Publications

Welcome from the WISERD director Featuring a variety of news from across the WISERD partner institutions and some of the latest additions to the WISERD blog, I hope this edition of WISERD News demonstrates our ongoing contribution to social science research and the ways in which we are influencing policy in Wales. Against a background…

Recent, UK-based studies have focused on the construction of working-class masculine identity and documented changes and softer displays among young men. This article contributes to this literature and is based on ethnographic research conducted in Wales, UK, and a sample consisting of the most marginalised working-class young men often associated with protest masculinity, homophobia and…

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on rural development programs aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Global South. The research question examines how the Smart Rural Communities (SRC) framework can support the SDGs as an international cooperation model. The article presents findings from fieldwork action research including a critical analysis of…

Read our annual report, WISERD Insight, featuring our key areas of activity, income profile, funding and engagement activities in 2022.

The paper draws upon open-source technologies to present methods of incorporating multiple travel modes into GIS analyses of cumulative opportunity and proximity-based metrics of accessibility. Two case studies are undertaken. The first uses isochrone analysis to evaluate national access to sport facilities expected to appeal to a broad range of ages and abilities. Predictably, urban…

What can the municipal state do to radically transform urban economies? Local government in countries such as the UK has been historically tasked with delivering public services; rarely extending its remit to economic develop-ment, let alone community-led forms promoting economic democracy, at least not since 1980s municipal socialism. But times are changing, and the UK…

Forthcoming Research Topic edited by Igor Calzada, Francesco Mureddu, and Smita Gupta Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “an agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be…

Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), despite much scholarly criticism, was popular in the two decades following publication in 1918. It is now a book that many people know about, but that few have read. Perhaps it was always so. This is not the place to reconsider in detail Spengler’s massive…

The paper considers the life and career of the prominent Welsh adult educator, civil servant, and cultural diplomat Sir Ben Bowen Thomas (1899-1977). He was born into a Christian Baptist family at Treorci, Ystrad Rhondda, Glamorgan, where his father Jonathan was a coal miner. His mother, Ann, was the sister of the poet Ben Bowen….

This report was produced in November 2022 as part of research undertaken by the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD) as part of its ESRC Centre research programme. Fifteen remote interviews were conducted in English or Welsh (depending on the participant’s choice) by three researchers (Dr Beel, Prof IR Jones, Dr…