News and Blog

I recently attended Play 2021 (a new conference hosted by community interest company Playful Planet) which brought together researchers, policymakers and practitioners interested in ‘child-friendly’ urban design and children’s play. One of our interests as part of our WISERD research project has been the concept of the ‘child-friendly city’ and what an enabling environment for the…

In this third and final part of my blog series exploring the recent election of new Unite leader, Sharon Graham, I’ll be focusing on leverage campaigns and how they work. As a highly contentious topic, they form a key part of Graham’s strategy for organising Unite into a union of “strike ready workplaces”, but are…

In the second part of this three-post blog series exploring the recent election of new Unite leader, Sharon Graham, I’ll explain a bit more about her priorities and approach. I’ll focus more on one particular aspect of her strategy in the final part of the series: Leverage campaigns and how they work. I interviewed her…

With both the TUC and Labour holding annual conferences one after the other, much attention was on the unions’ newest leader, Sharon Graham. Her election as general secretary of the UK and Ireland’s most important union, Unite, came as a shock to most of the commentariat. In this, the first part of a three-post blog…

In this blog, Stephen Drinkwater, Professor of Economics at the Business School in the University of Roehampton and academic lead for the EU Settlement Scheme Data Linkage Project, looks at the latest data available on applications made to the Home Office for EU Settled Status and how this data is helping to shape the project…

WISERD’s third foundational economy conference, held online earlier this month, brought together researchers and practitioners from across the UK and beyond, to discuss how the foundational economy can be rebuilt, enhanced and sustained in response to new and old challenges magnified by the pandemic. Over three days, an expert panel of speakers and discussants from…

On September 13th, the UK’s four chief medical officers concluded that children aged 12 and over can be offered one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination. There has been much debate about whether all children and younger teenagers should be offered vaccinations, with discussion about the safety of vaccines, consent from children and the need…

On Saturday 4th September 2021, Professor John Morgan presented a keynote lecture and workshop on Idealism and Realism in Educational and Cultural Exchange: International intellectual cooperation or ‘soft power?’, to the conference: Living together with ambiguities – Different cultures and common values?, organised by the Fondazione Intercultura Onus, Florence, Italy (2–4 September). An outcome of…

Anwen Elias, Aberystwyth University and Matt Wall, Swansea University Can the United Kingdom survive Brexit? This remains one of the great unanswered questions of our time. Politically, two major narratives have dominated. The first is that the UK is on a break-up trajectory. Brexit has revived the Scottish independence movement and destabilised Northern Irish politics. Clashes between UK and…

COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerabilities of global supply chains, including our food system. In the UK, the dual impact of the pandemic and Brexit have led to considerable losses in food and drink trade, closures of hospitality venues and growing food insecurity among the population. In front of this backdrop, the demand for more crisis-resilient…