Publications

The importance of the early years is well understood within the Welsh Government. Since 2003 work has been underway to develop effective interventions in this area, such as the Flying Start programme. However, the question of what works best and is most effective remains important. Events such as this that bring colleagues from the policy,…

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 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…

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…

Through personal narrative, I describe my experiences as a technology teacher attempting to enact a critical pedagogy “under the radar” at a suburban middle-school. As part of my story, I offer vignettes that serve as windows into my classroom, detailing the successes and challenges my students and I faced in engaging in critical pedagogy at…

This paper argues that New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ project – and the chaos that ensued – can only be understood by grasping the longstanding, complex and intimate relationship between education and the middle class. Drawing on empirical data from ongoing investigations into the allegiances of the middle class, the paper shows how New Labour’s desire…

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…

This chapter describes the Wales Health Impact Assessment Support Unit (WHIASU) and the evolution of HIA in the context of Wales as a devolved nation with its particular approach to public health. The character of WHIASU can only properly be understood in terms of its history and the wider social, policy, and political context of…