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The paper examines the distinction that has been made in studies of nationalism between national elites and the ordinary members of nations. While the distinction is useful as a way of beginning to conceptualise the mechanisms through which nations and nationalisms are reproduced, it can also reify a boundary between national elites and the mass membership of the nation that is, in actual fact, blurred and unstable in character. Through case studies of nationalist campaigns relating to education and linguistic rights in the town of Aberystwyth in West Wales, the paper argues that a focus on the places in which national ideologies are produced, circulated and consumed can enable us to question the distinction that is made between the national elites and ordinary members of the nation. As well as illustrating the poly-vocal production of Welsh nationalism, the empirical research also suggests the need to re-examine the social and spatial contexts within which nationalism is reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines the evidence from Wales for the common but now largely forgotten custom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of using hearthstone, rubbing stone, or the sap of green leaves to decorate the thresholds, hearths, and floors of farmhouses, cottages, and terraced houses on a daily or weekly basis. It traces the known history of the custom and attempts to place it into the development of homes and housework. The custom was thought by at least some of its practitioners to prevent evil but, whilst the patterns used were ancient, the apogee of the custom may well have post-dated the Industrial Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, older lesbians and gay men were largely invisible within ageing research and, where it has been undertaken, a bias towards urban samples has occurred. As a result, less is known about the experience of living in a rural community as an older lesbian or gay man. This paper presents a discussion of a current research project that is taking place as one part a programme of research in the south-west of England and Wales under the umbrella of the UK's New Dynamics of Ageing Programme. The research projects in the south-west and Wales are broadly aimed at exploring how older people living in rural areas interact with their local communities. The Gay and Pleasant Land? project is focused on exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in the south-west of England and Wales. The project uses multi-methods to explore connections between place, space and identity, which include visual ethnography, focus groups and interviews using the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM). The development and production of a short, professionally made film as the key dissemination tool are outlined. Performative Social Science and its philosophical grounding in Relational Aesthetics as the bedrock of the project are deliberated. Implications for research with marginalised groups in rural communities are discussed, alongside a consideration of multi-methods and the use of tools from the within social work research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues in favor of a comparative approach to research on Celtic influences in Appalachia. It is based in part on my ethnographic field experiences in Appalachia and Wales since 1997. Drawing from scholarship on Celtic identities and histories in Appalachia and the United Kingdom, this paper examines three examples of constructing "the Celtic" in comparative context: for defining cultural distinctiveness amid social and economic changes in the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) during the early twentieth century, for promoting public consumption of the past via U.S. and U.K. tourist sites, and for proclaiming political-cultural opposition in the present U.S. and U.K. societies. The goal of this paper is to highlight how scholars of Appalachia might extend current discussions and critiques about regional homogeneity in Appalachia via historical and cultural evidence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: People with type 2 diabetes can enter remission but may relapse or develop legacy complications. This analysis assesses whether people with remission from type 2 diabetes continue receiving annual care processes recommended in national guidelines and the potential impacts of formal recognition of remission. Methods: People with type 2 diabetes with and without formal recognition (diagnostic code) of remission, and with and without evidence of remission (HbA1c < 48 mmol/mol without prescription for glucose‐lowering drugs in preceding 26 weeks), included in the 2018/19 National Diabetes Audit (NDA) for England and Wales were followed up to identify care processes received between 1 January 2019 and 31 March 2020. Results: Of the 2,822,145 people with type 2 diabetes in the cohort, 16,460 (0.58%) were coded with remission in the 2018/19 NDA. After adjustment for age, sex, socioeconomic deprivation and ethnicity, people coded with remission were less likely to receive each care process than those without such coding irrespective of HbA1c measurements (relative risk (RR) of receiving all 8 care processes 0.70 (95% CI 0.69–0.72)). For the 339,235 people with evidence of remission, irrespective of diagnostic coding compared to those without such evidence, the RR for receiving all 8 care processes was 0.94 (95% CI 0.93–0.94). Conclusions: People coded with remission of type 2 diabetes were less likely to receive diabetes care processes than those without such coding. People with evidence of remission had only a slightly reduced likelihood of receiving care processes. Formal recognition of remission may affect the provision or uptake of care processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Colloquial Welsh (MCW) displays a considerable variety of tag question patterns. In this paper we offer a unified account for the divergent developments in modern Welsh dialects, focusing on tags attached to “normal” or