News and Blog

Dr Pearce’s successful research grant will fund the WISERD-based research project ‘Youth unemployment and civil society under devolution: a comparative analysis of sub-state welfare regimes’.  The £211,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council will fund a two-year project examining divergences in civil society responses to youth unemployment (policy) in the four, devolved nations…

Following last week’s WISERD blog post about the 2017 McDonald’s strike, Wil Chivers and Helen Blakely report from the picket lines in London at the UK’s second McStrike. Until now our research on the McStrike has been at a distance. We’ve followed the Twitter conversation and although we’ve got a good sense of what’s been…

In September 2017, McDonald’s workers went on strike for the first time in the UK. Researchers at WISERD analysed the social media conversation that surrounded the ‘McStrike’at the time. With a second McStrike scheduled for the 1st May Wil Chivers, Helen Blakely and Steve Davies outline key findings from this research. Young workers unite McDonald’s…

The financial crisis has been identified as the catalyst for the tremendous growth seen in social enterprise – organisations that have social purpose but rely on the functioning of the market to maintain long term viability. Social enterprises are thought to have grown from an estimated 5,000 in the late 1990s to an estimated 70,000…

WISERD’s Professor Melanie Jones blogs for The Conversation with Professor Victoria Wass, Cardiff University. Disability affects the lives of millions of people in the UK. With about one in six working-age people currently reporting some kind of disability, around 70% are either working, looking for work or want to work. Good quality work is important…

Our latest annual report details what we’ve achieved as an institute throughout 2017

We are working on an ethnography of Six Bells, which was once a pit village on the eastern borders of the South Wales coalfield. Our primary interest lies in the significance of Guardian, a memorial erected in 2010 to commemorate a mining disaster in the village that resulted in the death of 45 miners in…

13% of shops on Welsh high streets were vacant in 2017

Dr Alexandra Plows shares her experience of a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship pilot scheme to enable Welsh Assembly Members to develop policy and practice: Between March and June 2017, Dr Alexandra Plows was engaged on a Knowledge Exchange (KE) Fellowship pilot scheme with the National Assembly for Wales (NAfW) – sharing expertise to enable Assembly Members to…

WISERD Fellow, Dr Alexandra Plows, is one of two Bangor University academics involved in piloting Academic Fellowships with the National Assembly for Wales, by sharing expertise to enable Assembly Members to develop policy and practice for the benefit of the people of Wales. Dr Alexandra Plows of Bangor University’s School of Social Sciences and Dr…