Publications

The important role which older people play in rural community development through their various activities has become a substantive area of interest across social science disciplines, including gerontology, sociology, psychology and human geography. Reflecting the demographic shift of an ageing countryside within many parts of the global north, the future of rural social policy initiatives…

Over recent decades there has been an international shift towards multi-level governance. Against this backdrop, many comparative welfare studies take government policy outputs as the starting point for their analysis. However, the associated pluralization of electoral systems in unitary states means that welfare choices are no longer exclusively informed by single state-wide ballots. Accordingly, this…

This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for…

This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for…

It has become commonplace to describe new social movements as ‘rhizomic’ in form, yet the full implications of this metaphor are rarely teased out, and the corollary that other political organisations are arborescent in form has been largely neglected in social science research. In this paper we employ Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomic and…

Access to higher education (HE) has become an extremely controversial area of policy, as successive UK administrations have sought to balance increasing student fees with ensuring that HE is open to individuals from as wide a range of social backgrounds as possible. There have also been numerous initiatives that have sought to increase participation by…

This article explores the substantive representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in party manifestos in general elections and regional elections in the United Kingdom, 1945–2011. The findings show that while there is some evidence of progress, there is also significant variation in the attention that parties afford to LGBT issues, and a…

But what, after all, is ‘the regional’? A region can be as largeas the European peninsula. Within the political enterprisethat is the European Union, however, regions subdivide acontinent already sliced up into nation-states – and eventhen what counts as a region is far from certain. Accordingto the latest Map of European Regions, a region might…

This article examines the electoral discourse associated with state decentralisation. It offers an original perspective that complements existing studies by detailing the discourse-based dimension of policy agenda-setting associated with Scottish and Welsh devolution in UK state-wide parties’ general election manifestos 1945–2010. Innovative aspects include a combined quantitative (issue-salience) and qualitative (policy framing) methodological technique transferable…

During the mid-to-late 1980s, ‘locality’ was the spatial metaphor to describe and explain the shifting world of regional studies. The paper argues that the resulting ‘localities debate’ threw this baby out with the bathwater and rather than invent new concepts to capture socio-spatial relations in the twenty-first century, the paper urges a ‘return to locality’…