Rhys Dafydd Jones
Biographic Data
| ID | 125245 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rhys Dafydd Jones |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rhys Dafydd |
| FAMILY NAME | Jones |
| SIGNATURE | JONES R D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aberystwyth University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1231-7529 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 800 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Resilient rurals: New Zealand, Mid Wales and differentiated community agency within a global economy
‘Booming’ and ‘lagging’ regions have traditionally been a key area of debate in rural and regional studies; the former being characterised as centres of growth and innovation, and the latter associated with stagnation and/or decline. Recent research has tended to undermine simplistic tropes and emphasise the inter-connectedness of the city and the country. Building on the premise of relationality, this paper further unpicks depictions of winning …
Civil society in crisis times: New geographies of governance in an era of AI
Translating sanctuary: Politics of solidarity in a bilingual and plurinational context
This paper explores the rescaling of sanctuary to the national scale, distinct from the state scale. While scholarship has largely focussed on how sanctuary, hospitality and citizenship are provided at city scales, we analyse how substate nations respond to people seeking sanctuary by focussing on the case of Wales, an officially bilingual nation (multilingual in practice) within a plurinational state. By unpacking different meanings of Nation of…
Reconceptualizing the Nation in Sanctuary Practices: Toward a Progressive, Relational National Politics
This article explores sanctuary in Wales, focusing on the Welsh Government's recent declaration to become a Nation of Sanctuary (NoS), and identifying how the national scale provides an alternative locus for progressive sanctuary measures. In revealing the nation's emergence as another crucial site of sanctuary, the work reconceptualizes the nation's place in sanctuary policies and practices in two ways: (i) it locates sanctuary through a nationa…
They were chasing me down the streets”: Austerity, resourcefulness, and the tenacity of migrant women’s care-full labour
In this paper, we examine the role of migrant women in civil society in Wales in a triply-hostile environment created by UK government policy since 2010. Drawing on interviews carried out with EU migrants between 2016 and 2017, we outline the active support and care work provided by these women to migrants and others and the way in which they navigated austere and hostile conditions (contrasting the popular construction of migrants passively requ…
A spatial justice perspective on EU rural sustainability as territorial cohesion
Territorial cohesion is a guiding set of EU principles to achieve sustainable development. However, evidence suggests that within and across rural and peripheral regions in particular, prosperity and social and economic wellbeing continue to lag behind other regions. The aim of this article is to examine how a spatial justice perspective can provide new development insights on rural sustainability. Introducing a spatial justice perspective to a s…
Communities of/for Interest: Revisiting the Role of Migrants' Online Groups
This article offers a critical examination of the role played by migrants' online communities. With much of scholarly analysis focusing on the new ways in which online groups enable migrants to connect, interact or socialise together in digital space, little attention has been paid to how these groups are actually formed, by whom and with what motivations. Drawing on qualitative interviews with moderators of online groups created by EU migrants l…
Situating spatial justice in counter-urban lifestyle mobilities: Relational rural theory in a time of crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed the rural idyll, as urban-dwellers seek greener, safer spaces. If the counter-urban trend appears for novel reasons, it does so along lifestyle mobilities’ well-worn paths. These paths often depend upon spatial inequalities. Yet, despite awareness that inequalities undergird mobilities, spatial inequalities have remained under-theorized in the lifestyle mobilities literature. This article remedies the gap through…
Rethinking lifestyle and middle‐class migration in “left behind” regions
So‐called “left behind” regions have gained infamy for working‐class discontent. Yet a concurrent phenomenon has gone unremarked: middle‐class lifestyles in peripheral places. This article examines how middle‐class migrants (defined by economic, social, and cultural capital) to peripheral regions envisage and enact their aspirations. Against presumed migration trajectories to growing urban centres or for better‐paid employment, we argue that seem…
Rural Brexit? The ambivalent politics of rural community, migration and dependency
Reclaiming authenticity: The spaces and scales of national sincerity
At present, there seems to be somewhat of a paradox between critical academic and more political and popular understandings of authenticity. At one level, the notion of authenticity has become passé, almost a dirty word, for critical social theorists and human geographers: being something that reflects, at best, naïve, or at worst, essentialist and exclusionary ways of thinking. At the same time, we are in the middle of a period during which noti…
