Publications

Many Welsh towns are twinned with towns in Brittany. Twinning is part of civil society, providing opportunities for international friendship and cultural exchange. Welsh-Breton connections especially celebrate shared Celtic heritage. But, with challenges from budget holidays to Brexit, will town twinning stay relevant, or be relegated to the past?

International Journal of Heritage Studies 26(10) pp 955-974 Concerned with understanding emotion and visitor responses through both self-report and wearable physiological sensors, this paper examines the affective relationships enacted at a historic house within two distinct visitor routes. First, it looks at the growing interest in emotion and covers a compatible approach to physiology, emotion and…

2016 is likely to be recalled – in Europe, at least – as a temporal bordering, after a majority in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The “Brexit” referendum result has been pinned on the rise of populist politics and the revenge of so-called “left behind” places. Regardless of reasons, the referendum…

This paper addresses a lacuna in the literature on environmental policy integration by exploring civil society organizations’ (CSOs) experiences of participative environmental mainstreaming – a policy imperative to embed environmental concerns in all aspects of policy-making. A raft of international treaties and laws require this to be operationalized through knowledge exchange and critical engagement between…

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate…

We’ve gathered young people’s views on their teachers, school trips, why they’ve been asked to leave the classroom and why they’ve been given a detention. We also asked about the GCSE subjects they’ve chosen and their awareness of vocational education. We’ve also asked them about growing up in Wales more generally, including their awareness of…

This paper discusses the creation of a growth deal for North Wales (The North Wales Growth Deal – NWGD). North Wales is primarily a rural region within the UK, withoutacore-city or large metropolitan centre.The paper examines how this urban dynamic, fostered around a pushing of the agglomerative growth model out of the city-region, is being…

This article uses data from the Labour Force Survey to examine the effect sexual orientation has on wages in Britain. In doing so it provides the first empirical investigation of the effect being in a same-sex legal partnership has on wages. The results show that gay cohabitees and lesbians face a wage premium compared to…

This paper examines spatial differences in the attitudes of the public towards asylum seekers using data from the British Social Attitudes Survey. Initial analysis reveals some statistically significant variations across geographical areas, with people living in London, the South East of England and Scotland displaying the most tolerant views. The spatial variations are then further…

The Spanish nation-state is gradually being rescaled by Catalonia’s “secession crisis.” Recently and dramatically, in the aftermath of the “illegal” and “constitutive referendum” that took place on 1 October 2017, 2,286,217 Catalan citizens attempted to exercise the “right to decide” to ultimately become “stateless citizens.” This paper examines this rescaling process that has been forming…