Publications

The south Wales’ valleys had been at the centre of the Industrial Revolution in the 1920s and so at the cutting edge of skilled practices developed in the mining and steel industries. Men came to these remote and typologically impressive places, settled, created communities, brought up families and passed down their skills. The last working…

This exploratory study examines issue salience and the discourse on human rights in the principal parties’ manifestos in UK state-wide Elections 1945–2010. Innovative aspects include the application of combined qualitative and quantitative techniques. These are used to test a series of hypotheses. The findings reveal the nature and extent of the party politicisation of human…

Recent developments in mapping and distributing geographical data using accessible Web 2.0 technologies and practices (such as Google EarthTM, WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap) as well as developments in user-generated online content through web-based and mobile technologies have raised the public profile of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in societal applications. There are numerous high-profile world-wide examples of…

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…

Excess alcohol consumption has serious adverse effects on health and violence-related harm. In the UK around 37% of men and 29% of women drink to excess and 20% and 13% report binge drinking. The potential impact on population health from a reduction in consumption is considerable. One proposed method to reduce consumption is to reduce…

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…