Publications

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…

New data-driven technologies in global cities have yielded potential but also have intensified techno-political concerns. Consequently, in recent years, several declarations/manifestos have emerged across the world claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. In 2018, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and NYC city councils formed the Cities’ Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an international alliance of global People-Centered Smart Cities—currently…

Environment and Urbanization 33(2) pp 478-495 While advances in participatory planning have led in many cases to the more inclusive rebuilding of informal settlements, the debate regarding participatory planning has focused largely on the improvement of current informal settlements without asking “what next”. Declining living conditions following settlement consolidation, however, provide evidence of the potential shortfalls…

This chapter examines connections between Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the earlier British countryside protests in the early 2000s. Revisiting data on rural protests and activists collected in the mid-2000s alongside analysis of the Brexit campaign, the chapter compares the framing of the two movements and the motivations of participants….

Book review in Eurasian Geography and Economics journal. The lands in between: Russia vs. the West and the new politics of hybrid war by Mitchell A. Orenstein, New York, USA, Oxford University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-19-093614-3 The author is a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior…

Can the United Kingdom survive Brexit? This remains one of the great unanswered questions of our time. Politically, two major narratives have dominated. The first is that the UK is on a break-up trajectory. Brexit has revived the Scottish independence movement and destabilised Northern Irish politics. Clashes between UK and devolved governments over dealing with…

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy: Contemporary Applications for Spatially Integrated Social Science 14(3) pp 449-472 In response to changing consumer habits driven by the advance of online services and mobile apps, substantial reductions in the provision of bank branches have been widely documented over the last decade. Such closures have economic consequences for the sustainability 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…

Please see below for a link to Dana Brablec’s review of Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty, written by Courtney Lewis .

Welsh Government policy establishes town centres as central places of community activity and local prosperity, recognising the positive impact towns have on the local economy and the well-being and cohesion felt amongst local communities. In light of this, recent declines in the usage of town centres are a major cause for concern. These have not…