Sociology of Scotland

Throughout the history of the abolition of the Slave Trade and Colonial slavery the city of Aberdeen and it's surrounds played a role far and above what it's size and regional locality might have suggested. This dissertation examines primary sources to expose the history of the people of Aberdeenshire who contributed to the Abolitionist cause. From writers such as James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, and the strongly anti-slavery editors of the Aberdeen Journal in the late eighteenth century to the dedicated and zealous members of the Aberdeen Anti-Slavery Society who, in 1828, roused the shire to contribute more petitions to the emancipationist cause than any other region in the United Kingdom. Unique debates and documents reveal the extent to which this small corner of Scotland played both a potential and actual role in the removal of slavery in the British Empire.

Attempts to standardise a Scots written language have been met with challenges stemming not only from what I perceive to be an inability to decide how to select and codify an official written standard, but also a lack of popular awareness in Scotland of what Scots actually is. Indeed, attempts to standardise Scots have been made before (Lallans, issues 56 & 57), but they have not been met with wide acceptance and use. I would like to therefore argue that these challenges can be explained as the result of (a) the wide variation within Scots dialects as well as mutual intelligibility with English, (b) the lack of any high-prestige Scots, and (c) events of social history which have made it difficult to make the concept of a “Scots” language part of Scotland’s national linguistic consciousness. Any Scots standard would therefore require careful sociopolitical rhetoric, popular support and elaboration over time. As I will show, there is nevertheless little indication of consensus on how approaches to standardising Scots can encompass variation, as well as promote favourable language attitudes about Scots in opposition to English.

In this article, I intend to concentrate on one type of process by which Scots has found new legitimation as a language, and how discourses surrounding the issue of Scots might seek to contribute to the creation of a new Scottish society. I whish to show how history is used as a legitimating discursive device by the various components of the Scots language revitalisation movement.

"Language Revitalisation: Discourse, Myths and Ideologies
A Critical Approach to Revitalisation Movements in Provence and Scotland
This thesis seeks to explore theoretical and practical aspects of language revitalisation (LR), an emerging field of investigation which has been described as under-­‐theorised. We approach the question from a sociolinguistic and anthropological point of view, informed by fieldwork in Provence and Scotland, where both Provençal (or Occitan) and Scots are construed as being under threat. This thesis, which treats LR as a social phenomenon arising in contexts of cultural contact, comprises three parts (seven chapters) organised as follows:
Part One explores how the question of LR arose from works on language death in descriptive linguistics, but also from works in sociolinguistics and anthropology. It then examines the way in which LR is conceptualised in academic literature, particularly in sociolinguistics and documentary linguistics. This part concludes that while works on LR have focused on language, much work needs to be conducted on social actors in order to understand this growing and worldwide phenomenon.
Part Two links works on LR with more ancient findings on cultural revitalisation movements in American anthropology, and suggests links with LR in order to propose a conceptual framework for the description and analysis of LR movements. This framework includes central notions such as mazeway, and adds the categories of myth and ideology as central notions for the understanding of LR movements.
Part Three explores how this conceptual framework can be used to describe and interpret some aspects of language revitalisation movements in Provence and Scotland, looking at how LR is construed in the discourses of language experts, activists, ordinary speakers and pupils. It then looks at how discourses circulate in two schools, which represent particular sites of LR in which orders of discourse and social practice meet.
In our conclusion, we suggest links between current works on language revitalisation theory and globalisation studies. Contemporary LR movements can indeed represent ways of dealing with the uncertainty caused by the increasingly globalised world in which we live"

This chapter examines changes in the composition of the ruling class of Scotland over the past two decades, showing how it has changed, but also how the dominant ways of thinking about it-particularly those whose primary focus has been with the national question-have maintained by either omission or commission that neoliberalism has somehow passed Scotland by.

Throughout the thesis I take symbolic communication and visual metaphors as starting points for developing a contemporary picture of diverse Craft practices in a small corner of Scotland. As a result, this thesis is both an ethnography of Craft and a craft object, explicitly made to be a theory-laden object of material culture.

Both in its analysis and its subject matter, this thesis aims to question a variety of epistemological regimes found not only in anthropology, but also in the North-East of Scotland. The main argument of this thesis is that in order to understand something about Craft and the experiences of its makers it is important to have an understanding of the ways in which they create that world as meaningful: that is, an understanding of the thirdness (or symbolism) that is an active, generative force in that world. In the following chapters I argue two interwoven points: one, that a stash (collection) is a collection of stash (craft materials) and is also a site of thirdness in which symbolic thought and action are vital. And two: that, as such, stash and the craft world in which it is embedded are well served by an approach to visual anthropology that takes seriously a study of semiotics in which poetics become more than a subject of analysis; poetics are also allowed to develop into a method(ology) of engaging both informants and audience in a meaningful dialogue of knowledge production.

