Publications

Education and skill are increasingly used by states around the world as a central organizing principle in the regulation of migration flows. Immigration theorists have often claimed that use of education and skill to determine “who should get in” to a country is non-discriminatory, innocent and legitimate. Using the example of Canadian immigration policy, this…

The aim of the 2010 ESF Leavers Survey is to assist in assessing the effectiveness of labour market interventions delivered under ESF. Telephone interviews were conducted with 7,500 people who had left an ESF project delivered under Priorities 2 and 3 of the Convergence Programme and Priorities 1 and 2 of the Competitiveness Programme during…

Paul Peterson’s (1981) City Limits was to become one of several landmark publications in the study of urban politics during the 1980s and 1990s. It pioneered the argument that, amid the unravelling of the 1960s Great Society welfare accord and associated War on Poverty1 and now confronting the deindustrialisation of their maturing economies and the…

The elections were fought on the basis of the same constituency and region boundaries as the previous NAW elections in 2007 The number of constituency candidates fell to 176 compared to 197 in 2007 Thirteen parties or groups were represented in the regional lists together with 1 individual Labour won 28 out of the 40…

This article considers Goffmans conceptualization of interaction order at the margins of society in encounters between urban welfare workers and their clients. Observations from these encounters demonstrate practices relating to the situated management of stigma and identity, and the accomplishment of role within these service encounters. A reading of Goffmans theoretical contribution lies in revealing…

The paper reviews public discourses and research on the safeguarding of other people’s children by adults at the neighbourhood level. There is much empirical evidence pointing to the existence of thriving informal communities of support and informal childcare for parents across the social classes. There appears to be less empirical evidence related to intervening with…

This paper focuses on the links between informal care provision and labour market activity at the sub-national level within the UK. Within-country analysis of this issue has been very limited to date despite the wide regional variations in informal care provision that are often present. This issue is important in the context of policy decisions…

During the course of this article we examine data gathered from two research meetings in which coding issues and data organization are being discussed in relation to the use of the software package Atlas.ti. The meetings were concerned with the organization and coding of semi-structured interviews carried out by three different groups as part of…

Sociologia Ruralis 51(3) pp 219-237 This article explores the significance of researchers positionality for the interpretation of local cultures of rurality. Drawing on personal experience of studying the apparent emergence of a new squirearchy in an English village, it argues that backyard ethnographies, in which researchers study worlds with which they are already familiar if…

In writing the article ‘Applied policy research and critical human geography’ (Woods and Gardner, 2011), Graham Gardner and I aimed to nudge discussion of policy research in human geography along from debates about the value of such research, to engagement with the actual practicalities of conducting contract research and the challenges that arise. Through an…