Youth organizations and the reproduction of nationalism in Britain: the role of Urdd Gobaith Cymru

Youth organizations have long played significant roles in promoting particular forms of nationalism among young people in the UK. To date, however, academic studies of UK youth organizations have been Anglocentric, focusing on youth organizations associated with a hegemonic British state and imperial project. This paper seeks to show how youth organizations have also been used to promote alternative forms of nationalism in the UK, which have sought to challenge a British state and imperial project. Focusing explicitly on Wales, it examines how Urdd Gobaith Cymru – the Welsh League of Youth – has played a significant role over the past 90 years in promoting a Welsh and Welsh-speaking citizenship amongst Welsh youth. Drawing on documentary and archival research, the paper discusses how the organization has fostered particular practices and identities among its members and the way in which these have been challenged in recent years; most notably as a result of a decline in the numbers of Welsh speakers in Wales and changing configurations of the meanings of Welshness. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to take seriously the role played by youth organizations in helping to shape political geographies in a devolved Britain.     

Broadcasting after devolution: policy and critique in the Welsh media landscape 2008–2015

This essay examines the provision of media (especially broadcasting) in Wales and considers recommendations made in key reviews and reports which have sought to bring about change in how the media serve people in a devolved Wales. It provides a critical insight into how these debates have developed since 2008 and reveals how some of the monumental economic, policy, production and technological changes that have affected broadcast and digital media internationally have taken shape in Wales specifically. The chief aim is to identify how a distinctly Welsh media policy agenda is developing in the context of devolution. This research is timely given the growing political pressure from several parts of the UK both for greater accountability of broadcasting to the nations of the UK and also for substantive devolution of powers over broadcasting to their governments. The essay argues that media scholars need to pay further attention to how policy evolves in the context of multi-governmental levels such as those existing in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom.     

‘The Best-Laid Schemes o’ Mice an’ Men’? Proposals,Planning, Defeat,and Legacy,of Devolution in the 1970s*

The question of whether devolved assemblies should be established for Scotland and Wales dominated considerable parliamentary time in the 1970s and became a key pillar of the Labour government's legislative agenda after the two 1974 general elections. The main building blocks of the government's devolution proposals for Scotland and Wales were in place from 1975 with the publication of the white paper, Our Changing Democracy, which outlined proposals for a primary lawmaking assembly for Scotland and a Scottish executive, operating under a ‘conferred powers model of devolution’. For Wales, the assembly was to be a body corporate (with no split between executive and assembly) exercising only executive functions and able only to pass secondary legislation. With some important modifications (including crucially the requirement for a referendum, which was then further amended to require a Yes tally equating to 40% of the electorates in both nations), these proposals were eventually incorporated into law as the Scotland and Wales Acts 1978. While the political debates surrounding devolution in this period are well known, less attention has been paid to the practical plans undertaken by the civil service for devolution to become a reality. Considerable time was spent drawing up, from an early stage, detailed preparations for devolution, particularly in Scotland. In Wales, planning was more tentative, yet, none the less, was taken seriously by the Welsh Office. These plans never materialised in the way envisaged, with neither Welsh nor Scottish devolution able to pass the referendum thresholds put in place. However, as this article also demonstrates, both the Scotland and Wales Acts had a constitutional legacy when devolution became reality under New Labour in the late 1990s.     

Engaging with Young People's Conceptions of the Political

In many states, there are concerns about declining levels of political engagement and participation among young people. Our understanding of this decline, however, is limited because much of the research on youth politics is based on a narrow conception of 'the political', little attempt is made to explore how people themselves define politics, non-participation is not adequately problematised, and there are in sufficient youth-specific explanations for declining participation among young people. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in Britain, I argue there is a need to develop an approach and research methodology that engages with young people's conceptions of the political.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

'Minorities with a Message': The Beveridge Report on Broadcasting (1949-1951) and Wales

This article explores the significance of the report of theBeveridge Committee on Broadcasting (1949–1951)—whichwas charged with considering all aspects of post-war broadcastingin Britain at a time of political, social, economic and culturalchange—in relation to Wales. It argues that the interactionbetween the committee and the Welsh political and cultural andgroups that submitted evidence to the committee allows for aninsight into the cultural politics of Wales during the earlypost-war period. It also argues that a study of the report throwslight onto issues of broadcasting and nationhood, the significanceof the Welsh language in defining nationhood and a nationalconsciousness and the relationship between a minority languageand the state, at a time of political and cultural change. Astudy of the Welsh dimension of the committee's report alsoprovides a framework for an understanding of the broadcastingpolitics of Wales in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the articleexemplifies the tensions that existed between what media historianJames Curran calls the ‘newness and modernity’ ofthe broadcast media and a political and cultural elite whichsought to preserve a ‘traditional’ way of life inthe face of the perceived impact of those media.     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

