Publications

Can the United Kingdom survive Brexit? This remains one of the great unanswered questions of our time. Politically, two major narratives have dominated. The first is that the UK is on a break-up trajectory. Brexit has revived the Scottish independence movement and destabilised Northern Irish politics. Clashes between UK and devolved governments over dealing with…

Against the widespread assumption that data are the oil of the 21st century, this article offers an alternative conceptual framework, interpretation, and pathway around data and smart city nex-us to subvert surveillance capitalism in light of emerging and further promising practical cases. This article illustrates an open debate in data governance and the data justice…

The purpose and practice of international educational exchange has been interpreted ambivalently especially since the Second World War. The aftermath of that war saw new global and regional institutions aimed at international political, economic, and social co-operation, most notably the United Nations with its Specialized Agencies such as UNESCO. However, the period was also one…

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy: Contemporary Applications for Spatially Integrated Social Science 14(3) pp 449-472 In response to changing consumer habits driven by the advance of online services and mobile apps, substantial reductions in the provision of bank branches have been widely documented over the last decade. Such closures have economic consequences for the sustainability of…

Journal of Contemporary Religion 36(2) pp 287-309 The relationship between religion and civil society at the macro-level has attracted the attention of sociologists of religion but empirical detail of how religion is connected to the social relations and practices that constitute local civil society is relatively lacking. This article explores the contemporary social and communal significance…

Public ownership plays a critical role in climate-saving and social inclusion. Our new report shows how partnerships between public institutions and citizens are one of the key instruments in this process. You can also watch the video below to see three examples of how citizens are cooperating with public institutions to manage essentials such as water, energy,…

Regional and Federal Studies 2022 Forthcoming This article introduces a new dataset on regionalist actors’ territorial demands and frames in Europe. The FraTerr dataset advances on existing datasets by proposing a more fine-grained understanding of regionalist actors’ territorial demands, and is the first to provide comparative data on how these are framed. Methodologically, it develops an…

The Chinese language has many expressions of politeness such as “Li rang” or comity and “Rang li” or ceding profit. Yet, there is a contradiction between an image of Chinese amity and hospitality in private and the brashness exhibited in public places. Several factors explain this, not least the social anxiety of living in such…

Peace Review 32(4) pp 434-440 How can play, sport, and dialogue may be used as pathways to peace? In the pioneering classic of cultural history, Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga describes play as an informal voluntary activity according to guided rules accepted freely under limits of space and time. The purpose is to create…

Journal of Civil Society 17(2) pp 101-118 This study explored the respective importance of compositional (individual) and contextual (neighbourhood) factors associated with the propensity to engage in formal volunteering among a nationally representative sample of adults in Wales, UK. To date, while certain contextual characteristics of local communities have been found to be associated with the…