At the end of the twentieth century, as social democratic parties around the world struggled to produce a coherent response to the deindustrialization crisis, many pivoted towards progressive neoliberalism and Third Way social democracy. Almost everywhere, they turned their backs on the weakened trade union movement and embraced neoliberal assumptions about labour force flexibility and global competition. Shamefully, Third Way social democrats emphasized the moral dimension of poverty rath...

There’s a pervasive sense of betrayal in areas scarred by mine, mill and factory closures. Steven High’s One Job Town delves into the long history of deindustrialization in the paper-making town of Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, located on Canada’s resource periphery. Much like hundreds of other towns and cities across North America and Europe, Sturgeon Falls has lost their primary source of industry, resulting in the displacement of workers and their families.One Job Town

Plant shutdowns in Canada and the United States from 1969 to 1984 led to an ongoing and ravaging industrial decline of the Great Lakes Region. Industrial Sunset offers a comparative regional analysis of the economic and cultural devastation caused by the shutdowns, and provides an insightful examination of how mill and factory workers on both sides of the border made sense of their own displacement. The history of deindustrialization rendered in cultural terms reveals the importan...

This volume explores the concept of deindustrialization in post-reform India. It combines macro studies of Indian political economy with the micro analysis of economic restructuring, growth, and precarity in a "flat world" of digital technology, globalization, and valorization of labour at the lowest cost.The chapters in this volume,Use a range of theoretical and practical social and economic approaches to study the complex relationships between deindustrial...

The Routledge International Handbook of Deindustrialization Studies is a timely volume that provides an overview of this interdisciplinary field that emerged in response to the widespread decline of manufacturing and heavy industry from the 1980s onward. Edited by prominent figures in the field, the volume brings together many of the leading scholars from a range of countries across the globe to offer a multifaceted overview of deindustrialization and its impact.Deindustri...

The Politics of Industrial Closure explores how the political consequences of neoliberal globalization have led to the decline of industrial regions across Western Europe and North America.Co-editors and historians Steven High and Stefan Berger, and the team of contributors, depict that deindustrialization and its legacies have long-term impacts by diving into its ongoing manifestations and aftermaths. With collaboratively written chapters exploring Italy, France, Germany, ...

Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond.Scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share personal stories o...

This Handbook explores the latest cross-disciplinary research on the inter-relationship between memory studies, place, and identity.In the works of dynamic memory, there is room for multiple stories, versions of the past and place understandings, and often resistance to mainstream narratives. Places may live on long after their physical destruction. This collection provides insights into the significant and diverse role memory plays in our understanding of the world around us, in a...

Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, A...

Remembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works. A model of community-university collaboration, it includes contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, survivors of mass violence, and performers and artists who have created works based on these events.This anthology is g...

Steven High’s presidential address, delivered at York University in May 2023, grapples with many of the issues facing our discipline and what it means to be a historian in the present. Despite the extreme political polarization of our time, he expressed admiration at the courage of so many historians who continue to speak truth to power, even at considerable risk to themselves. He also addresses the structural violence of precarity within our discipline and what we as a professional associ...

When hundreds of people displaced by mass violence volunteered to tell their stories to the Montreal Life Stories project, they challenged long-held beliefs about how oral stories should be recorded, collected, and shared.Using the Montreal Life Stories project as an example of collective storytelling, Oral History at the Crossroads rejects the idea that there must be “critical distance” between researchers and their subjects. Instead, it provides an alternative model to t...