The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804
The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) so…
The state, civil society and the shadow state: Analysing three vectors of relationality
Politics of Hiding Invisibility and Silence
From Territorial Cohesion to Regional Spatial Justice: The Well-Being of Future Generations Act in Wales
The European Union's flagship Cohesion Policy faces evidence of dubious economic effectiveness and growing political and philosophical critiques of the very ideals of furthering European integration. This article examines ambitions for territorial cohesion as they have been operationalized through regional development in Wales. We argue that a potential alternative to the failed realization of territorial cohesion lies in the principles of spatia…
The makeshift and the contingent: Lefebvre and the production of precarious sacred space
Geographical engagement with religion has grown substantially of late, with many recent studies considering the 'sacred beyond the officially sacred'. However, many sacred spaces are not used solely for devotion, and there is a need to understand the diversity of sacred spaces, including how they come to be used as such, and the experiences of worshipers using them. Drawing on Lefebvrian notions of diversion and appropriation, I argue that the co…
Where are we going to go now?” European Union migrants' experiences of hostility, anxiety, and (non‐)belonging during Brexit
This paper examines the impact of the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum and its aftermath from the perspective of European migrants living in Wales. Drawing on interviews conducted with EU nationals in 2016 and 2017, the article highlights various examples of hostility and violence encountered by these migrants during and after the referendum campaign, demonstrating the longstanding nature of hostile experiences. It further outlines the uncerta…
Politics done like science: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state
There has been a growing academic recognition of the increasing significance of psychologically - and behaviourally - informed modes of governance in recent years in a variety of different states. We contend that this academic research has neglected one important theme, namely the growing use of experiments as a way of developing and testing novel policies. Drawing on extensive qualitative and documentary research, this paper develops critical pe…
The Politics of Hiding, Invisibility, and Silence: Between Absence and Presence
Post-pastoral? Rethinking religion and the reconstruction of rural space
Nations, materialities and affects
In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focusing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’, we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities …
National sustainabilities
National bodies and affects: A reply to Antonsich and Skey
(Re)Inhabiting awareness: Geography and Mindfulness
This paper opens up a dialogue between mindfulness and the discipline of geography. As a meditative practice that cultivates ‘present-centred non-judgmental awareness’, we claim that the practices and insights of mindfulness have important implications for various forms of geographical enquiry. This paper argues that mindfulness can inform geographical practices in relation to epistemology and methodology, and contribute towards geographically in…
Youth organizations and the reproduction of nationalism in Britain: The role of Urdd Gobaith Cymru
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social and Cultural Geography on 23 Feb 2016 available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1139166
Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales
Nations, materialities and affects
In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focusing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’, we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities …
Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian paternalism
This paper critically examines new modes of behaviour change promoted by the contemporary British state, providing a critique of libertarian paternalism as an emergent form of government in the UK. We analyse the multivalent principles and mechanisms associated with libertarian paternalism. We consider the contribution of Foucauldian theories of governmentality and psychological power within human geography to a critical analysis of libertarian p…
New Geographies of Citizenship
This paper explores an emerging agenda of the geographies of citizenship. Citizenship studies has become an established multidisciplinary arena of academic study, and in part it has developed a num
Where are we going to go now?” European Union migrants' experiences of hostility, anxiety, and (non‐)belonging during Brexit
This paper examines the impact of the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum and its aftermath from the perspective of European migrants living in Wales. Drawing on interviews conducted with EU nationals in 2016 and 2017, the article highlights various examples of hostility and violence encountered by these migrants during and after the referendum campaign, demonstrating the longstanding nature of hostile experiences. It further outlines the uncerta…
