Publications

Trust has long been identified as an essential component of social, economic and political life. Since the mid-1990s, there has been renewed interest in the concept driven by its perceived decline and reengagement with concepts of social capital. The article acknowledges these debates, especially the general context of decline in trust in western democracies, including…

In the ninety years since the foundation of the CPRW in 1928, rural Wales has changed substantially, yet it is far from fanciful to draw parallels between the challenges that concerned the organization in its early days and those facing the Welsh countryside today, or to see continuities in the underlying vulnerability of rural Wales…

The intensification of global mobility has introduced international migration to rural areas and small towns with little or no significant recent history of immigration. Drawing on an emergent literature in rural studies, this paper seeks to consolidate the concept of ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ both as a political or ethical project, and in relation to the ‘actual-existing…

Gwerddon, 26(2) The Foundation Phase (FP) is a statutory curriculum in each state school in Wales since 2008. The curriculum follows a developmentally appropriate pedagogy, and encourages children to engage by learning through experiences. The paper that follows is taken from a wider evaluation of the FP, commissioned by Welsh Government in 2012 and considers…

The Labour Force Survey is used to examine the influence of sector on the UK gender pay gap 1997–2015. The assessment is twofold: first comparing gender pay gaps within sectors and second through identifying the contribution of the concentration of women in the public sector to the overall gender pay gap. The long-term narrowing of…

This article reports on a study of how young people in a post-industrial UK town reflect on their sense of health, place and identity. Drawing on 56 qualitative interviews with 14–15 year olds, we explore how young people negotiate public space and how public lighting and darkness affect interactions with their surroundings. The young people…

Background We propose that arts based methodologies can be of value in the production and exchange of evidence in supporting public health related policy. This article reports on a collaborative piece of work resulting from two projects which took place in a former coal mining town in South Wales. Methods We used a participatory framework…

The article draws upon Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital to provide an in-depth analysis of the gender differences in students’ motivation for undertaking postgraduate (PG) education in Mainland China. It reports an in-depth case study comprising 381 questionnaires and 30 semi-structured interviews. The quantitative data show that students who enter PG education do…

In this article we discuss findings from our ethnography investigating how volunteering in local associational life is changing, asking whether structural factors fixed in localities remain important or whether, as others have suggested, volunteering is becoming disembedded from place. Across two locations, we observe how situational variables, including belonging, identification and interaction, remain important determinants…

This paper focuses on the ‘mainstreaming’ of charities into schools. There have been growing concerns about the permeation of business and business values in education, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which schools are increasingly engaged in the ‘business’ of fundraising for charities. Drawing on survey data from the WISERDEducation…