News and Blog

Hannah Blake is a PhD student at Cardiff University and recently contributed to the WISERD Cardiff lunchtime seminar series with a presentation on her master’s degree research into volunteer accounts of participation.   Research in the volunteering phenomena is increasing. Having been a volunteer for six years, the decision to undertake my own research in…

As part of the Young People and Brexit project, WISERD will be creating a series of short films with young people. In this blog, Dr Sioned Pearce discusses some of the questions that the films will be asking. This week I sat on a debating panel to discuss young people and politics at the National Assembly…

The decision to leave the European Union on 23rd June 2016 was potentially the most dramatic ever taken by the British electorate. Not only did it fly in the face of the expectations of the majority of the media, opinion pollsters and politicians (both in the UK and Europe), but it has come to dominate politics…

Dr Marta Eichsteller reflects on the challenges of biographical narratives in ethnographic research on civil society. Doing biographical narrative research as part of an ethnographic project is becoming established research practice. The method’s place in social research is to give context and meaning to what can be observed in the field and establish historical background…

Finding strategies to live well with dementia is increasingly a focus of UK government policy.  But, we know relatively about what living well with dementia means to the people and families affected by it, or what factors support living well and what factors act as a barrier to living well. I’m a qualitative researcher based…

Young peoples’ social media usage on the rise Amongst young people social media has been consistently growing in popularity over the past ten years. EU Kids Online’s research on young people’s use of digital media across 25 European countries suggests that from 2005 to 2010 internet use increased from 70 to 93 per cent amongst 6- to 17-year-olds. Research…

The Sheffield City Region (SCR) faces considerable problems in terms of economic and social inequality. As the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) emphasises, there has been a marked decline in living standards in the UK, which is projected to continue. The Sheffield City Region has the highest concentration of those in work and paid below…

  As part of my ethnographic research on the WISERD Civil Society project examining participation over place and time, I’ve spent the last year or so visiting two north east Wales villages, where I’ve been interviewing local residents and surveying neighbourhoods. The location of each research site is about an hour away from my house…

‘Should 16- and 17-year-olds be given the right to vote’ is a topic that has been discussed a lot recently in the UK. The Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 was a case to the point as the 16- and 17-year-olds were given the opportunity to vote and the results indicated that 89% of all 16-…

Remembering and remembrance are incredibly important to the labour movement. Trade unions hold their history dear and the hard fought battles of the past are positioned firmly in the minds of those who take pride in their allegiance in the present: cohort after cohort of novice activists are schooled in trade union history; the spectacle…