Nostalgia - a reassessment in the era of austerity

In this October 2022 roundtable, DePOT affiliates and friends consider how a reassessment of nostalgic reflections, and their meanings, can contribute to our understandings of experience in deindustrialisation's half-life across generations. Taken together, our presenters offer fresh insights into how we can reconnect the history of deindustrialisation with the contemporary experience of those communities worst impacted.
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Organized and co-chaired by Hilary Orange (Swansea University) and Andy Clark (Newcastle University).
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Twitter: @deindustrialpol
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Photo: Pascal Raggi
Music: "Never Give Up" by Ketsa, freemusicarchi...
Presenters:
Andy is an oral historian interested in labour history, deindustrialisation, ruination, the impacts of multiple deprivation, and the long-term impacts of deindustrialization on healthy ageing and wellbeing. Andy completed his PhD with the Scottish Oral History Centre in 2017 and has subsequently worked with the Universities of Stirling and Newcastle. He has conducted research on the response of women workers to factory closure in Scotland, framed within an analysis of short and long-term impacts of capital relocation on mobilisation theories and memories of activism. His first book Fighting Deindustrialisation: Scottish Women’s Factory Occupations, 1981-1982 was published on October 1 of this year with Liverpool University Press.
Fred is a postdoctoral researcher at Cape Breton University who recently completed his PhD in History at Concordia. He is a Core Affiliate of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and splits his time between Nova Scotia and Montreal. Fred grew up in rural Nova Scotia, in the heart of Eastern Canada’s lumber industry, and witnessed deindustrialization’s dire consequences on his community. In Montreal, he has been an active participant in a variety of grassroots struggles against capitalist exploitation, particularly in tenants’ movements and migrant justice organizing. This political work has shaped his commitment to public-facing historical scholarship that challenges power structures and de-specializes the pursuit of serious historical inquiry.
Jackie is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and member of the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow. She is a Co-Investigator in the DéPOT project, working particularly on questions of gender and working-class expression. She has published several articles and chapters that address questions of nostalgia in the wake of factory closures, most notably 'Closing Time: Deindustrialisation and Nostalgia in Contemporary France' in History Workshop Journal (79:1) 2015.
Sinead is a History PhD candidate at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Her thesis will focus on the impact of deindustrialization and conflict on photographic representations of childhood in Belfast between 1979 and 1998, using visual and oral history approaches. She holds a BA Honours and MA in History (Distinction) from Queen’s University Belfast. In 2019, she was awarded a funded PhD studentship from the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland).
Stefan is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum in Germany. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and a Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK.
Magdalena is Assistant Professor of Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the intersections of heritage and social justice, the politics of memory, gender, and grassroots organizing. Through her engaged scholarship in Chile, she has investigated memory and heritage's role in challenging the impacts of extractive economies and deindustrialization in the country's south. Magdalena has recently been recognized with a Whiting Foundation Public Humanities award to continue recovering memories and histories of deindustrialization in Chile.
Ewan is a lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He published his first book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland with the University of London Press in 2021. Ewan is now working on a British Academy-Wolfson Fellowship project on workplace and community perspectives from areas of the UK that experienced major changes in the energy economy since the second half of the 20th century.