Geraint Rhys Whittaker’s research while affiliated with Scholar Rock (United States) and other places

While tense and contested forms of nationalism tend to dominate public discourses of national belonging in Europe, there is a need to explore in more depth the ways in which nationhood and ethnic and religious diversity continuously intertwine to re-create plural expressions of national identity. This article will do this by exploring the subtle, intermittent moments when people who identify with a religious minority mobilise their national identities. By analysing the family visits of second-generation Welsh Muslims to parental homelands, it will highlight how they use their attachments to Wales as a tool for situating a sense of national place-belongingness. When thinking about these mobilities, the participants negotiate what a sense of place means to them, revealing moments when belonging to Wales matters within their biographical narratives. By highlighting these relationships, this article analyses a bottom-up approach to understanding how ethnic and religious minorities experience the nation and argues that diversity and nationalism should not be treated as mutually exclusive entities. Rather, it argues for the need to develop more plural and flexible interpretations of nationalism, which highlight how diverse populations ‘do’ their national identities in ways which matters to them.

This article will discuss how Welsh Muslims construct what a sense of place means to them through their cross-border mobility between England and Wales, and how this contributes to the ongoing re-construction of a plural understanding of nationhood in an era of diversity. To understand when and where being Welsh matters to Welsh Muslims, it will explore how mobility rather than being the antithesis of belonging, can be used as an essential tool in highlighting how perceptions of the nation, sub-state nation, home and place are influenced and understood.

This paper analyses the manner in which some Black and minority ethnic (BAME) people are adding new voices to conceptions of what national identity can be by re-constructing their own position within the nation’s political narratives. It will do so by exploring how the 2011 referendum to establish legislative powers for the Welsh Assembly Government mobilised some BAME individuals and organisations, to contribute to the on-going development of a Welsh political identity, by announcing their support for the ‘Yes’ campaign. This will analyse how the scale of the national is made meaningful in particular spaces by those at the forefront of BAME relations, and considers the possibility this presents for creating a future plural nationality. It will do so by looking specifically at how sub-national identity challenges primary national narratives, to deepen our understanding of the complex relationships between ethnic diversity and the performance of national identity, in the re-imagining of contemporary ideas of nationhood.

The Think Project is a grassroots project initiated by the Ethnic Youth Support Team in Swansea, South Wales to provide a response for preventing far-right extremism. The project was designed to offer disengaged young people the opportunity to take part in a program of workshops, where the facts about race, religion, and migration are explored. This article discusses the results and the opportunities of the initial pilot project and will give a Welsh perspective on the implications for policy and practice in terms of community cohesion and fulfilling the UK government's PREVENT agendas.