Welsh Women's Industrial Fiction 1880–1910

From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development of industrial writing. Although prevented from gaining first-hand experience of the coalface, Welsh women writers were amongst the first to try to fictionalize those heavy industries—coal and metal in the south, and slate in the north—which dominated the lives of the majority of the late nineteenth-century Welsh population. Treatment of industrial matter is generally fragmentary in this early women’s writing; industrial imagery and metaphor may be used in novels that are not primarily “about” industry at all. Yet from c. 1880–1910, Welsh women writers made a significant—and hitherto critically neglected—attempt to make sense in literature of contemporary industrial Wales in powerful and innovative ways. This essay maps their contribution and considers anglophone Welsh women writers’ adaptations and innovations of form (particularly romance) as they try to find a way of representing industrial landscapes, communities and the daily realities of industrial labour. It identifies the genesis in women’s writing of tropes that would become central to later industrial fiction, including depictions of industrial accident, injury, death and disability. And it explores the representation of social relations (class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) and conflict on this tumultuous, dangerous new stage

“It’ll be our own little Wales out there”: re-situating Bardsey Island for post-devolution Wales in Fflur Dafydd’s Twenty Thousand Saints

This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland […] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on Bardsey, a real small island off the coast of north Wales, the novel employs a multiple-character narrative to explore and critique the various ways in which Bardsey has been constructed in the Welsh cultural imagination. In particular, the novel explores the idea of the island as a queer space. It does so in a way that posits Bardsey in dialectical relation to an ongoing, politically dynamic Welsh mainland. The article suggests that the novel can be read as a mainland appropriation of the island in the post-devolution era. Yet this is simultaneously an enabling imaginative act that confirms the power of literature to create new imaginative geographies

“No one talks about it”: using emotional methodologies to overcome climate silence and inertia in Higher Education

Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecological crises (CEC) and, at worst, actively contributing to them by perpetuating particular ways of knowing, relating, and acting. Calls for HE to radically transform its activities in response to the polycrises abound, yet questions about how this will be achieved are often overlooked. This article proposes that a lack of capacity to express and share emotions about the CEC in universities is at the heart of their relative climate silence and inertia. We build a theoretical and experimental justification for the importance of climate emotions in HE, drawing on our collective experience of the Climate Lab project (2021–2023), a series of in-person and online workshops that brought together scientists, engineers, and artists. We analyse the roles of grief, vulnerability, and creativity in the conversations that occurred, and explore these exchanges as potential pathways out of socially organised climate denial in neoliberal institutions. By drawing on the emerging field of “emotional methodologies,” we make a case for the importance of emotionally reflexive practices for overcoming an institutionalised disconnect between feeling and knowing, especially in Western-disciplinary contexts. We suggest that if staff and students are afforded opportunities to connect with their emotions about the CEC, then institutional transformation is (a) more likely to happen and be meaningfully sustained and (b) less likely to fall into the same problematic patterns of knowledge and action that perpetuate these crises. This profound, sometimes uncomfortable, emotionally reflexive work is situated in the wider context of glimpsing decolonial futures for universities, which is an integral step towards climate and ecological justice

Disability and Industrial Society 1780-1948: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields: Statistical Compendium

This statistical compendium gives information about accidents and injuries in the British coal industry from 1780 to 1948. It provides in tabular form statistics about the occurrence of non-fatal accidents, and various welfare and medical responses