Publications

Here we make an original, empirical contribution to debates on welfare pluralism, the mixed economies of welfare and territorial rescaling by comparing civil society approaches to tackling youth unemployment in England, Scotland and Wales. Our core finding is that academic and policy literature’s frequent characterisation of the UK as a single Liberal welfare regime is…

Here we present a critical exploration of evaluation as a concept within a state-led social policy programme. Studies critiquing this type of evaluation often assume its purpose is to provide knowledge and understanding of a given social policy, and its relative impact upon the social issue towards which it has been directed. However, drawing on…

UK unemployment has risen to its highest in two years this month, from 3.9% in March to 4.1% in September. Young people aged 16-24 have been hit hardest, and July 2020 saw a 122% increase in young people claiming unemployment related benefits, that’s 241,700 more young people since March 2020. To date, one-third of 18-24-year…

The devolution of power and responsibility from central to sub national levels of governance over the past half century marks a paradigm shift in forces shaping social policy across much of Western Europe. Scholarship in this field is often concerned with a binary analysis of before and after the advent of devolution, with insufficient attention…

‘Factors influencing local and community engagement in renewable energy in Wales’ is based on conversations with people directly involved with local and community renewable energy and energy-saving projects. It outlines the problems they perceived with the projects and identifies measures to alleviate these. The research emphasised the amount of time and expert skills that are required…

Since the Research Excellence Framework of 2014 (REF2014) ‘impact’ has created a conceptual conundrum gradually being pieced together by academics across the Higher Education sector. Emerging narratives and counter-narratives focus upon its role in dictating institutional reputation and funding to universities. However, not only does literature exploring impact, rather than ‘REF2014 impact’ per se, seldom…

A prominent feature of media coverage during the UK’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the stark difference between the pro-EU young and their Eurosceptic elders, widely assumed to reflect a generational divide. The positive relationship between age and hostility towards the EU is well established in academic research, however only Down, and Wilson…

Film as a research method for collecting and analysing visual data has a long and rich history within the fields of anthropology and ethnography. This approach is less commonly used within the social sciences and still less within the political sciences. This paper goes some way towards defining the parameters of visual methodology in the…

Despite clear linkages between conceptualisations and perceptions of politics, society, culture and territorial rescaling, research into young people’s political engagement, participation and representation is underrepresented in the field of social and cultural geography. Here the gap is addressed using perceptions of devolved politics, as a form of territorial rescaling, among young people living in Wales….

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing research base about the extent and significance of ‘shadow education’ through drawing on data from a national survey of over 1000 key stage 2, 3 and 4 pupils in Wales and over 200 of their parents. Wales provides an important lens to look at shadow education because…