Placing and Scaling the Nation
In this paper we discuss the geographical contexts within which nations are reproduced. Although geographers have carried out much interesting and insightful work in their studies of nationalism, we contend that the majority of authors have tended to focus on the way in which particular sites and landscapes come to represent nations. Less attention has been directed towards the geographical concepts and processes that inform the ongoing reproduct…
State Encounters
Much has been made in recent years of the need to promote anthropological understandings of 'the state'. Work in this area has tended to focus on either (1) the peopled aspects of state bureaucracies or (2) the effect of 'the state' on the everyday lives of its citizens. Some authors have also begun to move beyond these concerns by examining the ways in which the actions of state agents can affect the everyday lives of citizens and how citizens c…
Devolution, State Personnel, and the Production of New Territories of Governance in the United Kingdom
As a result of the creation of a Scottish Parliament, Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, and the devolution of power to various regional bodies in England, there has been a substantial territorial refocusing of governance within the United Kingdom. Much has been written in the social and political sciences concerning this change, especially with regard to the formation of new institutions of governance. Less is known concerning the connections …
Psychological governance and behaviour change
A suite of ‘behaviour change’ policies has become evident in United Kingdom public policies, informed by insights from the psychological and behavioural sciences. In this article we use Foucauldian conceptions of governmentality and psychological techniques of governance – along with interview and documentary research on contemporary public policy – to examine how such policies re-imagine and address the limitations of neoliberalism, as well as t…
Relocating nationalism: On the geographies of reproducing nations
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 stud…
(Re)Inhabiting awareness: Geography and Mindfulness
This paper opens up a dialogue between mindfulness and the discipline of geography. As a meditative practice that cultivates ‘present-centred non-judgmental awareness’, we claim that the practices and insights of mindfulness have important implications for various forms of geographical enquiry. This paper argues that mindfulness can inform geographical practices in relation to epistemology and methodology, and contribute towards geographically in…
Politics done like science: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state
There has been a growing academic recognition of the increasing significance of psychologically - and behaviourally - informed modes of governance in recent years in a variety of different states. We contend that this academic research has neglected one important theme, namely the growing use of experiments as a way of developing and testing novel policies. Drawing on extensive qualitative and documentary research, this paper develops critical pe…
Islam and the rural landscape: Discourses of absence in west Wales
This paper explores the relationship between the presence and absence of Islamic communities in western Wales. Commencing with a discussion of the literatures on the geographies of Islam and rural exclusion, I argue that both sets have neglected research on rural religious communities. Discussion is centred upon the visual absence of Islam in the area, as local mosques are predominantly housed in contingent or non-purpose-built buildings. Using i…
Geographies of languages/Languages of geography
This themed section is based on a session that took place at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual conference, held in Brighton in January 2000, and draws together the work of a number of authors who explore the signiecance of languages within geography. The inversion of terms in the session title is important, in this respect, since it helps to highlight the broad range of interest of geographers in la…
Mann and Men in a Medieval State: The Geographies of Power in the Middle Ages
The state‐making process represented a major institutional change, as societies moved from being organized according to notions of kinship to being ordered around the power exercised by kings over defined territories. The paper focuses on the medieval state‐making process, primarily in a Welsh context; building on Michael Mann's notion of power networks, it is suggested that the mapping of the geographies of power within a society may offer a pow…
Network Nation
Academics have increasingly begun to question the significance of bounded understandings of space and place, preferring instead to approach places as open, dynamic, relational entities that are in-formation, and the ways in which different places are connected by flows of people, ideas, and material things. The aim of this paper is to focus on the implications of networked and relational ways of thinking for how we understand the notion of 'terri…
What time human geography
