual learning platforms like Hwb (available to Welsh schools for free since 2012), teachers lacking Welsh-language resources for their classroom are unable to access translations of other resources. Under the current system, if…

CWPS-WISERD Co-Director Professor Michael Woods has published an open access paper in the Journal of Rural Studies which examines the settlement of refugees and asylum seekers in three small towns in Wales and Ireland, including Aberystwyth and Newtown. The paper builds on an earlier article that introduced the idea of ‘precarious rural cosmopolitanism’, arguing that…

ADR Wales has today (Thursday 1 December) unveiled its Planned Programme of Work that will help to provide an insight on the key issues facing Wales and the UK. The ADR Wales Planned Programme of Work 2022-2026 outlines the ten thematic areas that the ADR Wales team will focus their research on to help government…