In response to the crisis of refugees arriving in Europe over the summer of 2015, the Welsh Government held an emergency summit and reiterated its commitment that Wales should play a leading role as a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’. This is an interesting moment given that Wales doesn’t have direct responsibility for UK borders. What might it mean, in practice and in theory, for Wales to declare itself a ‘nation of sanctuary’? What are the theoretical and political imaginaries of sanctuary, national identity and citizenship at work in this context? What are their historical precedents? And how do they relate to political responses to the crisis across the UK and Europe more generally? This project will examine the political geographies of refugees, asylum seekers and citizenship in Wales, paying attention to Swansea and Cardiff as two declared ‘Cities of Sanctuary’ as well as other emerging groups across Wales that are committed to grassroots initiatives to build a culture of hospitality and welcome to refugees. The project will ask: what difference does an urban, regional or national imaginary of community make to the commitment to hospitality? What difference do different forms of welcome make?

Heritage sites worldwide are increasingly adopting digital technologies such as 3D visualisations, mobile phone apps and interactive games to enrich visitor experiences and engage with wider audiences.   The aim of this project lies in exploring the potential impact of these technologies to enhance public engagement at a number of Welsh archaeological heritage sites.

I am particularly interested in issues of community engagement, Welsh identity, landscape archaeology, heritage preservation, and the utilisation of technologies that allow two-way communication between professionals and the public (e.g. through the uploading of photographs, videos, stories or memories of archaeological heritage sites that are important to individuals and/or local communities but may be overlooked by heritage professionals). In this way the research aims to investigate the multifaceted nature of digital technologies in both enriching public engagement with Welsh heritage sites, providing potential new sources of research information, and in promoting sustainable protection of our finite heritage resource through increased awareness and ownership.

Focusing on cities, this project seeks to elucidate the interrelatedness of space, place-making, emotional experiences and emotion-articulations in interactions of different types of ‘bodies’. To narrow this broad scope, particular attention will be paid to emotional aspects of public interventions at night-time. I am interested to see how people navigate the city and to what extent their movement-patterns are reflected in or influenced by their emotional attitudes attached to certain locales. Self-perceptions, how people are externally framed, and collective as well as individual memories presumably affect how one uses cityscapes, which necessitates ethnographic methods to unearth narratives of emotional landscapes and meanings attached to a city’s ‘places’. In the context of interventions, the questions of emotionality of experience and self-expression will have to be asked for those intervening, those ‘receiving’ interventions at night and those who may have opinions about night-time interventions that based on non-experientially obtained ‘knowledge’. When booming digital and social media enable self-representation, opinion and information-distribution at a near-omniscient scale, it becomes easier to develop emotional atmospheres or form a picture of ‘places’ that rests on other people’s experiences. Also, the virtual realm may offer a different kind of platform to express emotional attitudes that remain obscure in real-life face-to-face interventions – for all involved. It will be interesting to follow digital footprints of nightly city-dwellers to investigate their (emotional) understandings of cityscapes. Hopefully, knowledge about mobility-patterns and emplaced sentiments, related to self-identification, stereotypes etc., helps improve communication between groups involved in interventions and establish a more positive emotional cityscape.

Food insecurity is the political issue of our time, and in the UK, its prevailing symbol is the food bank. With the significant rise in the demand for food banks across the UK in recent years, academic interest has turned to this phenomenon to try to understand these spaces and the experiences of those accessing such services. Investigating the relationship people have with food when they live on a low income, this research project explores everyday experiences of food insecurity for individuals accessing food aid in Bristol.

Carrying out ethnographic research in two Trussell Trust foodbanks, a FoodCycle Community Kitchen, and a Real Economy Community Food Centre, I ask, what role does the food bank hold for people experiencing food insecurity? How do people exercise agency in this context? What impact does the service itself have on those individuals? How do these services position themselves with/against one another? By addressing these questions, I have sought to understand different approaches to tackling food insecurity; the position of the food bank within the individual lifeworlds of those using them; and at what stage people may use alternatives to food banks. Engaging with debates around cultural foods, surplus food waste, and food sovereignty, this project is based on material collected over 10 months using participant observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups.

