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Industrial Hauntings: Smokestack Nostalgia or Working Class Obituary?, public lecture by Tim Strangleman (University of Kent)

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Speaker: 
Tim Strangleman
Building: 
Oktober 6. u. 7
Room: 
Oktober 6. u. 7, Room 102
Monday, May 4, 2015 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Monday, May 4, 2015 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Industrial Hauntings: Smokestack Nostalgia or Working Class Obituary?

 Public lecture by

Tim Strangleman (University of Kent)

 

Abstract: 

This paper will explore some of the ideas and images that have emerged from the process of deindustrialisation over the last three decades or more. It seek to understand the similarities and differences between post-industrial photography collected in book format and other publishing trends in both North America and Europe. In doing so it seeks to examine what this tells us about the wider meanings and values attached to industrial work in the past and present. While it would be easy to dismiss this material as ‘simply nostalgic’, representing another manifestation of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ this paper suggest that we need a more nuanced account which asks questions about the continuing desire to reflect back and find value in the industrial past.

 

Biography - Tim Strangleman

Tim Strangleman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.  He is interested in a wide range of areas around the sociology of work and economic life. He has carried out research in a wide variety of industries which raise questions about work meaning and identity, deindustrialisation, the experience of industrial change and nostalgia. He has collaborated with a number of photographers, artists and film makers, and is the author of two books, (2008) Work and Society, with Tracey Warren, Routledge; (2004) Work Identity at the End of the Line? Palgrave. In 2013 he co-edited with Sherry Linkon and James Rhodes a special issue of the International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH) entitled Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class and Memory.  He is currently writing two books Imagining Work in the Twentieth Century: Guinness and the Transformation of Employment (Oxford) and Corroding Capital: Work, place, culture and the meaning of deindustrialisation (Cornell) with James Rhodes.