Publications

To better understand why Middle Eastern states continue to languish at the bottom of world rankings on gender equality, this study presents critical discourse analysis of state and civil society organizations’ implementation of the Participative Democratic Model of gender mainstreaming. A requirement of the 1995 United Nations Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the Participative…

The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 was for many a watershed moment in the ongoing debate about youth political engagement. Against a backdrop of declining electoral turnout amongst young voters, and evidence that today’s young people are the most politically apathetic to have entered the electorate in the last century, the 85% turnout among 18-24…

Within the context of spatial rebalancing and a Northern (metro-region) Powerhouse, this article explores the implementation of the devolution of employment and skills within the Sheffield city region. We make both an original empirical and analytical contribution by suggesting that notions of governance and metagovernance failure are important for analyzing the development, tensions and contradictions…

The increasing integration of rural communities into transnational social and economic networks has unsettled the politics of rural regions across the globe. Through much of the 20th century, rural economies and societies in the advanced industrial nations of Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia (the ‘global north’) were defined and governed in relation to national…

This paper examines the positioning of the Welsh education system within contemporary policy debate and analysis. It begins by outlining some of the ways in which education policy and provision in Wales differs from that of its neighbour, England, and then goes on to critique how these differences have been represented in both the media…

This chapter is part of a collection of essays that put contemporary Wales under the microscope. Examining issues such as class, gender, culture and the Welsh language, Our Changing Land presents a complex and often contradictory picture of a nation. The book also continues a discourse begun over thirty years ago in the 1994 Our Sisters’ Land (edited by Jane Aaron,…

This book explores how culture and citizenship are theorised, promoted and learned throughout schools in Wales. Following a brief history of Welsh education and a discussion of how contemporary cultural identity is theorised through citizenship education curricula, it illustrates how archaic approaches to understanding cultural identity continue to undermine the development of culturally relevant curriculum in…

The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to discuss what teachers in Wales think about the Welsh Government’s recent education (mainly school) policies, and secondly, to suggest how the educational system in Wales might be improved. It is based on the findings from a general survey conducted by the Wales Institute of Social &…

Two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) techniques are popular for measuring potential geographical accessibility to health care services. This paper proposes methodological enhancements to increase the sophistication of the 2SFCA methodology by incorporating both public and private transport modes using dedicated network datasets. The proposed model yields separate accessibility scores for each modal group at each…

This article presents critical discourse analysis of state and civil society organisations’ efforts to implement the gender mainstreaming goals set out in the United Nations’ Beijing Declaration. It is argued that the latter represents a generational opportunity to apply a Feminist Political Economic Framework to development in Africa. However, the research findings show how current…