News and Blog

The WISERD stand attracted much interest from conference-goers. Findings from WISERD’s civil society research featured prominently at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) Annual Conference at Aston University last week (10-11 September). WISERD researchers presented a number of papers, including PhD student Amy Sanders, who shared initial findings from her research on sustaining the…

Today, WISERD launches a new interactive service allowing users to access data on union membership for over 400 unitary authority and local authority districts of Great Britain. UnionMaps allows users to produce area reports of union membership for a particular location or explore how different measures of union membership vary across Great Britain. Since its…

WISERD is one of four social science research centres in the UK to be successful in the highly competitive Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centres Competition. WISERD will receive £6.3 million as reinvestment into the continuation of its civil society research – the third major funding to be awarded in WISERD’s ten-year history. The…

On Monday 9th September, a team of WISERD researchers from Cardiff University, Helen Blakely, Wil Chivers, Rhys Davies, Steve Davies and Katy Huxley, will share the latest findings from our research on trade union membership in the UK, to the TUC Congress. The 151st annual congress event will take place at the Brighton Centre and attract hundreds of delegates representing every…

  In cooperation with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, WISERD recently held a conference attended by 250 delegates on citizenship rights and the Rohingya crisis. This was part of a series of events stemming from a Global Challenge Research Fund project led by Professor Paul Chaney and Professor Nasir Uddin….

On the 3rd and 4th July, WISERD held its 10th Annual Conference in the Medrus Conference Centre at Aberystwyth University. This year’s theme was Civil Society and Participation, and as Wales’ largest social science conference, the event attracted over 100 delegates from across academic, policy, public, private, and third sectors. The conference began with two…

Professor John Morgan has been appointed to the editorial boards of two leading Russian academic journals. He joins Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia (Sociological Studies), the journal of the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Filosofi Zhurnal (Journal of Philosophy), published by RUDN-Russia People’s Friendship University. Earlier this year Professor Morgan published Civil Society, Social Change,…

Following on from the previous Eye On Wales programme last month, when Dr Nigel Newton was involved in a discussion which introduced the new education system, Dr Newton now discusses whether or not the new curriculum will help to close the attainment gap. Almost two-thirds of teachers at schools that have trialled Wales’ new curriculum feel it will…

Dr Nigel Newton comments on Wales’ new curriculum in a BBC news article.

Social Action as a Route to the Ballot Box is a project intended to determine whether schemes that promote youth volunteering can reduce age-inequalities in turnout. As previous posts have shown, it has found that such schemes can be powerful tools in improving the political representation of young people. Young people who volunteer are more…