Crumbling smokestacks, shuttered furnaces, and abandoned quarries are all striking representations of deindustrialization. These and other images construct a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining them to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, have profound effects on contemporary societies. In 2015, within the European Labor History Network (ELHN), a working group on historical cultures of labor under conditions of deindustrialization (working group) began to critically study and reflect on this nascent theme.Footnote 1 It grew from a small group of researchers to a network of academics across Europe and beyond. Though the study of deindustrialization is not new, contemporary work offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of classical industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions.Footnote 2 Yet, existing representations of deindustrialization have been criticized as “smokestack nostalgia.”Footnote 3 In order to chart how we understand contemporary industrial decay in our political, cultural, and economic climate, the working group explores representations and more-than representations of loss and regeneration in deindustrialized regions, primarily in Europe but widening to include a growing global network.
This network leads to numerous processes of exploring these aspects in a variety of ways. Furthermore, the annual meetings and upcoming publications emphasize the global relevance of our proposed perspectives by involving pan-European and non-European research projects. As such, in this “note from the field,” we share our ongoing research findings from our annual meetings and symposia since 2015, working toward notions of post-industrialization focusing on three emerging themes: human interactions, landscape reinterpretations, and the politics of methods.Footnote 4 This is concluded with a view toward the future of our working group.
Human interactions
Our first point is the human interactions that occur through deindustrialization. Our discussions dealt with the social aspects of these processes, namely the continuing struggle over the meaning of industrial work and its loss, and the unresolved tensions between the top-down and bottom-up initiatives. It includes understanding the “wounds of class,” which the de-industrial situation entails, or the changes to “natural” environments and the resulting entanglements.Footnote 5 Our research explores these topics in a representational and more-than representational manner that open up discourses between these historic representations and contemporary landscapes, providing insights into processes of re-thinking the industrial past.Footnote 6
For example, by emphasizing or transforming the industrial aspect of the landscape as in Katowice, Upper Silesia, the townspeople come to terms with its socialist past, though attempting to reinvent its post-industrial future.Footnote 7 Similarly, the contemporary utilization of these places points to numerous new research questions, where the tendencies toward environmental issues neglects serious social questions. The evaluation of the industrial past can cause tensions between those that lived it and those that are currently remembering, as is the case in Sardinia where the establishment of the Sulcis-Inglesiente Geopark has placed at odds the contemporary environmental and touristic needs with the memories of its mining residents.Footnote 8 Furthermore, diverse cultural aspects can also be analyzed, such as the leisure activities at the time of industrial activities (brass bands in Great Britain), its cultural transformation to diverse museums (in the Ruhr region) or special recreational zones, or through their memorization via art (in Scotland). All these aspects point to the fact that these areas are more than just human landscapes, not just because neither the human representatives nor their social unit have disappeared but also because “their legacy” is mobilized in diverse ways.
Landscape and territorial interpretations
The second point is the concept of landscape and territory itself, moving beyond traditional ideas and toward a relational understanding.Footnote 9 This includes the more-than-representational concepts disseminated through various narrative forms that show how memory, identity, and particularly industrial cultures are perceived and practiced. Themes from musical explorations of labor organizations, such as aural labored landscapes to the rethinking of gendered landscapes, opened up new discourse in the way that deindustrialization is performed and understood.Footnote 10
This new discourse challenges the result of human and natural interaction in which numerous heritage terms, such as historic urban landscape or cultural landscape, are discussed by UNESCO. It also points to not just the social creation of the given landscape but the contemporary utilization of it. Such a territory can be seen as the relationship between nature and culture, not just people and ideologies transforming the utilization of a given territory. Such research can be investigated by diverse sources through tangible (artistic and monumental) or intangible (through traditions and interviews) ways. Similarly, at different ages and socio-political circumstances, different aspects of this interconnectedness are emphasized and/or evaluated as valuable to preserve. Accordingly, sites can also be seen as different aspects of the evaluation process, which is why other transformation processes, such as gendered, audiovisualized, and heritagized aspects of the given territories, have been discussed as processes during the annual conferences.