This paper seeks to contribute to the debate concerning the current and future state of human geography by focusing on its changing treatment of the past. I argue that, while contemporary human geography has experienced a welcomed explosion in terms of its thematic breadth, it has also suffered from a considerable narrowing of the time periods that inform its empirical and conceptual studies. The paper begins by demonstrating the changing tempora…
Nation states, ideological power and globalisation: Can geographers catch the boat
Rural Brexit? The ambivalent politics of rural community, migration and dependency
Introduction. Between Absence and Presence: Geographies of Hiding, Invisibility and Silence
(2012). Introduction. Between Absence and Presence: Geographies of Hiding, Invisibility and Silence. Space and Polity: Vol. 16, BETWEEN ABSENCE AND PRESENCE: GEOGRAPHIES OF HIDING, INVISIBILITY AND SILENCE, pp. 257-263
Symbols of Justice’: The Welsh Language Society's campaign for bilingual road signs in Wales, 1967–1980
Negotiating Absence and Presence: Rural Muslims and ‘Subterranean’ Sacred Spaces
Rural Muslims' lives have received less attention than those of their urban counterparts in secular liberal democracies. Muslims' experiences of rural regions are characterised by a visible absence on the one hand, but a physical presence on the other. In this paper, the concept of the subterranean is invoked to understand the negotiation between superficial absences and physical presence. Conscious of the clandestine associations of the subterra…
Geography, libertarian paternalism and neuro-politics in the UK
This Commentary explores what the implications of the emergence of a putative 'nudgeocracy', and associated forms of neurologically-infused policy development, mean for human geographical research. Drawing on a 3-year research project into the rise of libertarian paternalism within the British polity, and our involvement in the recent House of Lords Behaviour Change Inquiry (House of Lords 2011 Behaviour change report[HL paper 179] Stationary Off…
Spatializing the ecological leviathan: Territorial Strategies and the Production of Regional Natures
This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of t…
Behaviour Change policies in the UK: An anthropological perspective
Reconstructing the Rural Economy of a Medieval Site in N.E. Iran; A Report on the Mammalian Remains from the Great Cave of Moghan
A Note on the Discovery of Stone Tools on Erith Island, The Kent Group, Bass Strait
Between Erith and Dover there is what is known among the local fisherman as 'The Swashway', a low spit of pebbles linking the two islands at low tide but covered by broken surf at other times. Overlooking this swashway is a saddle some 40-50m above sea level mantled with deep sand deposits, part of which is now being scoured away by the wind. It was here that the first flake had been found, and we quickly confirmed this find by discovering about …
A Note on the Discovery of Stone Tools and a Stratified Prehistoric Site on King Island, Bass Strait
The main archaeological site (Locality 2), located some 400m to the south of the tourist area, is backed by a wind-eroded arena approximately 80m long and 30m wide, cut into a series of sand units which display three main soil formations totaling about 5m in depth, all resting on the basal calcarenite
Une île comme miroir d'un continent: La position unique de la Tasmanie dans la préhistoire de l'Australie
The case of Tasmania is fairly remarkable in the history of mankind. It interested the first geographers and philosophers who saw in Tasmanians one of the first states of human society. The peopling of the island goes back a long way, and material culture was not developed much before the arrival of Europeans. Its prehistory is related to that of Pleistocene Australia, to which it was geographically attached. Its isolation since the end of the ic…
Political change and local objectives: Observations from rural Wales
In this article, we argue that the spatial reorganization of local government structures may pose a significant threat to fragile local cultures. A recognition at the national level that policy structures are culturally specific (and not converging) is not always conceded at the very local level. Drawing on observations from Wales, we show how political change brings the danger of cultural neglect
Early state formation in native medieval Wales
The mechanics of medieval state formation: Observations from Wales
This paper aims to explore the mechanics of the medieval state‐making process, and specifically the ways in which the inhabitants of medieval society came to terms with the territorialisation of power. It seeks to use Bourdieu's notion of habitus to conceive of a process of state formation that was essentially gradual in nature, one which was characterised by distinct themes of institutional continuity between the pre‐state and state political la…
Custom and habit(us): The meaning of traditions and legends in early medieval western britain
This paper discusses some well–known legends and hagiographic stories, and explores the context of their production and consumption. From an examination of Welsh foundation legends and Cornish hagiographical accounts, we focus on the methods by which versions of history were used in the Middle Ages to provide a context for fundamental changes in the way in which society was organised. It is found that, far from abandoning traditional versions of …
