Publications

The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 was for many a watershed moment in the ongoing debate about youth political engagement. Against a backdrop of declining electoral turnout amongst young voters, and evidence that today’s young people are the most politically apathetic to have entered the electorate in the last century, the 85% turnout among 18-24…

The increasing integration of rural communities into transnational social and economic networks has unsettled the politics of rural regions across the globe. Through much of the 20th century, rural economies and societies in the advanced industrial nations of Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia (the ‘global north’) were defined and governed in relation to national…

This chapter is part of a collection of essays that put contemporary Wales under the microscope. Examining issues such as class, gender, culture and the Welsh language, Our Changing Land presents a complex and often contradictory picture of a nation. The book also continues a discourse begun over thirty years ago in the 1994 Our Sisters’ Land (edited by Jane Aaron,…

This book explores how culture and citizenship are theorised, promoted and learned throughout schools in Wales. Following a brief history of Welsh education and a discussion of how contemporary cultural identity is theorised through citizenship education curricula, it illustrates how archaic approaches to understanding cultural identity continue to undermine the development of culturally relevant curriculum in…

“It is a very large question, with philosophical, anthropological, historical and political implications. In consequence and especially given the circumstances and time available, what I have to say will be in three parts. First, I will consider some theoretical concepts, drawn from the disciplines mentioned above. Secondly, I will consider three case studies by way…

There have been three main accounts of East Asian export-oriented economic growth in the 1980s: getting prices right, the developmental state (DS), and Confucian capitalism. None is satisfactory and, together, they reproduce the market—state—civil society triplet, which originates in European Enlightenment thinking, and one-sidedly highlight the roots of the miracle in one or other of…

This chapter challenges the dearth of sociological and political analysis within the health inequalities field, which, the authors argue, is facilitating the current behavioural bias of research, arguing that health inequalities researchers need to pay more attention to the voices of those whose health is most severely affected by inequalities in power and resources. Second,…

This chapter seeks to understand and explain the divergent trajectories of rural protest in different countries of the global north in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on a series of research projects undertaken since 2001, the chapter proposes that the determination of ‘trigger issues’, the organisational forms adopted by protest movements, and…

Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into ‘place-making’ and ‘locality-making’ in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political…

This book has been about the WISERD locality research programme, which has operated in the context of a devolved Wales. The spatial backdrop has initially been the Wales Spatial Plan (WSP) and its fuzzy boundaries, and more recently notions of ‘spatial complexity’ associated with the Williams Commission on Public Governance and Delivery. As detailed in…