News and Blog

On the 4th November, Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled the government’s proposals for updating the UK’s legislative framework for communications surveillance. The arrival in parliament of the Investigatory Powers Bill has been long-awaited and its possible contents have been the source of increasing speculation. We’ve now had our first look at the draft Bill (that’s #IPBill for the…

Professor David Blackaby, School of Management, was interviewed for BBC Wales’ Wales Today news about HMRC’s announcement that it is to close all its offices in Wales and create a regional centre in Cardiff employing up to 3,800 people.

Dr Ruth McElroy, was interviewed on BBC Radio Wales and Radio 4’s Media show, talking about the Cardiff media summit and the IWA’s Media Audit report

WISERD would like to congratulate our colleagues Professor Tess Fitzpatrick and Dr Dawn Knight, and their time, for recently securing £1.8m in funding from the ESRC for their Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes (National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) project; also known as CorCenCC. The project is funded for 3.5 years and will commence in March 2016….

In early September, the WISERD Education research team joined many other academics in the annual before-term ritual: to leave the warm confines of the university and stretch their legs at another institution – sometimes in a faraway land, sometimes much closer to home. On 7thSeptember we began the journey to Budapest, capital of Hungary and the venue…

As part of the Representing Communities project I worked with a group of Year 10 pupils for four months. The aim of this part of the research was to engage with the young people through photography to explore their perceptions of community life. This included some discussion of their feelings towards media representations of their community, which…

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…

Children in Wales are required to begin school at age 5. Although parents have no legal obligation to put their children into forms of education before this age, it is widely accepted that pre-school education has a positive impact on children’s cognitive and social development. Pre-school education is therefore universally popular and local authorities in…

Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy: Knowing Contemporary Wales Through New Localities offers important and interesting insights into ‘place-making’ and ‘locality-making’ in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, and national), it examines the historical processes and working…

Our book has finally been published! We say finally, because the idea for the book started to take shape five years ago during the first phase of WISERD. During this phase we were interested in understanding how different localities in Wales were behaving in relation to devolution and devolved policy areas and we developed a research strand…