Where next for Wales Studies? Restarting the conversation

Wales Studies is about understanding Wales’ unique cultural, social, and physical characteristics, and how they connect with the wider world.

‘Where next for Wales Studies’, our event in Aberystwyth later this month, takes a close look at what Wales Studies is and what it could be.

The idea of this distinct concept – Wales Studies – was given voice by Professor M. Wynn Thomas FLSW in ‘Studying Wales Today: A Micro-cosmopolitan Approach’, the 2016 annual lecture of the Learned Society of Wales and the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion.

In his lecture, Professor Thomas outlined the early steps the LSW was taking to give Wales Studies a defined status. He talked of a surge of multi-disciplinary research over the previous twenty years about Wales past and present, but warned that such a surge risked losing much of its potential energy. ‘No attempt has yet been made to grasp, or to co-ordinate, or to project anything like the totality of this remarkable, major achievement,’ he said. ‘It therefore remains a hidden, unexploited, asset of the modern higher education system.’

Wales Studies was therefore conceived as a way to log and provide an overview of all this activity; researchers in disparate fields could find out about work in other disciplines or subject areas that overlapped with their own, sparking connections and collaborations.

The culmination of the LSW’s early work was the Wales Studies Research Snapshot, a booklet that brought together over forty examples of Wales Studies research, projects and initiatives across many institutions and academic disciplines. The booklet highlighted work that was forward-looking, not stuck in cliched representations of Wales: from researching young people’s perceptions of their communities, their nation and the Welsh language, to rediscovering forgotten voices in literature; from investigating the legacy of heavy industry to pioneering solutions for climate change.

The Wales Studies Research Snapshot was launched at the end of January 2020. Two months later, the pandemic struck and, with it, some of the gathering momentum behind Wales Studies stalled.

The event in Aberystwyth seeks to jump-start the engine. It will give attendees the chance to restart the conversation and build the case for research and innovation that falls underneath the Wales Studies banner. We want Wales’ policymakers and politicians to hear that case.

There are just a handful of tickets left for the event, which takes place in the superb surroundings of the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth. Attendees will hear short presentations from Professor Helen Fulton FLSW and Professor Rhys Jones FLSW, with their perspectives as leading researchers working in different areas of Wales Studies, and by Meg Hughes from Medr, who will help position ‘Wales Studies’ within the broader tertiary education context.

Attendees will also have a chance to meet with representatives from the University of Wales Press at their stand, network with attendees from a wide range of disciplines, and see the results of LSW’s latest analysis of Wales Studies case studies in the REF.

‘Wales needs actively to safeguard and promote the research initiatives, across all academic disciplines, that enable us to understand and cherish the particular nexus of complexities that make Wales distinct,’ Professor Thomas said in his 2016 lecture. Nearly a decade on, we hope you will join us to make sense of those complexities now.