VSO clauses. We propose a scenario of how the MCW system of tags is descended from the pre-modern system by processes of reanalysis and grammaticalization. We show that South Walian dialects have elaborated a system of tag questions in which the tag reverses the polarity of the anchor to which it is attached, while North Walian dialects have followed a principle of constant polarity in which tags anticipate the polarity of the expected response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global population flows leave some social groups dislocated from their home territories and languages. Under these conditions processes of ethnolinguistic identification can become complex and the use of a home language can take on new symbolic values. We consider the case of Welsh-affiliating people in the United States of America, and the use of the Welsh language in one particular, long-running Welsh American community newspaper, Y Drych (The Mirror). Quite differently from its earliest forms in the second half of the 19th century, Y Drych nowadays positions the Welsh language as a richly iconic resource, available for ceremonial and celebratory social purposes — to celebrate Welshness at a remove from 'the homeland'. We interpret the use of Welsh in Y Drych as a form of language display, and as part of a process of retraditionalisation. Linguistic and cultural elements of 'old Wales' are re-embedded into Welsh-American consciousness and practices, in ways that might be paralleled in other sociolinguistic diasporas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year in the towns and cities across Wales, humans and ex-racing greyhounds come together onto the streets in the name of charity. These public fundraising and awareness-raising events offer unique opportunities to unravel the reciprocal strands of canine and human experience which coalesce in leisure contexts. I conducted ethnographic research culminating in an autoethnographical account of four of these events, to determine how these encounters might be constituted for multispecies participants. Humans intra-acting with greyhounds on the street experienced an affective state; what I have termed an 'auric imprint', which prompted further exchanges of an emotional, economic and practical nature. Ideologies about greyhounds were underpinned by cultural understandings, situating these dogs as 'not-like-other-dogs' and resulting in a perpetuation of their representation as objectified, homogenous entities, and limiting their recognition as individual dogs. A practical embodied approach, inspired by discourse supporting attentive awareness to non-human animals, was discussed as a mechanism for enabling the recognition of greyhound subjectivities at street collections. Future research might examine how street collections may provide spaces of insight where human behaviour change for non-human animals can be tested and enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The National Blood Transfusion Service ( NBTS) in England and Wales was established as a single entity in 1946 and operated as such for almost half a century. During those 50 years, the blood service in Wales, as in the rest of the UK, saw many technological and operational changes. The automation of donation testing, the introduction of successive layers of microbiological screening, the creation of the Tissue Typing Laboratory (later renamed the Welsh Transplantation and Immunogenetics Laboratory) and the development of information technology brought - over a relatively long period - highly significant improvements to an organisation that had begun life as an Emergency Medical Service. Differing funding and reporting arrangements for the Welsh and English blood services made little difference in practice, but the devolution of government following the 1997 referendum in Wales would have a profound influence. Four years before the Government of Wales Act (1998) was passed through the UK parliament, the National Blood Authority ( NBA) assumed executive control of the English blood services but not the blood service in Wales. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service and the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service had been created as independent organisations in 1946; thus, the scene was set for diversification between the four independent blood services, each operating in different political environments with different funding streams. The creation of the UK Blood Services Forum and its Joint Professional Advisory Committee in 1999 has, however, ensured consistency in professional matters. The blood transfusion service in Wales, in its new headquarters in Talbot Green, became known as the Welsh Blood Service ( WBS), or Gwasanaeth Gwaed Cymru in Welsh, reporting for most of its life to the Velindre NHS Trust, part of NHS Wales. Considerable changes would impact the WBS in the 21st century. Social changes would mean that the role of recruitment and marketing would become ever more important, although the impact of this was lessened somewhat by a decreasing demand for blood following the Better Blood Transfusion initiatives. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency found new powers and impetus after the so-called EU Blood Directive was transposed into British law, and the inspection regime became significantly more onerous, requiring more resources to be put in this area. A strategic review found that some parts of the service required extensive modernisation, such as the information technology system in use and the deployment of staff on the blood collection teams, and these matters were attended to. The review also prompted the Welsh Government to consider the question of blood supply to and blood collection in North Wales, which had been the remit of the Liverpool Centre since the establishment of the NBTS in 1946. The Welsh Government duly announced the creation of an all-Wales Blood Service, and finally, in May 2016, 70 years after its creation, the WBS took over responsibility for blood collection and blood provision in the whole of Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this article revisits The Established and the Outsiders, a largely forgotten and in our view unfairly neglected community study by Elias and Scotson (1965). Drawing from our ethnographic research on an urban community in South Wales, the contemporary significance of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of insider-outsider relations in bounded, household-based communities made by the original work is foregrounded. The findings from our research on 'Cornerville' confirms many of the empirically based conceptual claims of Elias and Scotson's earlier diagnosis of largely intra-working class relations, distribution of status honour, and processes of micro-sociality. The article concludes by drawing out some of the implications of community-based research for advancing sociological criminology's contribution to the specific analysis of group stigmatization and more broadly of social processes of communal ordering and informal rule-making and rule-breaking in contemporary localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Welsh language has a complex vowel inventory with up to thirteen monophthongs and the same number of diphthongs. According to descriptive reports, systematic differences are found between the two main varieties of Welsh, Northern and Southern Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001, Jones 1984). However, few studies have attempted to verify these claims instrumentally, and little is known about the acoustic properties of Welsh vowels. The present study is the first systematic acoustic investigation of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Northern and Southern Welsh and includes measurements of formant trajectory length and spectral rate of change for the diphthongs (Fox & Jacewicz 2009).The results largely confirm claims about contrastive vowel categories in Northern and Southern Welsh. In contrast to auditory-based accounts, however, pairs of Northern Welsh vowels were found to differ, not only in terms of duration, but also vowel quality. The diphthongs, in turn, revealed interesting cross-dialectal differences in spectral dynamics across their trajectories. The results have implications for notions of contrastivity in languages with large vowel inventories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article quantifies the concentration of Welsh male immigrants in a nineteenth- century Australian gold town within one occupational category (gold mining), and considers the extent to which that concentration was maintained and the relevance of this economic specialisation to culture maintenance. In addition, this study provides an analysis of intragenerational and intergenerational changes in socio-economic status amongst the Welsh, as indicated by occupational shifts, which gives a clearer picture than the images promulgated by contemporary Welsh leaders who strove to emphasize the industry and upward mobility of their fellow countrymen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical accounts have offered a general understanding of the social significance and importance of dignity and suggest that older age may threaten dignity by structuring and limiting the opportunities for participation and/or social recognition. Micro-sociological research has shown how older people negotiate their identity, in the face of its erosion by the aging body and disability and the domination of health and social care workers. These theoretical approaches inform the study presented here, which explores the meaning and experience of dignity for older people in their daily lives. Older people's accounts were elicited through a series of focus groups with participants living in England and Wales. Participants were selected according to predefined criteria to represent a range of different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, levels of fitness, and home circumstances. Personal identity and autonomy were the aspects of dignity most meaningful to the participants, and discussions tended to focus mainly on when personal identity and autonomy were threatened or violated in the context of the provision of health and social care. The authors discuss the extent to which older people's discourse on dignity resonates with the theoretical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has led to semiotic forms in general taking on new values. We report on the trends and values of photographic images in a sample (1948-2001) of a North American newspaper (Y Dlych), established in 1851 to serve the Welsh migrant community there. For such diasporic groups, visual imagery of this kind potentially links them with their 'roots of origin', provides opportunities for representing their conditions and contemporary trajectories, as well as possibly functioning as a resource for constructing social identities. We consider the images partly in distributional terms -- whether they are of scenes or of people in North America or in Wales -- and partly through qualitative analysis. We report shifts in the photographic content during our sample period, from primarily images reflecting status and hierarchy in North America, towards the inclusion of more photographs of place (buildings and landscapes) and people in Wales, emphasizing tradition, history and cultural continuity. We consider these findings, first, in relation to selectivity of resources for constructing social identities, and second, in relation to the contestation in Wales between folk and vernacular conceptions of Welshness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Welsh etymology for the terms "eskibah" in the book "Ancrene Wisse." A description of the seven deadly sins marked the appearance of the word. According to author Joseph Hall, the term is Scandinavian in nature and refers to one who bathes or sits in ashes. The "Middle English Dictionary" believes the word is an Old Norse agent noun. Also cited is the possibility that the book is related to the Welsh border if the term means "little brush; cinder-jack" from Middle Welsh words "escup fach" or "ysgub fach."