News and Blog

WISERD Annual Conference 2016 Starts Tomorrow!

Wales’ largest social science conference is taking place at the new Bay Campus at Swansea University tomorrow. Now in its seventh year, the WISERD Annual Conference brings together practitioners, policy makers and social scientists to discuss and debate themes such as health; social care; wellbeing; education; culture & values; environment; labour markets; devolution; and civil…

Making the best of a bad job? Measuring job satisfaction in Wales

Since the introduction of its well-being programme in 2010, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has introduced a number of questions into its surveys in an attempt to measure the well-being of the population in the UK.  The Annual Population Survey, the largest regular household survey undertaken by the ONS, now includes a suite of…

WISERD Annual Conference: Speaker Titles Confirmed & PhD Student Competition Extension

Updates on the WISERD Annual Conference! The WISERD Annual Conference offers delegates an insight into current social science research through keynote addresses, plenary sessions, workshops and exhibitions. For more information on the Conference and to book visit: www.wiserd.ac.uk/training-events/annual-conference-2016/ This year’s speaker titles are now confirmed: The Right Honourable Rhodri Morgan – The Services/Manufacturing Balance and the Welsh…

Public Engagement: A liberating experience

Public engagement used to be something I shied away from but in the past month I have taken part in two public engagement events to present the work of the IDEAL study and even discussed them on BBC Radio Wales.  In the past I worried about how to translate research to the public in a meaningful and engaging…

WISERD Annual Conference: Early Bird Closing 29th May

Wednesday 13th July to Thursday 14th July 2016 Great Hall, Swansea University Bay Campus Come and join Wales’ largest social science conference! Swansea 2016 is set to be bigger and brighter than ever, offering an even greater choice of sessions for delegates in addition to plenary sessions, workshops, commercial exhibition and of course, the opportunity…

Absent Friends and Absent Enemies: reflections on the Radical Social Innovation Colloquium

  Let me introduce you to Moran’s Law of Academic Conferences: the more a conference draws on a single discipline, the less interesting it is.   The most mind numbingly boring conferences now are those lumbering leviathans, the Annual Conferences of  professional associations, where the only way to survive is to disappear to the bar to…

Measuring trade union membership: Harder than it may seem?

Declining levels of trade union membership is often cited as evidence that trade unions have become less relevant within the modern UK economy. In 2012, particular attention was given to this issue as levels of union membership among TUC affiliated unions fell to beneath 6 million members for the first time[i].  The recent development and…

Dementia Awareness Week: WISERD to sponsor special film screening

The Canadian film Away From Her will be screened on 18th May with Dr Alex Hillman taking part in the expert panel discussion following the film. In collaboration with Cardiff University sciSCREEN programme, the screening aims to engage audiences in dementia research through cinema.  The screening will be followed by a panel discussion of 4 speakers…