Touraj Atabaki is the head of the Middle East and Central Asia Desk at the International Institute of Social History and holds a Chair in the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of International Society for Iranian Studies and the Central Asian Survey and of the Board of Consulting Editors of ILWCH. Atabaki is a past president of the European Society for Central Asian Studies and is currently the elected president of International Society for Iranian Studies. His most recent publications are The State and the Subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (London, 2007); Iran in the Twentieth Century: Historiography and Political Culture (London, 2009); Modernity and its Agencies: Young Movements in the History of the South (New Delhi, 2010); and, with G. D. Brockett, Ottoman and Labour History (Cambridge and New York, 2010).

Thom Davies is a Doctoral Researcher in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is researching the ongoing social and economic fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine. He continues to conduct long-term ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as well as more broadly within Ukraine. He is using qualitative methods that include in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and photographic participation techniques to investigate how Chernobyl continues to impact everyday life in Ukraine. His research interests include visual methods, risk, postsocialism, and informal activity.

Mark Edele is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (Oxford, 2008) and Stalinist Society (Oxford, 2011) as well as one of the editors of Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories (Oxford, 2013) and War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires, a special issue of Australian Journal of Politics and History (58 [2012]: 337–479). He is currently working on a history of Soviet war experiences.

Paulo Fontes is Associate Professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (CPDOC/FGV) in Rio de Janeiro and a Researcher of the Brazilian Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq). He was a Visiting Professor at Duke (2004) and Princeton (2006–2007) Universities. An historian of Brazilian labor and working-class culture in Brazil, Fontes is the author of Um Nordeste em São Paulo. Trabalhadores Migrantes em São Miguel Paulista, 1945–1966 (FGV Press). In 2011, this book was the winner of the first Thomas Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the Brazilian National Archives and the Brazilian Studies Association. As a result, the book will be published in English by Duke University Press.

Steven High is the Canada research chair in Oral History at Concordia University in Montreal, where he codirects the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He is the author of numerous books and articles on deindustrialization, including Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt (Toronto, 2003) and, with David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY, 2007). He is currently completing a book-length study of place identity in a former mill town.

Peyman Jafari is a doctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Leiden University. He is writing his dissertation on labor, capital, and the state in the Iranian oil industry from 1978 to 2008.

Maral Jefroudi studied Political Science, Sociology, and History at Bogazici University, Istanbul. She worked as an instructor of Modern Turkish History at the Ataturk Institute, from 2008 to 2010. Since October 2010 she has been a doctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the social history of labor in the Iranian oil industry (1951–1979). Her research interests include social and political movements, everyday life, social memory, and migration.

Sherry Lee Linkon is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University. From 1997 to 2012, she codirected the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. With John Russo, she coauthored Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Lawrence, KS, 2002) and coedited New Working-Class Studies (Ithaca, NY, 2005). In addition to her work on deindustrialization and working-class culture, Linkon researches student learning in the humanities and on social class in US higher education. She was the founding President of the Working-Class Studies Association, and she edits a weekly blog, Working-Class Perspective.

Jennifer Miller is Assistant Professor of German history at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Her research interests include “guest worker” immigration to Germany, Muslim minorities in Europe, and postwar German history, broadly. Numerous foundations have supported her research, including the Fulbright Program, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Institute of Turkish Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Berlin Program for Advanced European and German Studies, and the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant.

Jeremy Morris is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests include new media, the informal economy, class, precarity, and postsocialism more generally. His current research is focused on ethnographic approaches to understanding actual lived experience in the former Soviet Union. His most recent publications include The Informal Post-Socialist Economy (Oxford, 2013) with A. Polese; “Unruly Entrepreneurs: Russian Worker Responses to Insecure Formal Employment,” Global Labour Journal 3 (2012); and “Beyond Coping: Alternatives to Consumption Within Russian Worker Networks,” Ethnography 13 (2013).

Andrew Perchard holds the positions of Lecturer and Research Associate of the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and is an affiliated faculty member at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Among his publications are Aluminiumville: Government, Global Business & the Scottish Highlands (Lancaster, 2012), and The Mine Management Professions in the Twentieth-Century Scottish Coal Mining Industry (Lampeter and Lewiston, 2007). He serves on the editorial collectives of History Workshop Journal and Scottish Labour History, and is a Trustee of the Scottish Working People's History Trust.

Jim Phillips is Head of Economic and Social History in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He is a member of the Scottish Labour History Society's Committee, and Scottish Labour History's Editorial Collective. This article is part of his larger program of work on the employment dimensions of deindustrialization in post-1945 Scotland, which follows his two recent books, The Industrial Politics of Devolution: Scotland in the 1960s and 1970 s (Manchester, 2008), and Collieries, Communities and the Miners' Strike in Scotland, 1984–1985 (Manchester, 2012).

James Rhodes is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK, and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies (CWCS) at Youngstown State University. His research interests include race, class, urban sociology, and deindustrialization. His work has been published in journals including Urban Geography, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Urban Studies, and Sociology.

Tim Strangleman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is interested in a wide range of issues relating to the sociology of work and economic life. His research addresses questions about work meaning and identity, deindustrialization, the experience of industrial change, and nostalgia—all in a wide variety of industries. He has collaborated with a number of photographers, artists, and filmmakers and is the author of two books: Work Identity at the End of the Line? (Basingstoke, 2004) and, with Tracey Warren, Work and Society (Oxford, 2008). Strangleman is currently writing a book about work culture in the former Guinness brewery in London.

Marcel van der Linden is Research Director of the International Institute of Social History, Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam, and President of the International Social History Association (2005–2010 and 2010–2015). He is the 2009 recipient of the Rene Kuczynski Prize. His recent books include Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Farnham, 2003; Spanish edition 2006); Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden, 2007; paperback edition Chicago, 2009; Chinese and Korean editions 2012); Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden and Boston, 2008; paperback edition 2010; Brazilian edition forthcoming).