Custom and habit(us): The meaning of traditions and legends in early medieval western Britain
Mann and Men in a Medieval State: The Geographies of Power in the Middle Ages
The state‐making process represented a major institutional change, as societies moved from being organized according to notions of kinship to being ordered around the power exercised by kings over defined territories. The paper focuses on the medieval state‐making process, primarily in a Welsh context; building on Michael Mann's notion of power networks, it is suggested that the mapping of the geographies of power within a society may offer a pow…
Foundation Legends, Origines Gentium, and Senses of Ethnic Identity: Legitimising Ideologies in Medieval Celtic Britain
Societies in the Middle Ages underwent a fundamental change in their mode of organisation as they moved from being organised around concepts of kin rule to being ordered around the power exercised by kings over defined territories. Even though this state-making process led to the creation of a landscape that was inherently impersonal in nature, kings strove to legitimise and justify the existence of the new state to their subjects. Their principa…
Changing ideologies of Medieval state formation: The growing exploitation of land in Gwynedd c. 1100–c. 1400
Changing geographies of governance and group identities in the Middle Ages: The Role of Societal Interaction and Conflict
Institutional Identities and the Shifting Scales of State Governance in the United Kingdom
In recent years, organizations of state governance within the United Kingdom have undergone a fundamental change in scale. The creation of a Scottish Parliament, and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies, along with the devolution of power to Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in England, has signalled a substantial territorial refocusing of the scales of political and economic power within the UK state. In this paper, I argue that Storpe…
Nation, Identity and Social Theory: Perspectives from Wales
Bilingualism and geographical knowledge: A case study of students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
This paper explores the role of languages in the constitution of geographical knowledge. We argue that the fact that people speak different languages is significant to the ways in which they engage with geography as a subject. We unpack some of the processes through which languages make a difference to geography through an empirical project based on students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where geography is taught bilingually through We…
Geographies of languages/Languages of geography
This themed section is based on a session that took place at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual conference, held in Brighton in January 2000, and draws together the work of a number of authors who explore the signiecance of languages within geography. The inversion of terms in the session title is important, in this respect, since it helps to highlight the broad range of interest of geographers in la…
Devolution and Economic Governance in the UK: Uneven Geographies, Uneven Capacities?
Recent academic debates have suggested that the capacity of any given territory to embed increasingly global processes of economic development partly rests on sub-national social, cultural and institutional forms and supports. In this context, devolution has the potential to alter the institutional architecture of the UK state and this paper interrogates the various ways in which the devolved bodies in the four territories--England, Scotland, Nor…
Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain
Learning Geography Bilingually
A concern with the role of the ‘Other’ in geography in higher education has led to work on the incorporation of marginalized social groups into learning contexts. Recently some authors have discussed the role of language in teaching, and in particular the dominant role of the English language in marginalizing non‐Anglophonic students and subject matter. In this paper an empirical case study of the experiences of bilingual students at the Universi…
What time human geography
This paper seeks to contribute to the debate concerning the current and future state of human geography by focusing on its changing treatment of the past. I argue that, while contemporary human geography has experienced a welcomed explosion in terms of its thematic breadth, it has also suffered from a considerable narrowing of the time periods that inform its empirical and conceptual studies. The paper begins by demonstrating the changing tempora…
Medieval biographies and the geography of power: The Historia Gruffud vab Kenan
Nation states, ideological power and globalisation: Can geographers catch the boat
Geography: Discipline, profession and subject since 1870. An international survey
Practising state consolidation in early modern England and Wales
Sociology (63 works) · Political science (60 works) · Law (55 works) · Politics (47 works) · Law (35 works) · Geography (27 works) · Social science (22 works) · History (20 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · Economics (18 works)