Ethnography and Education 'The lady is not returning!: Educational precarity and a social haunting in the UK coalfields (original) (raw)
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Journal of Working-Class Studies
This article reflects on a series of ‘Ghost lab’ events (Bright 2019) with local people where creative memory work – stimulated by songs, films, and readings from a pack of what we have called a ‘Community Tarot’ cards (our main focus here) – was used to register aspects of what, following Gordon (2008), we are calling a ‘social haunting’ of former coal-mining communities in the north of England and the valley communities of south Wales. The events were part of a joint 2018-19 research project called Song lines on the road – Life lines on the move! (On the Road for short) that sought to share two independent strands of longitudinal, co-produced, arts-based research in which we have developed approaches aimed at amplifying how living knowledge flows on in communities even when the shocks and intensities of lived experience defy articulation and representation. During the last decade or so both of us have worked with artists to co-produce research projects that enable young people and...
Belonging, memory and history in the north Nottinghamshire coalfield
Journal of Historical Geography, 2018
Studies recurrently emphasise the critical role played by memory in the production of belonging in the context of deindustrialisation. This paper examines the interrelations of memory, history and belonging among former coal miners in the north Nottinghamshire coalfield surrounding Mansfield, UK, an area of complex and contested memories and histories. Couched in the approaches of emotional geographies and the 'turn to affect', the paper investigates the emotional and affective dimensions of remembering histories of the coal industry under nationalisation between 1947 and 1994 including job security, the 1984-1985 miners' strike and colliery closures, as well as the industrial ruination which these closures caused. To fully apprehend and empathise with the emotional processes of memory, the paper contends that memories must always be situated within a reading of the wider historical geographies and politics upon which they are constituted. Drawing on archival research and psychosocial life history interviews, the paper broadly argues that historicising memories as well as examining their affective dimensions advances understanding into what has been lost and disrupted through localised processes of deindustrialisation and postindustrialism. In the case of north Nottinghamshire the contested solidarities of the miners' strike and subsequent colliery closures have endured in affective memories which, in turn, have problematised the production of individual and collective belonging.
Mining for coal in the north east of England has ended as an industry. Most of the mine workings and evidence of the industry in the environment have been almost completely eradicated, replaced by new industry, housing and numerous types of Country Park or forest. This dissertation is intended, as a discussion on the current way the industry is being memorialised and explores how people engage with current types of memorialisation. By the early 1990’s people were no longer employed in the coal mining industry in what was the Durham Coalfield. The people who worked in Durham’s pits at the time of the closures will now be either retired or reaching retirement age soon, others have already passed away. It is important that the views and opinions of these former miners are recorded for future generations, after all coal mined in the North of England helped power the industrial revolution in to the country we live in now. The cultural heritage both related to the miners and the communities their families lived in is important, as we move away in time from pits being the central focus, parts of this heritage are being lost and diluted. The desire to memorialise pits and the people who lived and died in them in these communities is evidence for the need and desire to record this heritage. Many examining communities have developed in to communities made up of families that have stayed, as well as families that have chosen to live there. The choice of memorial to the former life of the community needs to speak to every current resident if the heritage of mining is to survive.
"Broken Men" and "Thatcher's Children": Memory and Legacy in Scotland's Coalfields
International Labor and Working Class History, 2013
This article explores the legacy of the demise of the deep coal mining industry in Scotland. It places particular emphasis on the cultural scars of this process as witnessed through miners' and managers' memories, positioning these within the context of occupational socialization, conflict, and alienation. The piece explores the enduring importance of these cultural scars in shaping broader collective narratives of decline in Scotland, and how responses were manifest in shifting political outlooks and the emergence (at both a local and national level) of a resurgent nationalism from the early 1960s onward. Drawing on the notion of the "cultural circuit," the article examines how and why personal experience of the loss of the coal industry informed and conformed to the politics of the miners' union in Scotland, the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA). As the article makes clear, the program of closures in the industry has left profound psychological scars in coalfield communities--ones that, like the closure of other major industrial sites, shape a powerful national narrative.
Revisiting the history of the British coal industry: the politics of legacy, memory and heritage
Waseda RILAS Journal, 2020
This paper revisits the history of the British coal industry in the context of deindustrialisation, ruptures in electoral politics, and attempts by former miners to preserve a mining past. Methodologically it draws on an oral history project that involved over 100 participants in England, Scotland and Wales. The life stories conveyed by the former miners provide entry points to various aspects of the industrial, social and cultural life of coal communities. The specific focus here is on the ways in which the miners themselves are striving to create and curate their own stories and experiences through local heritage projects in the town of Leigh in north west England and the former mining villages of the north Wales coast. The interviews are indicative of the sense of the isolation they continue to experience in the contemporary economic context of deindustrialisation and challenges to their sense of class, community and nation. Tensions between former miners and the wider social and political culture of their communities hinge on narratives and histories of the 1984/5 miners' strike. Heritage projects developed in both localities have become battlegrounds for what kind of history should be presented to the public, where memorials should be located, and which memories and experiences should be preserved. Miners who took part in the strike understandably want to centre their histories and narratives through the lens of 1984/5, while those who continued to work through the dispute argue that it should be given a more marginal position in commemoration and heritage. The interviews offer more complex readings of the social and cultural politics of the coal industry and challenge some of the prevailing orthodoxies in the historiography.
The Sociological Review, 2005
This chapter draws upon a qualitative research project which examined the post-1984/85 Strike experiences of a South Wales coalmining population, and looked at how people engage in work for their communities, why this work is undertaken, and how it fits in with their other responsibilities, transgressing private and public, formal and informal boundaries (Parry, 2000). I argue that community work continues to provide a powerful occupation for local populations, and that the disruption of traditional solidarities in the coalfields has at once encompassed gain, loss and stasis. These have given way to a more diverse array of community activities, which reflect the increasingly variable socioeconomic circumstances of people’s lives.
As I approach, I am haunted by the realization that this place, this landscape, an area of abandonment near where I grew-up, is still an open past. Today, it is a site where my eyes have become used to the catastrophe of cracks, piles of dust ('culm banks'), 'stripping holes', and sounds devoid of human cacophony, a recall of my childhood play sites among ruins and abandoned anthracite coal mining spaces. It is a place now written in both the chronicles of history and social media, yet continues to be inscribed into the very materiality of a place after abandonment. Here is a silent assertion of exploitation, of absent presences, identities, memories, and meaning carved into place by those who once lived here. The land, as I walk amid shadows, echoes within an archaeology of sensual surface strata, 'artifacts' of destruction that can be seen, felt, touched, smelled, and heard, despite the absence of people, buildings, a community.
EVENT REVIEW: 'Born of Coal' - Project Report
Track Changes, 2016
In May 2014, the University of Sheffield's Engaged Curriculum initiative (also known as 'Engaged Learning') awarded funding for a small-grant project entitled 'Filmmaking and the Engaged Curriculum', an undergraduate research project supervised by Dr David Forrest and Professor Brendan Stone (both School of English) and undertaken by the author of this article. The project ran from July 2014 until September 2014, and sought to explore the potential role of filmmaking within the University's curriculum, through an investigation into the empirical effects of the 1984-85 Miners' Strike-and the subsequent process of post-industrialisation on the present sense of community spirit and resilience in an ex-mining town: Barnsley, South Yorkshire.