By using images to contextualize ethnographic evidence and by making these previous points not only with words, but also through imagery, I aim to convince the reader of the integrity of my ethnographic analyses as well as that theories of visual anthropology are as useful for analysing anthropological subjects as for communicating ourselves.

Adult education and learning are critical for citizenship and democracy yet the worldwide contexts, appearance and expression of adult education and lifelong learning have changed significantly during the past 20 years. This chapter on Scotland was written for a book which explores recent changes in policy in ten countries (the Czech Republic, USA, Brazil, Mexico, Botswana, Ghana, Palestine, South Korea and India) and five international organisations.  It highlights several significant shifts: increased awareness of the role of adult education/lifelong learning in enhancing economic growth and social cohesion and mobility, challenging economic and social exclusion and inequality, and developing human and social capital; increased involvement of transnational bodies; pressure for increased global and national co-operation and competition between educational sectors and institutions; and demand for more integrated, accessible, relevant and accountable educational systems and processes. At the same time, it shows that Scottish policy makers have focused primarily on the 'front end', and have neglected and even undermined adult education and learning, creating a system of provision that is maked by pronounced inequalities.

Eighteenth-century Scottish poetry has often been regarded as the product of only three men, each greater than the last. This Scots triad—Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns—has served as the de facto nationalist vanguard of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry, defiantly opposing the forces of English assimilation provoked by the Union of 1707. In this scenario (and given the altogether slender opus of Scots poems in the eighteenth century), the abundance of English verse by the Scots triad may continue to provoke the nagging suspicion that perhaps eighteenth-century Scots really did have a cultural "inferiority complex." Critics contending with eighteenth-century Scottish poetry face an apparent impasse: either continue studying a relatively limited sampling of Scots or hybrid Scots poems or argue for the value of English verse by Scottish poets. The former task not only invites critical burnout, but also relies on dubious assumptions about the function of Scots in eighteenth-century Scotland. For many critics, forces of cultural imperialism bent on eradicating literary Scots and its practitioners are the sole culprit for the loss of a cohesive Scottish national identity after the Union. However, in a nation with a diverse linguistic inheritance in Gaelic, Scots, and English, poets such as Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns explored the possibilities of English in the same manner they did Scots: through self-conscious imitation of existing literary models. Plainly put, Scottish poets wrote in English for specific reasons that are as reflective of their culture as their motives for writing in Scots.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.

Calzada, I. (2014), PostIndependentzia > #HanIzanikHonaGara, TransLoKal – Academic Entrepreneurship for Policy Making – Publishing, Donostia. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.33265.28007. ISBN (e-book): 978-84-942752-1-0 & ISBN (paperback): 978-84-942752-2-7.

'Postindependence' book aims to summarise the most relevant conclusions of a three-year research project on Regional and Social Innovation Studies carried out at the University of Oxford. The original and first edition is in Basque language. In 2015, the English version will be launch.

In Europe, milestone changes are taking place in which the right for territories to decide their own future and democratic choices for devolution and independence are becoming issues. This book aims to visualize the Basque Country from the outside, from an international point of view by proposing its real choices and contradictions in a constructive, transformational and entrepreneurial manner.

And what if we were an independent country? What if, starting today, we began to think about independence the very next day and started on a plan of action? That is what PostIndependence is. To that end, the author believes that it is essential that relations with other countries and projects should be bolstered, a place that we would like in the world, to start working on a united strategic action.

The launch event will be on 23rd June at 11AM in Elkar Bookshop in St. Sebastian where it will be presented the book by the author and the Basque journalist, Mariano Ferrer.
This event that will be forwarded to media will be completed with another event on 26th June at 7PM in the same venue. This second event that aims to open the floor to discussion and conversation around the book, will be conducted entirely by the Basque journalist, Mariano Ferrer.

The book has been published by TranLoKal Academic Entrepreneurship for Policy Making - Ekintzailetasun Akademikoa Herrigintzarako new organization.

The book contains the preliminary conclusions from the research project entitled "Benchmarking Future City-Regions" carried out by Dr Calzada at the University of Oxford and Ikerbasque.

