Publications

Civil Society Book Series 2021 Drawing on place-based field investigations and new empirical analysis, this original book investigates civil society at local level. The concept of civil society is contested and multifaceted, and this text offers assessment and clarification of debates concerning the intertwining of civil society, the state and local community relations. Analysing two…

A new collection of essays entitled Social Anthropologies of the Welsh: Past and Present, edited by Professor W. John Morgan and Dr Fiona Bowie will be published this month in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Country Series. The book has its origins in a joint colloquium of the Royal Anthropological Institute, WISERD, the Learned Society of…

Journal of Contemporary Religion 36(2) pp 287-309 The relationship between religion and civil society at the macro-level has attracted the attention of sociologists of religion but empirical detail of how religion is connected to the social relations and practices that constitute local civil society is relatively lacking. This article explores the contemporary social and communal significance…

This paper examines the possibility of using sense of belonging as an indicator for social capital. Social capital, from the collective social capital theory perspective, is constructed from three main elements: trust, social network and participation. Social capital is crucial to civil society and well-being, but there is no consensus on how to define and…

Students’ sense of belonging is known to be strongly associated with academic achievement and a successful life at university. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of belonging, this study collected data via the 10 Words Question. Responses from 426 participants were analysed using a sequence of analytic methods including In Vivo coding, systematic coding, clustering, and…

Big Local provides local areas with funding to support resident-led solutions to create lasting change. Starting in 2010, The National Lottery Community Fund (then called The Big Lottery Fund), identified areas that have since been described as ‘left-behind’ – areas that had been previously overlooked for funding and investment. In choosing the areas, consideration was…

In this article we discuss findings from our ethnography investigating how volunteering in local associational life is changing, asking whether structural factors fixed in localities remain important or whether, as others have suggested, volunteering is becoming disembedded from place. Across two locations, we observe how situational variables, including belonging, identification and interaction, remain important determinants…

Anderson’s notion of imagined communities has helped to focus attention on the complex connection between language and membership of social groupings. This article explores the sense of membership of an imagined transnational community of ‘Europe’ through a selection of autobiographical narrative interviews in a multi-nation study of identity formation. Data drawn from a sample of…

The WISERD locality research programme comprised a series of locality studies, carried out by six full-time researchers, based in Aberystwyth, Bangor, and Cardiff Universities. These studies were complemented by a suite of qualitative micro-locality and place-based studies Local knowledge in Context’, completed by researchers at Cardiff University. This podcast gives an overview of the research…

Many theorists, in their search for a better explanation of the dynamics of structure and agency, have expressed the need for a theory in which reflexivity and habitus are reconciled. In this article, we argue that a dissociative theory of mind can provide the essential framework in which habitual routines and reflexivity function in parallel….