Employing new graduates is about tailoring support to an individual’s needs

Co-joint venture partners vet nurse Helen Navran and vet Samantha Bird run Vets4Pets Cardiff Bay. Their support and development of young vets has recently won them a national award.

From Bodmin Moor to Cardiff Bay: a European education?

David Marquand revisits the trajectory of his thinking and writing across his varied life experiences. Above all, Marquand places value on the ‘mutual learning’ that goes with pluralist democracy as well as the potential, through public deliberation, for citizens to transform their outlooks, perspectives and maybe even their very natures as human beings by taking on board the perspectives of others that they encounter in political conversation, even in the most informal of settings. This is what worries Marquand most about populism: that populism of any kind has the effect of extinguishing the potential for dynamic political education, mutual respect, public empowerment and moral advancement. It is also why Marquand, in his essay, issues a ringing endorsement of pluralist democracy and a sharp denunciation of populism in which its leaders, or, in many cases, demagogues, falsely claim to speak ‘for the people’, when they are merely speaking to the people, while also fraudulently framing the people as a ‘homogenous and monolithic whole’.

Affect and Dialogue in Collaborative Cross- Disciplinary Research: Developing Interactive Public Art on Cardiff Bay Barrage

Where Cartesian philosophy distinguishes the perceiving and perceptual mind from the body, phenomenology constitutes the experiential/experiencing body as the subject, giving rise to the affective potential of art. An immersive world of digital connections, smart cities and the Internet of Everything dramatises the centrality of relationship, the intertwining of Self and Other, in the lived environments of human experience. This article addresses the contextual, disciplinary and practical challenges encountered in developing an ambitious interactive public art project embedding SMART technology on the coastal fringes of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales (UK). It examines the processes and problems involved in delivering a stimulating aesthetic experience in and on a complex site, for a complex audience profile. It traces, in particular, the dependence of a multi-disciplinary project team on the theoretical and practical effects of affect in their ongoing effort to produce engaging, provocative, socially inclusive interactive public art, in and through human-centred design techniques.

The state and post-industrial urban regeneration: the reinvention of south Cardiff

ABSTRACT:South Cardiff was once dependent on the export of coal and the production of steel, but these activities had faded by the 1970s, creating economic stagnation and physical dereliction. However, the area was rechristened ‘Cardiff Bay’ in the mid-1980s and was the focus of an ambitious and contested state-funded regeneration. This article argues that regeneration was broadly successful, although not without failures, and that government remained willing to intervene heavily in some small areas. The main contribution is to identify and analyse how local authorities retained influence over regeneration, in contrast to approaches taken elsewhere by central government.

Insecure positions, heteronomous autonomy and tourism-cultural capital: A Bourdieusian reading of tour guides on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour

This article contributes towards debates concerning media tourism and tour guiding by using Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments regarding field and capital to analyse performed tour guide identities on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour in Cardiff Bay. The article pursues three core arguments: first, a Bourdieusian framework provides an enhanced understanding of the insecure positions that tour guides occupy in what is referred to throughout as the tourism field; second, the divergent pulls between heteronomous and autonomous poles which position tour guides are magnified in officially-located media tours because of the presence of branding and theming discourses; third, drawing upon empirical data from the Doctor Who tour, the symbolic capital of official guides involves demonstrations of what is named tourism-cultural capital, but such displays do not result in an increase in individualised status as any accrued capital transfers to the institutional level.