This research looks at the newly completed Wales Coast Path, a continuous path along the whole Welsh coastline. This is a world first, as Wales is now the only country in the world with a continuous path around its coast.

The project will look at the physical act of walking and how being able to walk freely along the whole national coastline creates a sense of identity, connection (to Welsh nationality and the Welsh language), community, sociability, pleasure, consumption and leisure. It will address the different uses of the path and how different people engage with the materiality of the path, as well as how its affordances enable (or in some cases obstruct) people to walk along it.

I am particularly interested in issues of mobility and movement and how walking unhindered along a continuous coast path could connect people to Wales, facilitating a feeling of belonging to the land and to the Welsh nation. I am also interested in discovering if walking along the same route/sharing the same space establishes a relationship and unites all those who walk the Wales Coast Path. Issues of mobility also draw attention to issues of constraints; that is, not everyone will have an equal relationship with the path such as the elderly, minority groups or the disabled. It is important to acknowledge that there are different physical, social and political affordances for movement which determine mobility for different people.

The study is concerned with the financialisation of rural development in liberal-market economies (UK) through the commodification of financial risk. The process of financialisation is situated within a wider discussion of rural governance in the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) and green finance as an institutional apparatus of reflexive modernisation.

The research is divided into three parts, investigating:

• Optimisation of financial risk, spatial planning and territorial cohesion policy in Welsh Agriculture.
• Institutional apparatus and ‘commoning’ of financial risk in (sub) sovereign green bonds.
• Data justice, financialisation and participation in ‘smart’ rural development.

Rural economic geographies provide a key research site for investigating the environmental politics of green finance and resourcing the transition to a low-carbon economy. The site of such politics is assumed to be in ‘feasibility assessments’ of financing rural firms in transitioning land uses.

The thesis aims to elucidate interactions between the optimisation of financial risk through market instruments and existing frameworks of rural governance. These include notions of sectoral integration, territorial cohesion, sustainable place-making (Marsden, 2017; Woods, 2007) and social justice (Harvey, 2009) in rural space.

This research explores how futures are imagined in Wales, in light of environmental change and the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’. Increasingly, imaginations of the future are seen as influential to social change because they are a part of how possible futures are pre-experienced and set in motion, and yet the ways in which futures are imagined and predicted are given little attention. Wales provides an interesting context for this research as its Government is one of only a few in the world to have sustainability as a central organising principle in its constitution, an approach which includes the pioneering One Wales: One Planet manifesto and the Well-being of Future Generations Act. This project engages with a range of case studies in Wales, from environmental art projects to Government initiatives, and aims to contribute to discussions and understanding about the role of imagination (particularly imaginations of the future) in behavioral and political responses to global environmental change.

My project will look to analyse previously collected semi-structured interviews conducted in Zambia with members of the Siavonga community (Southern Zambia). This area has been introduced to aquaculture of tilapia and other fishing practices yet is still an impoverished area. During analysis, social-political and ecological-environmental frames will be used to try and determine the extent and drivers of poverty in the area and use this as a possible platform for rebuilding fisheries.

The social science of wildfires is an important field of research focusing on the social implications of fire; of social dynamics before, during and after fire; as well as the multiple scales of human interaction with fire (individual, local, community, institutional, governmental).

The changing climate and land uses in the UK present potential increased risk, or at least uncertainty, to the wildfire hazard. The issue of fire in the UK is one which involves multiple stakeholders, such as private and public land owners, service providers (water utilities), forestry commission, and fire and rescue services. Very little is known of social perceptions in the UK to wildfire and managed/prescribed burns, so this project hopes to obtain a nuanced understanding of how different groups experience, understand and react to fire; as well as the social dynamics that occur in mitigation and prescribed burning. This will supplement the gap in understanding of the different parts of social perception, especially as an example of somewhere non-fire prone, facing new possible risk.

This work will use head-mounted logging technology to document the behaviour of people whilst they navigate around urban and wild spaces. Special software will identify particular behaviours and relate them to environmental features and navigation behaviour. Subsequently the study will attempt to determine what features of the environment and of the people negotiating that environment lead to particular behaviours. An important aspect of this work will consider of how use of mobile technology modifies behaviour.