Publications

Using data from the educationally mobile (EM) ‘sensitised group’ interviews1 this chapter responds to the question: do experiences of European educational exchange programmes or study abroad make the participants more ‘European’? The biographical approach allows experiences of international educational mobility to be interpreted within the life course as a whole and is designed to reveal…

This paper considers how shifts within the social sciences towards conceptualising spatiality in relational terms have unfolded in rural studies in particular ways over the past decade or so. A period in which networks, connections, flows and mobility have all established themselves as compelling conceptual frames for research, the rural has increasingly been recast in…

This is a final report for the Welsh Government New Ideas Social Research Fund project entitled ‘Public Sentiments Towards Immigrants and Minorities: The Difference Wales Makes?’ The aim of this project was to investigate public sentiments in Wales towards immigrants and minorities. The monitoring of what people think about immigrants and minorities has come to…

This article explores the responses of senior local government actors to the 2004 Wales Spatial Plan and its 2008 update. An example of the so-called ‘new spatial planning’ which has emerged in the movement towards regional devolution in the UK, this planning discourse foregrounds elements of relational thinking that seek to alternatively augment, destabilize and…

It is now five years since Sheller and Urry (2006) published their summation of an emergence across the social sciences of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. Sheller and Urry posited then that a form of interdisciplinary convergence was occurring centring on interests with mobility. Research that took mobility as its object and topic, they argued, had demonstrated that…

During an ethnographic research project exploring young people’s perceptions of living in a post-industrial semi-rural place, boys aged 13/14 years revealed their semi-clandestine motorbiking activities across mountains trails. It was found that riding motorbikes and fixing engines were potential resources for young boys’ transitions into adult working-class masculinity and sources of competence, pride and enjoyment…

This paper focuses on the principal parties’ manifestos in UK statewide elections 1970–2010. It makes an original contribution by using a mixed methodology to examine the electoral discourse, issue-salience and policy framing associated with civil conflict resolution (CCR) proposals for Northern Ireland. Mandate and accountability theory suggest that party programmes may play an important role…

This research report, commissioned by NOMS Cymru, evaluates the provision of Women’s Turnaround Services (WTS) by the North Wales Women’s Centre (NWWC), based in Rhyl, North Wales between 1 April 2010 and 31 March 2011. The Women’s Turnaround Service was piloted in North Wales in May 2009 and fully established by April 2010. The WTS…

Since 1999 it was the view that parliamentary devolution had enabled Welsh Governments to pursue a wide range of imaginative policies across the whole gamut of educational provision. More recently, however, the focus of political discourse has shifted to the perceived failures of Welsh schools. This ‘crisis of Welsh education’ has provided the basis for…

The coalition government has set out plans to dismantle the regional tier and return powers to localities and Whitehall departments. These changes will have significant implications for the way in which transport policy is formulated and delivered in England. When in power, New Labour introduced a range of measures to strengthen governance arrangements for promoting…