News and Blog

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…

A radical agenda for social innovation

WISERD/CRESC Civil Society Colloquium 18th and 19th May 2016, Cardiff   As part of the WISERD Civil Society programme, WISERD and CRESC jointly organised an international colloquium on 18th and 19th May at Cardiff University for academics, policy makers and civil society organisations involved in Social Innovation (SI) initiatives. As an international event the colloquium was organised in…

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…

Introducing the GW4 Pay Equality Research Consortium

From 2018, companies with more than 250 employees will be required to make their gender pay gap publicly available online.  Employers that fail to address gender pay disparities will also be highlighted in new league tables intended to drive progress.  The launch of a new project has coincided with the governments publication of these planned…

Women’s marginalisation in post-war UK politics

On 2nd February Prof Paul Chaney presented the findings of a recent study of political representation to a seminar organised by the Chwarae Teg Research Hub. The paper analysed the parliamentary scrutiny of the substantive representation of women (SRW) in UK Governments’ Post-War legislative programmes. The SRW refers to the situation whereby women’s needs and…

Making the case for the Social Sciences

  Telling stories has always been a good way to grab people’s attention and get them to understand what is important, but it’s not something that academic researchers are very accustomed to doing – after all, is it not a normal part of their training. However, carefully worded and nuanced academic reports – however precise…

Making the case for the Social Sciences in Wales launch event – In pictures

  Wednesday 25th November saw the launch of ‘Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales’ at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. “Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales” is the tenth in a series of publicationsproduced by the Academy of Social Sciences and its Campaign for Social Science in order to celebrate the real and important…

Has the disability employment gap really declined?

If you keep track of key measures of disability equality in the UK, you’ll know that the gap in employment rates between disabled and non-disabled working-age people has gone down over the past fifteen years.  And you’d be in good company. Many experts have flagged this trend: Dame Carol Black in her influential 2008 Review, DWP indicators…