Research projects

New Emerging Citizenship Regimes explores five citizenship ideal types (Pandemic, Algorithmic, Liquid, Metropolitan, and Stateless) stemming from critical/radical social innovation perspective by employing fieldwork action research in six specific city-regional cases. COVID-19 has hit European citizens dramatically, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them…

Summary Wales is unique in having a national digital platform for online teaching and learning – Hwb (https://hwb.gov.wales/). This means that all children in maintained schools in Wales login to and use Hwb to access learning materials provided to them by schools and teachers. This project will have unique access to data collected via Hwb…

  Overview Understanding Welsh Places is a website that aims to be the first point of call for statistical information about towns and communities in Wales. A significant proportion of people in Wales live in towns and small communities. Too often, however, such places are overlooked by public policy. While targeted funding exists for city regions and rural…

This multidisciplinary research network project is jointly hosted by WISERD and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. It is funded under a Global Challenge Research Fund award from the Academy of Medical Sciences. The Principal Investigators are Professor Paul Chaney (WISERD, Cardiff) and Dr Sarbeswar Sahoo (IIT, Delhi) – in collaboration with Dr Seuty Sabur…

Research Questions In what ways are additional learning needs being considered in the process of curriculum development? What are the opportunities and challenges of curriculum development for ALN learners? How far is there perceived alignment between curriculum reform and the ALN transformation programme? Aims The primary aim of this research is to investigate how ALN…

Centre for Welsh Politics and Society / WISERD@Aberystwyth researchers are involved in a European study to investigate interactions between rural and urban areas and how they can be more effectively managed. ROBUST is a European research project involving 24 partners from 11 countries. It is coordinated by Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The project receives funding from the…

Overview This project will explore how imaginaries and practices of local civil society have been stretched and reconfigured by global interconnectivities, including both the reorientation of local civil society activities around global issues and concerns, and participation in local civil society by individuals outside the locality, for instance through social media. The research will focus…

Overview This project builds on previous research undertaken by the team. It will utilise a mixed methods approach, combining secondary analysis of existing datasets, development of case studies, documentary analysis and a series of interviews to investigate the impact of Faith-Based welfare provision on social cohesion. The project will proceed using a mixed methods design…

Overview This project will utilise a series of interviews and document-based analysis to explore the notion of stakeholder involvement in Local Employment Partnerships (LEPs), Enterprise Zones (EZs), City Deals and City Regions. Fieldwork will take place in four city regions, two within Wales and two within England. 100 semi-structured interviews will be carried out. Two…

Overview This project has examined experiences of participation at the local level and what they tell us about the changing patterns of mobilisation in particular places in Wales. Fieldwork took place in North and South Wales in three stages. 1. Mapping local level civil society groups. 2. Life history/narrative interviews, which will capture experiences and biographies of…

The Centre for Welsh Politics and Society / WISERD@Aberystwyth aims to use research on Welsh politics and society, comparative studies of Wales and other nations and regions, and analyses of Wales’s global connections, to make internationally-significant cutting-edge contributions to social science theories, debates and literature. Our research is organized around three key themes: Global Connections…

Overview ‘The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization (GLOBAL-RURAL)’ is a major research project funded by the European Research Council. The study aims to advance our understanding of the workings and impact of globalization in rural regions through the development and application of new conceptual and methodological approaches. Globalization has a pervasive influence in…

‘The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization (GLOBAL-RURAL)’ was a major research project funded by the European Research Council. The study aimed to advance our understanding of the workings and impact of globalization in rural regions through the development and application of new conceptual and methodological approaches. Globalization has a pervasive influence in transforming…

WISERD Research Associate, Dr Kate Moles, successfully secured funding to run a digital storytelling project with young women living in Cardiff. Building on the success of the Beacon for Wales funded ‘Sounding the Way’ project in 2011 – where young male residents of Grangetown produced audio walks allowing them to explore their community and express…

Overview This project was aimed at improving the linkages between research evidence and policy development in Wales (and elsewhere). It was based on a partnership between WISERD and the Welsh Government (WG); and involved the development of four Evidence Symposia, each of which focused on a key policy theme. Each Symposium brought together leading researchers…

The Skills and Employment Survey (2012) collects data on what people do at work, what skills they use and how they work. It is the sixth in a series of representative sample surveys of workers in Britain stretching back over 30 years. These cross-sectional surveys provide the means to chart and explain the changing pattern of…

Behaviour change is a topic which is of key importance to policy makers both in the Welsh Government and further afield. Behaviour change also emerged as a key theme during the WISERD localities stakeholder interviews and the subsequent stakeholder feedback sessions have indicated that a range of 3rd sector stakeholders in Wales are engaging with the…

The project engaged with the various ways that the Heads of the Valleys region has been bound. Drawing on policy documents; the WISERD localities stakeholder interviews and some small scale follow up interviews, and engaging with different levels of stakeholders (for example: residents, community activists, etc).  Using Agnew and Duncan’s Location, Locale and Sense of…

Overview This project was concerned with the impact on workers, their families and neighbourhoods of the closure of the Anglesey Aluminium (AA) smelter in September 2009, formerly one of the major employers in the Holyhead area. Previous studies of the impact of factory closure on local communities have focused on the individual impacts of redundancy as…