Visiting: March 2013-May 2013

After having spent only two and a half months in Wales in the spring of 2012, I intend todedicate around three months to working on Welsh sources in the spring of 2013. My research willbe organized according to the following tasks

Press:

• Consultation of the Welsh daily press of the 1970s and 1980s, especially around election dates so as to gather precise information on the Greens' development as well as on their public image;
• Systematic consultation of the nationalist press in the 1970s and 1980s so as to evaluate ideological convergences and disagreements.
  
  In both cases, special attention will be paid to the evolution of the way the Greens are perceived, both in terms of legitimacy in the electoral field, and as promoters of a specific ideology.

Archives:

• Consultation of Green Party archives kept in Teesside University (Middlesbrough, England);
• Consultation of the archives of the Wales Green party, notably Chris Simpson's personal archives (Aberystwyth);
• Consultation of the archives of Plaid Cymru (National Library of Wales).
  
  The latter will allow to define more precisely the way Plaid Cymru considers the Greens, while the former will provide elements to understand “green politics” in Green party proceedings and its actual reach, in terms of gender equality, decentralisation and relation with partners in the social movements.

Interviews:

• First formal interviews with (former) Green party members from Wales and possibly England, as well as with (former) Plaid Cymru members, and possibly other left-wing activists (Labour Party, CND, anti-nuclear movements, among others).
  
  Interviews will constitute the basis for a prosopographical approach of Green party members, so as to define different generations of members, shifts and cleavages in terms of ideology, of political strategy as well as of political culture, allowing to understand more fully the internal conflicts within the Green party of England and Wales throughout the 1980s, which culminated in the early 1990s.

I should be able to reach partial conclusions in June which will open the way to one or several research papers. They would be an opportunity for me to have some feedback from other researchers, academics, PhD or Master's students

Visiting: March 2012-May 2013

Martin Siloret was a Visiting Researcher with the Wales Governance Centre, conducting a comparative study of the Welsh political environment and Brittany. During his time here he worked closely with Professors Alistair Cole and Richard Wyn Jones, specialists in this field.