Welcome to the 2025 Festival

An introduction to the festival from Professor David Cowan, ESRC Strategic Lead and Journal of Law Society Chair in Socio Legal Studies.

I am delighted to invite – and welcome – you to this year’s Festival of Social Sciences. This year’s Festival theme is “Our working lives” and all our activities are free. Our researchers and their partners from the third sectors and industry demonstrate the significance of the social sciences in unpacking and thinking through this theme.

We are particularly excited that our events span the range of the social sciences, across physical and virtual architectures through to the circular economy to the ways in which our digital lives (last year’s theme) impact on our working lives. We consider things that we see everyday – the buildings around us, for example – through to what we might miss. I am as guilty as anyone, for example, of online shopping and sending back items which I decide I don’t like or don’t fit. I think most of us do that. But we miss the unseen, hidden costs of doing that. Dr Danni Zhang will guide us through those hidden costs and impacts (not just economic but also environmental).

At its best, the social sciences offer innovative ways of examining themes and deliver their ideas well beyond the old fashioned “chalk and talk” method. When we were thinking about our programme, we encouraged our academics to think about innovative ways of delivering their research. We wanted our Festival to challenge our ways of thinking, our normal modes of being in our working lives. So, I am delighted that our programme offers such a diverse range of opportunities for you to engage in our activities.

There are exhibitions, facilitated discussions, and other creative group activities. These ask you to come and prepared to engage with us and our partners, thinking through some difficult questions and finding out how to be the change you want. Social justice, it might be argued, impacts on our working lives through challenging the zero hours culture. But, how can we challenge that? Joshua Ireland (Citizens UK), Ali Arshad (Ffair Jobs) and Nirushan Sudarsan (Cardiff University) are involved in challenging poor working environments through Cardiff’s Community Jobs Compact, which has had a huge impact working with employers to have employment communities which reflect the actual communities in which they are based. Their session will give us the tools and inspiration to explore what fair, local, and good quality jobs really mean.

We know these are worrying times when our values are being challenged on a daily basis. For example, our freedom of expression in our working lives is an important value (whether or not, like me, you consider this as a lawyer or as a social scientist). Dr Chen-Yu Lin will ask you to watch a documentary about censorship and artistic freedom (in the context of Taiwanese musicians banned in China) followed by a reflection on our lived experiences on censorship at work. Dr Chen-Yu Lin is presenting this workshop in partnership with Creative Cardiff, a grassroots network, which is working with and through creatives from a range of sectors and disciplines. It celebrates our people, spaces, and language.

All of our events and activities in this period are using the now and currently available tools to get us to think about the future. What should our workplaces look like? Architects might design spaces, but our Places for Work we Want to Work in exhibition and online event demonstrates the importance of holistic insights from across the social sciences, including a socio-psychological lens.

Academics are often accused of living in ivory towers. That is not what we do at Cardiff. Inspired by our Global-Civic mission, we actively seek out partnerships and relationships within and beyond higher education, which enriches our work and the communities with which we work. This Festival enables us to showcase that work, and I hope you agree with me that it is inspirational and exciting.