News and Blog

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…

In early November 2022, we were delighted to welcome Professor Charles Sabel from Columbia Law School as WISERD international visiting scholar. Professor Sabel joined us in sparcIspark for a week of events and discussions about his work on experimental governance. The visit kicked off with an intensive workshop addressing “Industrial Policy for Climate Change and…

A new paper in the Journal of Rural Studies reports on research from the ERC Global-Rural project led by CWPS-WISERD to examine the industrial transformation of a village in eastern China in the context of globalization. Co-authored by CWPS-WISERD Co-Director Professor Michael Woods with former CWPS-WISERD post-doc Dr Francesa Fois (now at Salford University), Professor…

To celebrate 20 years of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science, WISERD hosted two events at this year’s Festival, which aimed to highlight one of our ongoing education research projects and a useful data tool that helps us to better understand our towns and local areas. We began with a…

A new book edited by Paul Chaney and Ian Rees Jones presents original findings and brings together core strands of theory to highlight some of the pressing challenges facing civil society. It is the latest edited volume to be published as part of the Civil Society and Social Change book series with Policy Press and highlights…

Dr Amy Sanders of Aberystwyth University has created a series of bitesize videos aimed at practitioners that share her research on the relationship between the voluntary sector and Welsh Government in the time that is takes to have mug of tea. Amy’s background in the third sector has always been important to her during her…

In October 2022, the Welsh Government announced that anti-racist professional learning would be mandatary for all school teachers in Wales as part of its Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan. Evidence from the latest sweep of the WISERD Education Multi-Cohort Study (WMCS) suggests that such universal and compulsory training is badly needed. In the summer of 2022,…