The notion of territory also involves the question of ownership that has led to numerous possible research initiatives regarding actors. On the one hand, a general notion of heritagization on local, regional, national, European, and global (UNESCO) levels can be identified but many times it does not involve the notion of bottom-up initiatives or the sustainability of the given project. Diverse actors have to cooperate not just hierarchically but also professionally as, for instance, many times the former industrial territories are either polluted, so environmental specialists are needed for the utilization projects, or have dubious ownership status, for which legal representatives are necessary. These aspects would allude to the fact that the local/national specificities would prevent the option of a comparative or global research initiative, though numerous presentations of the former conferences would deny this assumption. Ownership varies if the given example is spread through a wide scope of territory or focused on a well-defined factory location; similarly different questions can be raised if the case study is located within an urban environment or at its periphery. These questions and aspects can yet lead to new comparative possibilities that are more related to the character of the given territory than its geophysical location.
Politics of methods
Our final point looks at the politics of methods used in the research of deindustrializing communities or institutions that nurture, propagate, and manage these representations. Law claims that the methods used to gather narratives, data, and other forms of research are integral to the “making” of research.Footnote 11 This creates a particular “attunement” to methods that put to practice the theoretical talk of method assemblage, helping to concentrate on the landscape. The researched historical cultures can also point to diverse theories like Nora's concept of lieux de mémoire, as well as to research methodologies, such as oral history or the analysis of visual representation.Footnote 12 One common denominator is the social and cultural handling of the process of deindustrialization and its aftermath from the viewpoint of interviewees and their communities. What becomes apparent in the comparative perspective is the range of discursive framing—from the traumatic memories of the British miners’ strike to the relatively pacified conflict strategies reflected in memories from the West-German coalfields.Footnote 13 In many cases, the collective memory of industry is split between feelings of pride and belonging, on the one hand, and injury that needs to be redressed, on the other. This is particularly apparent for contexts in which industries have literally left behind a toxic legacy with regard to health and the environment, as in the industrial harbour of Venice, Porto Marghera.Footnote 14 In many cases, interviewees, actors, and communities strive to be recognized and legitimately inscribe themselves into the grand narratives from which they are often excluded. Practitioners of oral history, therefore, themselves become actors in the discursive conflicts of historical representation, be it in the museum, in archival research, local history workshops, or in the context of national heritage debates.Footnote 15
Next steps
The study of deindustrialization offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, economic, and political tensions. Overall, we reflected on the status of our growing program of events and the significance of our work within the labor history and broadening scope of our group. There are numerous new aspects to investigate in the future, especially in moving beyond the de-industrial and toward the post-industrial. In particular, the working group chose the theme of Industrial Heritage Activism: Memory Politics in Public Labour History to showcase at the third biennial EHLN conference in Amsterdam in 2019. At this time, participants will explore the critical turn in industrial heritage studies looking at relations, actions, and ideologies influencing how industrial heritage has been preserved. This is done by identifying movements, groups, and individuals that are instrumental to the construction, preservation, and reinterpretation of the materialities of the industrial heritage in its variety of forms (e.g., factories, landscapes of extraction, and infrastructures). Furthermore, new comparative research projects broaden the scope of collaborative partnership, including the urban landscapes of Duisburg, Germany; Sesto San Giovani, Italy; and Newcastle, Australia, and the project titled “Sociocultural Change, Memory, Heritage and Identities in the context of Industrial Decline” that involves South American and Spanish researchers (introduced in Gijon, Spain, in November 2018). These international collaborations not only strengthen the existing research within Europe but also broaden our impact beyond European borders, opening up new discourse.
Furthermore, we are developing the more-than-representational themes by collecting selected papers into an edited volume for publication by 2020. Taking into account the developing work explored within this paper, the edited monograph explores emerging moments and nodes, where a landscape comes into being of multiple actors and as a more-than representational approach, which opens up broader perspectives on practices of rhetorical exploitation, discursive representations, and performative approaches of dealing with the industrial past, loss, and regeneration. Therefore, this provides insights into processes of re-assessing/re-imagining the industrial past, which is essentially future-related and is the accompanied processes of historical knowledge production and meaning making. The future of deindustrialization will continue to impact not only European concerns but global issues as well. Our ongoing network will generate useful entry points investigating new perspectives, making critical insights among the diverse critical representations of deindustrialization in different media and contents, and moving these debates into the future.