Britain and Europe: Devolution and Foreign Policy

After the results of the September 1997 referendums in Scotland and Wales, devolution within the United Kingdom has become a certainty. This article considers the implications of the establishment of a Scottish parliament and a Welsh assembly for 'British' foreign policy. The author traces views of 'Britishness' from the beginning of the century, when 'home for all' had a brief vogue during the imperial heyday, through the mid-century period when an essentially anglocentric 'Britishness' seemed relatively uncontroversial, to the more contentious scene opened up by the end of empire, the retreat of the Commonwealth and the increasing prominence of the European Community/Union. He examines the new Labour government's official statements on the remit of the devolved institutions and considers the prospects after devolution for a UK foreign policy that is more genuinely 'British' than before, and for the emergence of, in particular, a distinctively 'Scottish' foreign policy.     

Welsh Office exceptionalism,economic development and devolution, 1979 to 1997

Between 1979 and 1997, five successive Conservative Secretaries of State headed the Welsh Office, the government department responsible for administratively devolved activity. The extent to which these ministers developed their own ‘exceptional’ policies at variance with those of central government was much debated, most commonly in relation to economic development. This paper examines such activity to make three arguments. First, exceptionalism took place, but was constrained by the nature of administrative devolution. Second, it often reflected the individual political philosophies of Secretaries of State and their ambitions on the UK’s political stage, as opposed to any desire for autonomy. Third, it was a crucial if inadvertent factor behind convincing the electorate that political devolution was both feasible and desirable. Overall, exceptionalism was driven by the Secretary of State’s ability to marshal the public sector behind his policy objectives, the momentum of existing institutions and the characteristics of each minister.     

“We're socialists not nationalists”: British labour and the national question(s)

The UK Labour Party, which in government delivered devolution to Scotland and Wales, has struggled to adapt to a multilevel and increasingly territorialised political space, where demands for significant territorial reform grow ever louder. These challenges intensified with the Scottish independence referendum and the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union. During this prolonged constitutional moment, the Labour Party has had to articulate the case for a plurinational and multicultural British identity and for the Union, and to a large degree, has struggled to do so. Capturing the period from 2012 to 2020, this article examines the discursive strategies adopted by the Labour Party and individuals within it. It identifies a deep discomfort, more pronounced in London and Edinburgh than in Cardiff, with the national questions and a reliance on largely instrumental arguments, albeit ones rooted in traditional left-wing values of welfare and social solidarity between working people.     

Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.     

Young People's Politics and the Micro-Territories of the Local

In spite of the late modern interpellation of youth as mobile and globally oriented, and a perception of social and political issues as increasingly playing out in a transnational arena, young Australians exhibit strong local and individualised tendencies in expressing politics. They are bounded by the ‘micro-territories of the local’; that is, their political thinking and acting takes place within the spaces of home, friendship groups, school and neighbourhood. This paper draws on an ARC project with nearly 1000 mainly 15–17-year-old Victorians to examine the relationship between young people's embeddedness in their local worlds and their views of themselves as efficacious political actors. It considers how their competency within such micro-territories opens up neglected sites and strategies for political expression and engagement while limiting their sense of sense of political efficacy, and it asserts the significance of considering this age group, not for what these young people will become in the future, but for their particular location, socially, physically and politically in the present.     

