Publications

The issues of Trust and transparency lay at the heart of contemporary debates regarding governance and democracy. Measures of trust and transparency (in the national leadership, in the conduct of professional politicians, in diffuse affect for the political regime) have been generally been applied to the national or EU levels. The paper is drawn from…

This paper offers a theoretical framework for the analysis of belonging in local communities. To do so it draws on a broad existing literature which argues that comfort is a key dimension of our attachments to place. The argument that experiences of local belonging (or otherwise) are related to a person’s sense of comfort is…

A prominent feature of media coverage during the UK’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the stark difference between the pro-EU young and their Eurosceptic elders, widely assumed to reflect a generational divide. The positive relationship between age and hostility towards the EU is well established in academic research, however only Down, and Wilson…

This ‘in perspective’ piece addresses the (re-)positioning of civil society within new structures of city-region governance within Greater Manchester. This follows on from the processes of devolution, which have given the Greater Manchester City-Region a number of new powers. UK devolution, to date, has been largely focused upon engendering agglomerated economic growth at the city-region…

This contribution introduces a distinctive approach to the critique of capitalism and, in this context, of recent economic and financial crises and crisis-management. Cultural political economy takes sense-making and meaning-making seriously in describing and explaining political economy without neglecting the historically specific properties, dynamic and crisis-tendencies of capitalist social formations. In this light, the chapter…

This chapter explores the work on language, ideology, and politics of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser. While only the first two explicitly considered language, all three adopted a totalising approach, forcefully critiqued ideologies and domination, and stressed the unity of social theory and political practice. The chapter addresses Marx’s ideas on language and…

W. John Morgan explains how policy has impacted higher education in China. China is a country marked by sharp differences in regional development and by social inequalities, especially between rural and urban areas. Given the economic and social development strategy of the Chinese Communist Party, education will continue to be a fundamental aspect of public policy…

This paper makes the case for the conceptual use of the everyday in economic geography. It does this by firstly demonstrating the explanatory potential that lies in attending to the lived experience of economic development and, secondly, the ability of the everyday to occupy a meso-level analytical position that is sensitive to the agency of…

Film as a research method for collecting and analysing visual data has a long and rich history within the fields of anthropology and ethnography. This approach is less commonly used within the social sciences and still less within the political sciences. This paper goes some way towards defining the parameters of visual methodology in the…

This paper reports on on-going exploratory research into the prevalence and patterns of social media use by trade unions in the United Kingdom. Social media platforms, like Twitter, are used by unions to organize and mobilize existing and potential members by communicating relevant content, which often engages politicians and the news media. However, there is…