News and Blog

The relationship between voter discontent in rural areas and support for disruptive political movements in Europe and the United States will be explored in a major study by a Aberystwyth University professor, following the award of a prestigious grant. Professor Michael Woods has secured funding of nearly €2.5 million from the European Research Council (ERC)…

Citizen science is a popular method of gathering data for natural and social scientists, with the number of projects and publications produced growing year by year. A typical citizen science project uses volunteers to gather data that would otherwise be unaffordable or inaccessible. But, based on the evidence we gathered during our study of a…

A new paper by Professor W. John Morgan, Honorary Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow, WISERD, at Cardiff University, considers the life and career of the prominent Welsh adult educator, civil servant, and cultural diplomat, Sir Ben Bowen Thomas (1899-1977). Professor Morgan was Chair of the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO,…

14-16 September 2023 University of Technology, Vienna (TU Wien), Austria Call for Papers and Contributions From the 14-16 September 2023 we welcome the 6th Foundational Economy Conference in the heart of Vienna! During the course of our conference there will be keynote speakers and plenary sessions, parallel sessions as well as working groups and city…

New research carried out by ADR Wales has examined the effectiveness of careers guidance in supporting participation in post compulsory education and training and how careers guidance is prioritised. The work, which was undertaken by ADR Wales researchers Dr Katy Huxley and Rhys Davies, used anonymised Careers Wales data to examine how the provision of careers support to key stage…

Everything starts with a seed… and so did our adventures as a fledgling research team based in the UK and South Africa, brought together through the British Council Farming for Climate Justice programme 2021-2022, coordinated by a transdisciplinary team of experienced researchers from the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University and…

Dr Igor Calzada, Principal Research Fellow at WISERD, has completed his role as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence (S-I-R) 2022-23 at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB) via the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Dr Calzada was formally welcomed by the university during a reception on 10th October 2022 (you can read the interview conducted before the event, watch the video…

In our last blog post we looked at how WISERD’s free interactive mapping tool UnionMaps reveals the complex patterns in trade union membership that exist across Great Britain. Analysis revealed that the overall downward trend in union density that is observed across Great Britain as a whole masks very different local fortunes for the trade…

Recent waves of strike action by nurses, train drivers, ambulance drivers, university lecturers, teachers and others besides has highlighted the prominent position that trade unions continue to hold within the UK. An important factor that determines the power and influence of trade unions, either within an organisation or across a sector, is the proportion of…

A new WISERD paper by Andrew Price, Mitchel Langford and Gary Higgs at the University of South Wales has recently been published in the journal, Case Studies on Transport Policy. Using sports facility data from Sport Wales and open-source data on green spaces, the team examine variations in potential access to recreational opportunities by different…