Left Behind? Language and the Invention of a “Post-Industrial” Locality in Scotland, 1950s-1990s
Event details
Join us for research seminars hosted by the Department of History with a selection of visiting academics, alongside University of York researchers. All students and staff are very welcome.
A zoom link will be made available for distance learning PhD students on request. Please contact Dr Jasper Heinzen or Dr Stephanie Mawson if you have any questions. View the full schedule for the semester.
Speaker: Dr Amber Ward (University of York)
Abstract: Today, the ‘post-industrial community’ is a powerful motif in popular and political discourse in nations across the West. In Britain, both the incumbent Labour Prime Minister and Reform UK employ a language of communities ‘left behind’ in the wake of globalisation since the 1970s. But when and why did people start to construct places in Britain as ‘post-industrial’? How did categories of ‘deprived’, ‘underdeveloped’, and ‘ex-mining’ locality emerge? This talk investigates these questions by focussing on developments in the former industrial area of Central Fife, Scotland. Through analysis of a range of local official sources from between the 1950s and 1990s, the paper traces how the area was first categorised as an area of historic ‘coal communities’ in retrospect, in the 1980s and 1990s, once coal employment was largely gone. It contrasts these official sources with oral history testimonies I collected in the area in 2022, in which locals recalled encountering, adopting – and resisting – new categories of the local area as ‘ex-mining’ and officially ‘deprived’ beginning in the 1990s. By analysing political and popular ‘vernacular’ sources together, this paper asks: how can we historicise and unsettle assumptions about place, belonging, and economic change?
Image: ‘Location of Industry’ in Alexander Smith, The third statistical account of Scotland, vol 2: Fife (Oliver and Boyd, 1952), p. 186