Publications

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…

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(5) pp 894-912 The European Union’s flagship Cohesion Policy faces evidence of dubious economic effectiveness and growing political and philosophical critiques of the very ideals of furthering European integration. This article examines ambitions for territorial cohesion as they have been operationalised through regional development in Wales. We argue that…

In this report, Alan Felstead of Cardiff University and Darja Reuschke of the University of Southampton present new and up-to-date evidence on the scale of the shift of paid work into the home in the UK during lockdown, its impact on the mental well-being and productivity of homeworkers, and the likely prevalence of homeworking after social distancing restrictions are…

The term shadow state has become popular within the social sciences as a way of describing all voluntary, non-profit or third sector organisations, and their role in providing services of different kinds. Our main aim in this article is to examine the usefulness of the concept of the shadow state as a way of analysing…

This chapter considers the significance of rural–urban linkages in current and future food systems. Food is at the core of the rural–urban relation: an increasingly urbanized global population is dependent on rural areas for its food supply, whilst rural societies and environments have in turn been transformed by their integration into a global food system…

Against the international backdrop of rising religious tensions, this article explores contemporary civil society views on religious freedom in Bangladesh. It uses critical frame analysis of the corpus of civil society organizations’ (CSOs) submissions to the United Nations’ third cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR), 2013–18. It provides a timely assessment of Bangladesh’s fulfilment of international obligations on religious freedom, and shows how the politicization of religion and the resultant conflict between ‘secularism’ and ‘extremism’…

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…

Few people would disagree with the notion of promoting child well-being. And yet there are many different ideas about what exactly this means. Some view childhood as a developmental phase in preparation for adulthood; this view focuses on future well-being, sometimes referred to as well-becoming. The Children’s Worlds project takes a different outlook. It focuses…

Presented by the authors at GIS Research UK Conference 2020 This paper draws on a new database of gymnastics facilities, the use of Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (E2SFCA) techniques, to measure potential accessibility for both private and public transport networks using a web-based tool to collect the network distances for the transport. Plans to incorporate…

International Journal of Human Rights 25(4) pp 639-674 This study uses discourse analysis of the critical views expressed in the corpus of United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) submissions by civil society organisations (CSOs), in order to explore how the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments are responding to their international human rights treaty obligations…