Scotland's Gàidhealtachd Futures: an introduction

This special issue of Scottish Affairs is the first to be solely dedicated to matters relating to Scotland’s Gàidhealtachd. Scottish Affairs has a broad, interdisciplinary readership and this informs our approach as guest editors for the special issue. As such, the focus for the issue is to be future-oriented, whilst necessarily being informed by cultural context, contemporary society and lived experience. By curating the articles in these terms, an aim is to
encourage an ethic of engagement with a spectrum of topics (not exhaustive) of contemporary research and debate of relevance to the Gàidhealtachd, and to encourage relational perspectives and creative horizons across that spectrum. Therefore, the special issue is not constrained by a single disciplinary focus or structure; although, in important, different ways, the articles are oriented to forms of disciplinarity and practice. This emphasis on emerging
debates within the Gàidhealtachd includes their intersections and orientations with situated experiences, subjectivities and voices. Whilst the theme of the special issue is ‘futures’, this is not in a superficially speculative or unproductive sense. Rather, it is ontologically oriented: to the spaces and cultural articulations of encounters and entanglements of people, places and social
or community networks. Nevertheless, and not least because of the finite space afforded in a collection or volume of writing, the special issue does not claim to be representative of all dimensions, experiences or understandings of the Gàidhealtachd. Some are yet to come – sin mar a tha e.