Institutional Arrangements and Political Mobilization in the New Italian Regionalism: The Role of Spatial Policies in the Piedmont Region

The paper focuses on the resurgence of the regions as protagonists of the process of the state rescaling in many European countries. In the EU countries this process can be seen as a result of a mix of economic and institutional factors, which have been producing an increasing competition between the central governments and the regional authorities. The rise of the multi-level governance and of the so-called Euroregionalism has reinforced the role of the regional scale in the territorial development: on one hand, with new actors like agencies and organizations engaged in the economic development (FDI attraction, place marketing, innovation and learning), on the other hand by the resurgence of “old” actors, such as the regions, in many cases empowered by processes of institutional devolution. The literature has investigated this re-composition of the political space with regard to the “hollowing out” and the “rescaling” of the state. On the base of these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss some empirical evidence from the Italian experience, in order to show whether and how the regional structures are not only “spaces for policies”, but also “spaces for politics”. Over the last decade, the changes in legal framework, the external inputs from supranational levels of government—the European Commission—and the re-territorialization processes have introduced many elements of innovation in the role of the regions. By illustrating the case of the Piedmont Region, we try to demonstrate that the transition towards the region as an active space of politics can be mediated by the sphere of the policies, especially the spatial ones.     

From London to Grenada and Back Again: Youth Exchange Geographies and the Grenadian Revolution, 1979-1983

Through a case study of three educational youth exchanges from London to the Caribbean island of Grenada in the early 1980s, this paper situates decolonisation as a site for youthful agency. Assessing official and ephemeral exchange material held in archives in London and the Caribbean alongside original oral history interviews with key actors, the paper argues that an analysis of youth exchanges as informal education spaces helps bring into focus young people’s agency in decolonisation both as a historical process and conceptual undoing. While the paper asserts that exchanging produced transformative moments of becoming in which young people’s global educational encounters transcended local perceptions of race, it also reveals youth exchanging to a revolutionary nation was no holiday, and that “youth exchange geographies” were governed, predetermined and impeded by the organisational labour of youth workers, fundraising initiatives, and unfolding international politics.     

Sunflowers,youthful protestors and political achievements: lessons from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

In 2014, an interesting youth movement collective started small p political and big P Political action and resistance in Taiwan. Their protest was against the way a major trade agreement proposed between China and Taiwan was being non-democratically pushed through the Taiwanese legislature. In this article, we provide an analysis of the activities of the Sunflower Student Movement (SSM) as a means to record a relatively little-known youthful and youth-centric successful uprising. It serves to place the SSM, and other East Asian-based protests, on the map of young people’s political geographies, and explores the paradoxical political and spatial practices pursued by young Taiwanese. This case study makes visible the interconnectedness of big P/small p politics of everyday youth geographies within an Asian context.     

A Lingering Diminuendo? The Conference on Devolution, 1919–20

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated to footnote status in the historiography on federal devolution and British politics. However, while the conference has not been the subject of detailed academic attention, the claim that devolution and constitutional reform in this period was a by‐product of the crisis in Ireland pre‐partition has gathered considerable traction among political historians. This article will redress both the paltry analysis of the Conference on Devolution within the academic literature and the Irish‐centric historiography on federal devolution in the early 20th century. On the latter front, this article will demonstrate that the conference was the product of forces that extended beyond the Irish crisis, in particular parliamentary congestion. As for the conference itself, this article will use a wide range of archival sources to examine critically the conference's deliberations and in doing so will challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the supposedly one firm source of agreement during the conference: the powers that the devolved bodies should enjoy.     

Young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity

Abstract

Debates about ‘security’ rarely feature children or younger people, whilst research with children and young people seldom focuses upon issues traditionally found within security studies. Building upon long-standing debates about political geographies of youth and political participation as well as feminist geopolitics and emerging discussions about children’s and young people’s geopolitics, we chart young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity. Key themes explored here include: secure pasts and insecure futures; ontological security and insecure selves; online security and digital insecurities; home(land) securities and insecure households and families; and global securities and insecure worlds.     

‘We’re moving out’: Youth Out‐Migration Intentions in Coastal Non‐Metropolitan New South Wales

This article discusses youth out‐migration on the non‐metropolitan New South Wales Eastern Seaboard. High levels of in‐migration and counter‐urbanisation, typical of many coastal non‐metropolitan towns in NSW, mask the out‐migration of youth. There are relatively few 15–24 year olds in the coastal communities of non‐metropolitan New South Wales, because many youths out‐migrate to larger centres, for a range of reasons. Out‐migration also demarcates a life transition away from school life, adolescence and the parental home. This paper draws from research with senior high school students in one coastal town – Coffs Harbour – where such trends have been particularly apparent. It examines the propensity for youth out‐migration and discusses how young people articulate their migration intentions. Young people's perceptions of their current and future prospects feature prominently in their discourses about intended migration, although this research also demonstrates that the life courses of regional youth are unorthodox and diverse in nature.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.