More info please contact: info@translokal.com

Back in 1977, when Nairn first published The Break-Up of Britain, the UK remained one of the most highly centralised states in Europe. The situation was not really that different from that in Spain in the wake of Franco’s death (1975). Almost four decades afterwards, decentralisation applies to both countries. Scotland, Wales and (an increasingly normalised) Northern Ireland all enjoy devolved powers whilst Spain is now made up of ‘autonomous communities’ which have turned the country into a federal state in all but name. Even though such moves were originally made to diminish the increasing pressure from peripheral nationalisms, the threat of separatist movements within both the UK and Spain is more acute than ever. The British Government has recently made it legally possible for Scotland to hold a referendum over its possible independence in 2014 whilst the newly elected Catalan Parliament is set to call a referendum on Catalonia’s right to self-determination in the same year.
The present paper will explore national identity issues in Britain and Spain. In order to do so, this work will revise the ‘Projections onto a greater self’ thesis (Prieto-Arranz 2009), looking back into the past of both nation-states so as to emphasise the parallels between their respective national identity discourses and point to a possible future, touching upon language policy and second language learning issues, as applicable in both countries, and their relation with identity, given that bilingualism ‘can help [bilinguals] to be more inclined to understand, accept and enjoy diversity’ (Bilbatua and Ellis 2011: 14).

This article proposes the following theory: by cutting the benefits of integration and by reducing the obstacles to independence or the various forms of autonomy,
globalization and European integration promotes disintegration. Moreover, the processes of decentralization imposed by globalization and European integration are
resulting in the substate players having more and more financial resources and areas of jurisdiction. In brief, globalization is expanding the set of actions of the substate nationalist movements to ensure the survival of their nation. Substate nationalist movements can now implement an international policy through their paradiplomacy. The case study 'Scotland' is of particular interest since the state of which it is part (United Kingdom) is neither decaying nor totalitarian, but a modern welfare state in which the rule of law governs intra-societal relations.

The notion of 'dual identity' is reviewed in relation to decentralization in Britain and Spain regarding the Scottish and Catalan cases. A brief account of the use of the so-called 'Moreno question' in Scotland twenty years ago serves the purpose of putting into perspective the merits and limitations of this methodological tool. A second part of this article deals with the process of Europeanization and how the 'Moreno question' may be relevant to improve our knowledge about multiple identities within the European Union. References to sub-sate cosmopolitan localism and the supra-state Europe's social model are aimed at discussing new lines of research. These would focus on identity formation and the conciliation of citizens' attachments to the various institutional layers of governance in Europe.

Charles Waddie was an Edinburgh solicitor and Secretary of the Scottish Home Rule Association at the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. He was, as you’ll see, both a pro-Unionist and a proud Scottish Nationalist. Today we see these terms as associated with Scots on two very different sides of the political divide in Scotland. Prior to the propaganda of the first and second World Wars, people in Scotland who held both patriotic feelings for their country and a desire to see the Union as being fairer and of more positive benefit to their nation, were prevalent. They didn’t see Britain as a country they could be patriotic to as it was just a treatied Union as opposed to Scotland’s being an ancient free and independent kingdom with its own rights and privileges in law to which they could hold an allegiance and a desire to see her succeed for their descendants.We first came across Mr Waddie in his correspondence within the press, from about 1883 to 1894, occasionally under the pen-name ‘Thistledown.’ I think I loved him immediately. He has a succinct way of presenting a case that’s well written and difficult to put down. I wasn’t able to find any of his publications as cited within the ‘Scottish Review’ articles quoted in ‘Treaty of Union Articles.’ This was strange to me being as he had both published them from what seems to be his own firm of Waddie & Co. Ltd., Edinburgh, and therefore could publish as many as required for his demographic, which appeared to be Scots in general. Also, as the Secretary of the Scottish Home Rule Association, distribution would have been easily done. They’re also by no means the oldest books. 19th century publications are fairly easily got a hold of, in my experience, especially those at the latter end of the century. I went looking for information and couldn’t even find a picture of the man himself. In such a position as he held I can’t believe he never had his picture taken or illustrated in some way. It all seemed very strange. An exceptionally generous Patron of Random Scottish History spirited a copy into our hands from the United States. What I quickly found out was that the text didn’t exist online, outside of the odd scanty quote from other publications. The information it contained was of far too much value to allow it not to exist anywhere. People needed access to this book. Within 4 days of it arriving on our doorstep it was transcribed and published to RSH.scot. It needed more exposure though and to that end I contacted the wonderful Ken of iScot Magazine who agreed with me and my aim as regarded this publication.Charles Waddie deserves commendation for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Scottish Home Rule Association and, therefore, Scotland and her people. His last sentence at the end of chapter X. of this publication is; “If we do our duty we will be classed with the wise and good Scots of the past; but if we falter and fail to assert the rights of our country in this crisis, then our memory will be covered with eternal infamy.”I hope these words didn’t cause him too much heartache at the end of his life. I hope he felt it was all worth it and that there was still hope for justice for his homeland within or without the Union in its future and that he’d laid an excellent groundwork we could use to complete his work.

