Our changing land: Revisiting gender, class, identity, work, and public and private life in contemporary Wales

This colloquium presents work from the forthcoming University Press Wales edited collection, Our Changing Land: Revisiting Gender, Class and Identity in Contemporary Wales, which revisits seminal publications from two decades ago, reflecting on continuities and changes in post-devolution Wales. The selected presentations focus on four areas of social sciences interest, education, work, political representation and the home. Michael Ward, returns to Jonathon Scourfield’s and Mark Drakeford’s influential work and examines masculinities, arguing that expectations and transitions to adulthood are framed through geographically and historically shaped class and gender codes. Alison Parken revisits the earlier work of Teresa Rees and considers the political economy of women's relationship to paid work in Wales in last twenty years. Paul Chaney reflects on his significant body of work on the substantive representation of women, which refers to women’s needs and concerns being reflected in public policy and law. Dawn Mannay revisits Jane Pilcher’s pivotal work on Welsh women in the domestic sphere and explores how women are negotiating the impossibility of being both in full-time employment and meeting the ideology of the ‘Welsh Mam’ in contemporary Wales. The authors present a reflexive picture of public and private lives in the context of postdevolution Wales