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…

This article addresses the problem of replication among smart cities in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020: Smart Cities and Communities (EC-H2020-SCC) framework programme. This article initially sets the general policy context by conducting a benchmarking about the explicit replication strategies followed by each of the 17 ongoing EC-H2020-SCC lighthouse projects. This article aims to shed…

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…

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field’s flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing…

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…

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…

Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment: Chapter 4, Springer Nature This chapter explores the concept of public narratives of crime and criminal justice and its importance in influencing criminal justice and penal policy as well as expressions of public opinion. In order to understand the power of public narratives of crime and criminal justice, it…