News and Blog

Since February 2021, we have been working with a community group in South Wales who are concerned about the air quality in their local area. We have adopted a participatory approach that facilitates the group’s work, but which also recognises the expertise of individual members and tracks how the group develops, shares and uses this…

The Migration Research Wales Network held an online symposium on 19th January for postgraduates and early-career researchers working on aspects of migration in Wales or based at Welsh institutions. The theme of the symposium was ‘New Perspectives on Migration’. Presentations covered research areas ranging from Italians in Wales, refugee women and Welshness, and the challenges facing LGBTQ+…

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities in society. In doing so, it has reinforced the importance of the government’s ‘levelling up’ policy agenda. In terms of protected characteristics, attention focused most immediately on ethnicity given the differences in health risk posed by COVID-19 and was subsequently concerned with gender as a result of…

Dr Igor Calzada has been featured in Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government list. Public servants were invited to nominate the academics who are the most influential to the work of government. Dr Calzada’s work intersects digital, urban, and political transformations, paying special attention to regional governments on 1. smart city citizenship, 2. benchmarking city-regions, and…

We are delighted to announce that the call for papers is now OPEN for the WISERD Annual Conference 2022. WISERD Annual Conference 2022 Swansea University   Wednesday 6th and Thursday 7th July 2022 The theme for our Annual Conference is ‘Civil society and participation: issues of equality, identity and cohesion in a changing social landscape’….

In the latest issue of The Welsh Agenda, Dr Anwen Alias, WISERD co-director, Matthew Jarvis, CWPS Executive Board member, and Mike Corcoran and Noreen Blanluet discuss what form a national debate about the constitutional future of Wales should take. The discussion is based on the ‘Constitutional Futures’ project based at Aberystwyth University, led by Dr Anwen…

Dr Wil Chivers, recently appointed as a social science lecturer at Cardiff University, has presented findings from his WISERD research exploring the nature of work as a cycle courier in the gig/platform economy, at the Work, Employment and Society Conference 2021. The paper, On your bike: exploring the geography and leisure of work as a…

As part of the project Trust, Human Rights and Civil Society in WISERD’s civil society research programme, I’ve been analysing the human rights situation of children in Cambodia. This is an appropriate, yet hitherto neglected area of enquiry because it is almost three decades since the country ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights…

I’ve been analysing civil society organisations’ (CSOs’) perspectives on the crisis facing an estimated one million Rohingya people, members of a Muslim minority group (a variation of the Sunni religion), that have fled persecution in the western state of Rakhine, Myanmar. This work is part of the project Trust, Human Rights and Civil Society in…

  WISERD researchers are hosting three ESRC Festival of Social Science events, covering youth unemployment and civil society under devolution, local community food systems and a citizen science project exploring air quality monitoring. Youth unemployment and civil society under devolution: a sub-state comparison 11th November 2021 This online event hosted by Dr Giada Lagana, based…