Scots were among the most widely-traveled people in eighteenth-century Britain, often recording their experiences of cross-cultural contact in their public and personal writing. The chapter will provide a detailed examination of the response of Scottish women to West Indian slavery, a practice in which many Scots were deeply implicated. In particular, this chapter will discuss the Caribbean-Scottish relations explored in the travel accounts of two women: Janet Schaw (born ca. 1740) and Maria Ridell née Woodley (1772-1808). Based on her experiences in the West Indies in the 1770s, Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality recounts the author’s personal contacts with West Indians and Scottish settlers. Not intended for publication, her journal explores the peculiarly Scottish dimension of West Indian life, seeking to clarify and defend the existing practice of slavery perpetrated by fellow Scots of “quality.” Schaw emerges in the Journal as an unwilling witness to slavery, a woman whose class status prevented her from establishing any sympathetic connection with the slaves she encountered. In this respect, Schaw’s Journal offers an alternative account of Caribbean-Scottish relations than has been typically expressed in the proto-abolitionist verse of her contemporary Scots. Two decades after Schaw’s Journal, Maria Riddell recorded her experiences as a young woman in the West Indies; her narrative Voyages to the Madeira and Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792) offers a much different viewpoint on the practice of slavery. Unlike the personal nature of Schaw’s Journal, Riddell sought to illustrate and assess life in the West Indies through a more “scientific” style of observation and description. This stylistic quality lends her Voyages a more distanced perspective on slavery, not yet presenting a fully-voiced critique of its practice but also disavowing the studied obliviousness of Schaw’s Journal. This chapter will examine this change in the perception of slavery from Schaw to Riddell, addressing the changing points of contact and departure in Caribbean-Scottish relations evidenced in the texts. It also offers the first critical analysis of Riddell’s Voyages, exploring in depth an important text that continues to be neglected in discussions of Scottish women’s travel literature. By examining the cross-cultural responses of Schaw and Riddell to life in the West Indies, the chapter will reveal the complex, often ambivalent reaction of Scottish women to Scotland’s role in a burgeoning British empire that was dependent upon slavery.

The article discusses the promotion of poet Robert Burns as a national icon for Scotland after his death in 1796. It cites Burns' popular appeal to Scots of all classes, with special attention to his cultural value in nineteenth-century Scotland. As the nineteenth-century glorification of Burns waned, interest in his political views (and potential value) grew among many Scottish groups. In particular, the significance of politics assumed a primary role in critical and popular cultural analyses of the poet. Particularly in the new climate of devolution following the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Burns represented different, often competing iconic meanings as various groups have sought to harness the power of his reputation to promote their interests. Nowhere has this process been more evident than in Burns’s relationship to politics; his endorsement or denunciation of radical politics in particular has continued to be a major bone of contention in discussions of his reputation. The article indicates the claim of ownership of Burns by the Scottish people continues to be a major feature of Scotland's relationship to Burns. It suggests that Burns' place in the literary field will be better understood and appreciated by recognizing the process by which he became a national icon.

This essay examines the processes through which Scotland became part of Britain and Brittany became part of France. It compares the amalgamation of the two polities into the larger states, highlighting the similarities and contrasts between the two events, and concludes by considering whether the ‘take-over’ of these formerly independent Celtic countries was by conquest, absorption or through some other means.

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of English and Scottish codes of cultural belonging. We find that whilst Scottishness and Englishness draw on historically founded racialised (e.g. biological, phenotypical) referents of ‘whiteness’ at the level of the ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood, such racialised codes of belonging are undermined in everyday life by hybridised codes: signifiers such as accent, dress, mannerisms and behaviours which destabilise phenotype as a concrete signifier of national belonging. However, those signifiers that contest the racialised referent are themselves reconfigured, such that contemporary signifiers of cultural values (e.g. terrorist, extremist) reinforce, but not completely, the original racialised referent. We conclude that a negative view of ‘the Muslim’ as antithetical to imagined racialised conceptions of nationhood cannot easily be sustained in the Scottish and English ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood. The sign ‘Muslim’ is split such that contemporary significations perpetuate the exclusion of the ‘unhybridised foreign Muslim’.

