A Practice of Concrete Utopia? Informal Youth Support and the Possibility of ‘Redemptive Remembering’ in a UK Coal-Mining Area

Abstract

A practice of concrete utopia? Informal youth support and the possibility of 'redemptive remembering' in a UK coal-mining area.

'That once romantic now utterly disheartening (former) colliery town': The affective politics of heritage, memory, place and regeneration in Mansfield, UK

“…Strike 1984-85, union splits and colliery closures. The distinct lack of apprehension and engagement with these issues by public heritage providers has left Mansfield bereft of usable pasts for 'redemptive remembering' (Bright 2012) or 'emotional regeneration' (Stephenson and Wray 2005: n.pag.). However, attempts to abstain from the politics of Mansfield's deindustrialization are, in fact, engaging in the politics of silence and dispossession, constituent of a broader feeling of being ignored (Gartzou-Katsouyanni et al 2018).…”

“…For example, emotional regeneration is being achieved in the northeastern coalfields of Britain through the commissioning, display and maintenance of union banners, which act as the 'symbolic and representational heart of [their] village' (Stephenson and Wray 2005: 180). Curated commemorative events, museums, performance and archaeology-based school projects have also been used to try and restore the social cohesion and rhythms afforded by industrialism (Wedgwood 2011;West 2010;Dicks 2000;Bright 2012;Muehlebach 2017). Former mining communities have been at the forefront of 6 these practices of emotional regeneration, cultivating collective memories of the pre-closure order to retain senses of belonging and process difficult histories (Dicks 2000;Power 2008;Foden et al 2014).…”

Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect

“…What needs to be appreciated is that “meaning‐making in communities such as these [deindustrialized] occurs within a powerful framework of social memory” (Bright, , p. 69) and expectations and valuations of behaviour, appearance, and economic activity are historically conditioned. Bright (, see also , ) found that traumatic and difficult histories of deindustrialization have disrupted intergenerational transfers of identity and belonging as older generations struggle to communicate class and place identities in changing circumstances. This is compounded by neoliberalized conceptions of aspiration and what constitutes success.…”

“…This is compounded by neoliberalized conceptions of aspiration and what constitutes success. Consequently, working‐class youth across genders have been left “adrift from “illegitimate” histories that are their legitimate “heritage” and, at the same time, subject to the traumatic affective legacy of those same histories” (Bright, , p. 316; see also Bright, ). Numerous studies have argued that legacies of industrial worker identities have retained meanings, continuing to form much of the basis of identity formations, gendered projections of societal purpose, and gendered performances (Clarke, ; High, ; MacKenzie et al, ; Walkerdine, ).…”

‘The lady is not returning!’: educational precarity and a social haunting in the UK coalfields

“…As time has gone by, my overall ethnographic inquiry (see Bright, 2011a;2011b;2012a;2012b;2012c) has effectively grown into an investigation of two parts, punctuated by a change of UK government in 2010. While the geographical field of inquiry -former pit villages in South Yorkshire and the northern part of Derbyshirehas remained the same throughout, it has become increasingly clear with hindsight that the character of much of the data that I've gathered has steadily changed, particularly during the last three or four years.…”