News and Blog

The financial crisis has been identified as the catalyst for the tremendous growth seen in social enterprise – organisations that have social purpose but rely on the functioning of the market to maintain long term viability. Social enterprises are thought to have grown from an estimated 5,000 in the late 1990s to an estimated 70,000…

WISERD’s Professor Melanie Jones blogs for The Conversation with Professor Victoria Wass, Cardiff University. Disability affects the lives of millions of people in the UK. With about one in six working-age people currently reporting some kind of disability, around 70% are either working, looking for work or want to work. Good quality work is important…

Our latest annual report details what we’ve achieved as an institute throughout 2017

We are working on an ethnography of Six Bells, which was once a pit village on the eastern borders of the South Wales coalfield. Our primary interest lies in the significance of Guardian, a memorial erected in 2010 to commemorate a mining disaster in the village that resulted in the death of 45 miners in…

13% of shops on Welsh high streets were vacant in 2017

Dr Alexandra Plows shares her experience of a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship pilot scheme to enable Welsh Assembly Members to develop policy and practice: Between March and June 2017, Dr Alexandra Plows was engaged on a Knowledge Exchange (KE) Fellowship pilot scheme with the National Assembly for Wales (NAfW) – sharing expertise to enable Assembly Members to…

WISERD Fellow, Dr Alexandra Plows, is one of two Bangor University academics involved in piloting Academic Fellowships with the National Assembly for Wales, by sharing expertise to enable Assembly Members to develop policy and practice for the benefit of the people of Wales. Dr Alexandra Plows of Bangor University’s School of Social Sciences and Dr…

As part of the WISERD Cardiff lunchtime seminar series, Dr Wil Chivers recently reported early findings from his research into trade unions on Twitter.   Back in September I introduced the Social Media Research Series of blogs here at WISERD. Following a period of data collection for WISERD Civil Society work package 3.3 at the beginning of the year,…

Professor Melanie Jones participated in a panel discussion focused on disability and self-employment for BBC Radio 4’s Money Box Live.

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…