Histories of hospitals have traditionally failed to probe the actual nature, routines, and meaning of institutional confinement. Patients and their diseases usually remain on the periphery while actual medical interventions are simply omitted or judged to be harmful. By contrast, this work offers the first complete account of the actual nature, routines, and meaning of institutional life in an eighteenth-century British hospital. The first voluntary establishment of its kind founded outside of London, the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh is examined within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as the tenets of British philanthropy. From its inception, this hospital was the focal point for the convergence of charitable intentions, civic pride, and the improvement of medicine.
Using a multitude of surviving documents, including hospital registers, ward ledgers, lecture notes, patient records and medical publications, the author presents an intimate view of the experiences of Scotland's sick poor and the appointed physicians between 1770 and 1800. Nearly a thousand individual clinical histories were sampled and subjected to a computer analysis that not only revealed the spectrum of diseases selected for treatment but also the outcomes of the medical intervention. The book effectively demonstrates that through careful patient selection and basic support, the infirmary was far from being a "gateway to death" institution, playing instead a benevolent and educational role that placed it among the top hospitals of the eighteenth century.

This article analyzes some unintended consequences of the introduction of Scots, Scotland's nonstandardized vernacular, in a primary school. I show that the lack of established definition of the language or standardization entails three different processes: first, indexical links are established between Scots and a number of social properties (amusement, lack of seriousness); second, the pupils are othered in a process that constructs them as speakers of Scots; third, that process is completed by the reversal of this latter proposition: what the children speak is Scots (and not English) because of their geographic (and covertly social) origin, locking them in an identity as speakers of nonstandard/substandard language. This analysis allows me to discuss this case in terms of circulation of linguistic authority within the classroom in view of the indeterminacy of a legitimate or generally accepted version of Scots. I conclude by reflecting upon the nature of standard languages, whose status positions them not as just another linguistic variety on a par with others, but as forms of speech whose legitimacy lies not (only) within speakers' identity but within representative institutions, hence their claim to neutrality and inclusiveness, however subverted this may be in reality.

This article examines the “power and the pain of class relations“ (Ortner 2006) through the experience of Scottish men working in the global shipping, offshore oil, and fishing industries: industries in which the nationality of workers has changed significantly since the 1980s. It combines recent anthropological literature on subjectivity and cosmopolitanism with a Marxist understanding of class as generated through differing relationships to production. The article describes how British seafarers have experienced the cosmopolitanization of their workplaces, as workers from Portugal, Eastern Europe, and the Philippines have been recruited by employers in order to reduce wages, working conditions, and trade union organization. Drawing on Therborn (1980), it concludes that the experiences gained through this process have led to the development of multiple and often contradictory subjectivities, which people draw on as they choose how to act in moments of crisis, and as they imagine possible futures.

In 2020, in the new EU strategic horizon that is opening at present, the place should matter more than ever when it refers to territories that are envisaged from the Social Innovation paradigm (Moulaert, Mulgan and Morgan). Nevertheless, how will the suggested H2020 strategy based on Smart City and Communities1, contribute and implement the so-called Social Innovation; facing realistic, economic and politic-driven issues in an increasingly territorially heterogeneous EU current context? This article aims to shed some light on the Critical Social Innovation (CSI) challenges from a constructive position.

This paper summarises the work done between October 2014 and Aril 2015 on an outreach and knowledge transfer  project which tries to improve the understanding of the social, cultural and economic parameters of integration of migrants into Scottish society, and how awareness of common links of heritage and its influence on identity can improve and ease the integration of migrants into their new environment. It aims to facilitate a dialogue between academics, policy-makers, charities and migrant communities and ensure a better coordination of their endeavours at community-level.

Assumptions about a friendly side of nationalism and national identification were renewed during the last decade, as a number of political theorists advanced a sophisticated and attractive blend of nationalism and liberalism. One of their more appealing arguments was the suggestion that national identification helps secure or regain citizens’ political confidence as well as their support for the welfare state. By applying a multivariate research design – using structural equation modelling – this study tests empirically those syllogisms as falsifiable scientific hypotheses. Findings show that support for the British political community does not have any effect on either political confidence nor support for the welfare state. Instead, it is British illiberal nationalism that is related to political confidence in Scotland – but not in England – but has a negative impact on support for the welfare state in England – while being irrelevant in Scotland. By contrast, support for the Scott...

Las analogías y contrastes en la pugna por la independencia política de ambas naciones ofrecen un campo fértil de argumentos hacia opciones institucionales diversas.

A poco más de un año para la celebración del referéndum sobre la independencia, los nacionalistas escoceses anhelan un mayor grado de la ‘inteligencia emocional’  desplegada por sus homónimos catalanes.

Sorprenden los silencios de académicos y estudiosos en un debate reducido al ‘ellos o nosotros’.